Chicken Fat, named for the enormous amounts of fried chicken he ate while hiking the Appalachian Trail in 2014, caught up to Beauchamp on July 25. They walked 30 miles together and camped in the Dispersed Camping Area along the Table Bluff Segment. They were talking and laughing like long-time friends when they reached the Ice Age Trail Alliance headquarters.
At the Alliance’s recent IAT-U: Trail Skills event at John Muir Park in Marquette Co., an Alliance staff member chatted with Priscilla about what inspires her, her Thousand-Miler journey, and why she volunteers.
That’s at least the reason Jake Braun decided to thru-hike.
“Planning for a thru-hike of the Ice Age Trail kept me going,” she says. It was what she thought about when she was really sick.
If you didn’t get a chance to say hi, let us introduce you.
There’s only one hot dog shirt like that, so we can confidently say that you caught a glimpse of the one and only Dosu Kinuta!
Dosu is a thru-hiker from New Hampshire currently attempting to set the Fastest Known Time (FKT) for a self-supported thru-hike on the Ice Age National Scenic Trail. Continue reading
Arlette graciously took some time from her busy hiking schedule to answer our questions. Read on to hear from this inspiring long-distance hiker and dollmaker from the Netherlands.
Knowing many aspiring Thousand-Milers merely tolerate road miles and other hikers eschew them entirely, I devote this essay to the joy of hiking connectors, hoping to inspire an appreciation for the miles marked not by yellow blazes but by white stripes.
My year on the Ice Age Trail helped me to leave a spirit crushing path. During my newbie trail days, someone had told me that there was magic on the trail. I was intrigued, but I also thought it was cliche–something cool to say about trail hiking. But as my miles added up, this magic began to reveal itself.
From the first, I was amazed at how each step seemed to leave the urban world behind. I thought how pleasant it would be to explore a few segments, but I really wasn’t hooked (yet). I bought the IAT Guidebook and Atlas. I enjoyed the mental exercise of planning my hikes. I would review the Guidebook and then map out my route. Since I was a solo hiker, I parked the car, biked one way on public roads and then walked the Trail back to my car.
This captivating section of the Firth Lake Segment in Chippewa County evoked fond memories of the time spend building it. Photo by Ryan Jansen.
Article by thru-hiker, Ryan Jansen
Three weeks or 30 minutes. Both are amounts of time, separated by a year, I spent on the Firth Lake Segment. The two experiences were very different. One occurred while I was a crew member with Wisconsin Conservation Corps (WisCorps) and the other while on my 2018 thru-hike.
Both had the similarity of being experienced through the lens of a unique perception of time. Trail-Time. A meditative, obligation-free state of mind. The senses peak to the point of almost combining. My thoughts felt 3D and immersive, to the point where I struggle to say if I was fully in my head (my brain often was occupied with thoughts to the point of blocking out my surroundings) or out of my mind (my thoughts felt like they left my skull and were in plain sight). Continue reading
