No Home Support?

imported
#1

Just wondering if anyone has done the trail or very long portions of it (like, more than 400 miles) without having someone mail supplies to you.

Was it very succesful? Was it truly difficult?

As I am considering doing roughly 1000+ miles next year, I find myself unable to find a single person who can handle the stress(es) of mailing supplies. It would be an intrusion upon most people I know, some of whom either have families or businesses to run (and some with both).

I do know that I don’t want to have a zillion maildrops. I won’t be one of those hikers who have food sent to them at every postal office along the way - it looks much too constricting, a feeling shared by more than a few trailjournalists.

But there are other things folks back home can do for the long distance hiker, like sending money (or paying my bills). It’s just that I can’t find (or haven’t found) someone so unencumbered by obligations that they can take on the fairly involved task of being a home support person.

So have any of you done it solo, without a home support person? I suppose I could get a bounce box. Are there other ideas or suggestions?

Thanks! :slight_smile:

Kineo Kid

#2

I’m hiking the AT in a couple months and I’m from Canada so it presents a bit of a problem with maildrops. The easy solution for me is to not have any. I know there are a couple places on the AT (ex. Fontana Dam) where resupply is iffy so I’ll just mail a box from a big town previous to that…basically wherever there’s a cheap grocery store where I can get a good deal. Besides that, I just plan to hope for the best and eat whatever I can find.

jackieb

#3

Resupplying is pretty easy along most parts of the trail…it really depends on where you are hiking, though.

Post Offices also usually hold boxes for a few months, so an option for you may be to mail out boxes yourself for the few towns that have little to no resupply, and give an ETA to the PO so they will know to hold it. A phone call wouldn’t hurt, either.

bearbait

#4

I personally know two people who thru hiked with no support from home. One relied entirely on stores along the trail. This was back in 1974 when there were few stores and very little in the way of reliable information to go by. He had few problems but several interesting meals. One time he was out of food and the only store (A gas station)for a couple of days had only candy and chips. Made a great breakfast. The other hiker did his thru in 1979 and used to stop at big stores and bounce food ahead to places where reliable stores were scarce. Back then they were so concerned with resupply they would fill their packs at every opportunity. Some days they would go into town with five days food in their packs and leave with seven days of food just to be sure. These days its not such a big deal as the companion and wingfoot’s guides are pretty accurate and there are a lot more services.

Big B

#5

On my first thruhike, I did maildrops along the way, but not at every town. So I learned to resupply out of the sometimes very small stores in the towns along the way. (Good practice - go into a gas station mini-mart and figure out a week’s worth of food). On my second thruhike, four years later, I mailed boxes for the first 200 miles (Neels Gap, Wesser and Fontana) and then resupplied all along the trail out of local stores. It isn’t a problem if you’re not too picky. A few places along the way you may want to buy food in a large town and ship ahead to the small ones (Monson used to be very limited, and some of the towns have lost their stores since I hiked.) A drift box can be helpful - buy some goodies, or large supplies of some items, take what you need and put the rest in the box to be used up later. (Tea bags, sugar packs, vitamins, advil, bandaids, etc.)

It will be helpful to find someone responsible to help with mail, paying bills etc. If you can, get automatic payments for the continuing bills like Visa etc., but set them up now so you can work out any bugs. We left a checkbook with a dozen signed checks with a family member who agreed to receive our mail and go through it to make sure there was nothing urgent (like tax notices or unpaid bills) and to pay the final phone, electric and water bills. Our only problem with that was the bank wouldn’t forward our renewed credit card to the family member and they threw out stuff that we considered important (401-K statements) that they didn’t. But all in all, they didn’t have a lot of work, and we had the relief of knowing someone responsible was paying attention to our mail. WE called them once a month to see if there was anything we needed to handle (like the missing Visa card and a phone bill that came two months after we shut off the phone, because a friend had called us collect just before we left and it took a while for the charge to come through.)

Ginny

#6

You don’t need home support.

Most bills can be paid on-line from numerous trail towns along the way. In this day of electroic transfer and the www, you don’t need someone to pay your bills. You can also set it up with your bank to pay them automatically for you. Also you can go on line most places and see what you owe. Also you can call your PO and have mail forwarded to you on the trail, so you can get your bills that way. And if you have to, you can write a check and drop it in the mail from anywhere along the trail.

Regarding mail drops. Mail drop to yourself from the numerous trail towns along the way. This works best because only you know what you will want 4 to 5 days down the trail. Also it’s cheaper to mail a hundred miles than a thousand miles (postal rates).

Hope this helps.

See you out there. :cheers

Maintain

#7

I’m sure there are those who do not rely on home support for mail drops. And if you are one of them, then that just means that your planning should be a little different.

First, you will probably need a bounce box for items such as maps and other things that are hard to find in small towns. See other threads realed to what’s in your box.

Second, there are places where it is tough find a good store. So, mail yourself a package from the last big town a week or so before hand. There are probably a minimum of 3 places where resupply is really tough. They include Fontana Dam, Port Clinton, and Glencliff. Other places, it should just be a matter of going further off trail than others to get to a store.

Peaks

#8

so it’s called a drift box…nice term. i wish you all woulda told me before i bought 6 months worth of staple food… hahaha, live and learn.

BURN

#9

I had WAY too many drops… but I got a group to donate the shipping so I really saved money by buying in bulk and having my mum put it in the mail. When I go again… I will have about 10 drops… and do the bounce box thing too. I found that more valuable than my regular drops.

windex

#10

When I started section-hiking the A.T. in '96, I did the maildrop thing with mixed results. Typically I was out for between two and six weeks each year, so it was necessary to resupply somehow.

Maildrops worked perfectly when I stayed on my “schedule,” but not so well if I got behind or speeded up. It was a real pain to have to spend extra days in a town waiting for post offices to open or for a package to arrive (if I was early). If I didn’t have a lot of stuff in those packages you just can’t buy in towns (meds, home-dehydrated food, etc.) it might have been better to just town-shop and forget about maildrops.

About the fourth year, I stopped having packages mailed to post offices and began having them sent to hostels and trail-friendly businesses–most of which are open many more hours than post offices. This works better, but you must always ALWAYS confirm that a place will accept your package and find out any special requirements. It’s also good form to offer the place receiving/holding your package a few bucks for their time/efforts (most will not accept your money, tho).

The final three years, I resupplied out of my truck. I’d put the truck about 5-7 days up the trail, then hitch or shuttle south and hike to my truck (almost always parked at a trail-friendly business or hostel, not a trailhead). I’d repeat this scenario several times in the month or so I was out. This would probably not work as well for a thru-hiker, but it worked very well for this section hiker.

“Skyline”

#11

I thru-hiked in '02, and got there all the way from Israel. no home support - as you can guess. I probably spent a bit more money on resupplying at stores along the way, and stuff like that, but it’s more than doable. After a while I also started using a bump box I mailed myself, with some stuff I didn’t want to carry on me all the way. it’s fairly easy to manage.
Good luck.

Amtrak

#12

Skyline brings up an interesting point: has anyone done a thru hike moving a vehicle along as he/she went?

John

#13

My wife and I have discussed doing something like that. We would play leap frog on the trail: her in an RV with the kids and me slogging along on the trail. It’s still very much up in the air, depending on the work situation and other factors.

Ardsgaine

#14

In 1992 there were two couples who did a key exchange with two vehicles from NY to Maine. They had slacked as a group from the Shenandoahs (one truck, 8 hikers, taking turns to drive to the far end), and when the rest of the group dropped out, they decided to do the two vehicle route. It is feasible for most of the trail. Another couple did a key exchange with just the two of them after the husband hurt his back in a fall and couldn’t carry a pack. I have also met several people, on both the AT and PCT who did the trail with vehicle support. On the AT one woman I met had a husband meet her almost every night. On the PCT, the three people I knew who had vehicle support were met every 3 or 4 days.

It makes for a very different hike. You have less freedom, in a lot of ways, as you have to keep going, often pushing the miles, to meet the vehicle at the road crossings. So, if the weather is bad and you want to hole up, you can’t. OR if the weather is good and you want to go for a swim or sit in the sun and admire the view, you can’t.

For the trail supporter, it can be very boring, always sitting around waiting at trailheads, especially if money is tight. It helps if they decide to go visit all the tourost areas around the trail, but it can get pretty expensive. With vehicle support, you end up with a lot more town visits, more restaurant food, more coke and ice cream. Nice, but is that what you are out there for?

Ginny

#15

I know OF or have met a folks who did what I did, or variations on that theme, to section hike or thru hike the A.T. If you do the methods described below, it is akin to what many hikers call “slackpacking,” i.e., hiking with such minimalist gear and weight that it is really a series of dayhikes strung together, without camping in the woods in the self-supported way that most backpackers do. Still, these are ways to hike the A.T.

Those solo usually did what I did (park several days away, shuttle or hitch back, then hike to their vehicle to resupply out of it). When I did it this way, I still carried about the same gear and weight that a traditional thru-hiker did and camped in the woods or near shelters along the way. Of course I was never one to turn down a slackpacking opportunity if it presented itself.

You can have any special stuff (meds, home-dehydrated foods, maps, guidebook sections, replacement gear, etc.) in your vehicle. Having that vehicle allows you to go anywhere you want to BUY the rest, including selected fresh foods. It also tends to make you somewhat popular with other hikers you encounter, but that’s a side benefit. :slight_smile:

But back to dayhiking:

I have heard of a guy who parked at one end of a day’s hike and rode a moped to the other, hid it in the woods, then hiked back to his vehicle, then at the end of the day drove to retrieve his moped. This guy usually slept in his vehicle overnight.

I also heard of a guy who had a truck-with-hitch and a small Ford Festiva or something like it. He’d tow the Festiva to his end-point, drive back to his start-point in the truck, then hike to the Festiva and drive it back to the truck. This person, I think, stayed in motels a lot.

The hikers I’m thinking of did not carry enough gear when doing this to support themselves in the woods overnight. You should be aware that there are a few places on the A.T. where the road crossings are far enough apart that this is impractical (at least for me), so if avoiding the purchase of gear (or the carrying of it) is the agenda slackpacking might not get you from GA to ME or vice versa by itself.

Another twist:

What Ardsgaine is thinking about is a “supported” hike, which requires one or more other people to assist as he describes. This is also a way of “slackpacking” and what he’d be doing is also “dayhiking.”

These and other styles are all valid ways of hiking the A.T. IMO, but provide very different experiences. Just more examples of how diversity rules on the A.T. It is possible to use a combination of these styles to hike all the white blazes between Springer and Katahdin.

“Skyline”

#16

Kineo Kid, another option you have with bills is to see if you can set them up on automatic payment. Many companies (phone companies, utilities, cable TV providers, for example) offer this service. You usually have to fill out a form they provide authorizing them to automatically debit your checking account for the amount due on your normal monthly due date.

Even before I was away from home for three months hiking the AT in the fall of 2002, I had many of my regular bills set up this way, but when I was planning for the hike, I went through all my monthly obligations and set nearly all of them up this way. If it’s a regular monthly payment that you routinely pay in full, do it this way. This has the great virtue of simplifying your life even when you’re off the trail.

During the hike, I was able to use my bank’s online bill-payment service for the few bills that I couldn’t or didn’t care to set up this way (bank credit cards, for example).

If you have a regular payment obligation to an individual, check with your bank to see if you can set an automatic transfer up. It is possible.

I also did what some people have described above as a supported hike. My wife was with me and stayed off the trail while I hiked from Katahdin to the Conn/NY state line. My wife is a quilter and antique lover, so between working on her quilts and browsing for antiques, she had no problem killing time. I was able to find places where she could stay at a long-term rate, so we were usually not paying full motel rates. For example, she stayed at a motel in Farmington, Maine, which offered a long-term rate while I hiked from Katahdin to Gorham.

When the trail crossed a road, she would usually pick me up, take me back to the motel, feed me, have clean clothes and food for the next few days ready, and take me back to the trail the next day after I had a good night’s sleep. At a minimum, she was able to meet me at a road crossing with provisions. I was carrying a satellite phone, so we were able to coordinate our meetings pretty efficiently, and I was able to communicate with her when I got significantly knocked off schedule (which only happened once).

Snowbird

#17

As easy solution for me on all my travels is that I made my main bank account a joint account with my mom. All my bills go to her house and she just signs a check and mails it in, or sets up automatic debit for me or whatever. It would have been nearly impossible to keep track of my financial matters from overseas without her help and if you have someone willing to do this for you, it’s a great solution.

jackieb