A Tip for traveling on Grey Hound buses

Here's a little tip for traveling on Grey Hound buses:



Often when traveling with a 70+ liter backpack you will need to check it with baggage handling, and the handler will put it under the bus. To make sure your backpack is undamaged, put it in a $24 Samsonite Tote-A-Ton 32.5 inch Duffel.

Appetite and Stomach issues while Long Distance Backpacking

Have you ever worked so hard that you encountered a loss of appetite, rather than an increase?

Similar conditions are present in long-distance backpacking and thru-hiking, especially during the first couple of hundreds of miles. Also, stomach upset and added fatigue from physical exertion can cause your body to not feel hungry which compounds the problem when one radically alters their dietary habits.

"I figured if I could do this, I could do anything..."
- Anonymous A.T. tru-hiker.

Thru-hiking can be relentless, and if you are the type to test your own limits, thru-hiking will be your personal dream come true. The elevation gain and loss of hiking the entire Appalachian Trail is the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest 16 times -- the elevation change hikers traverse along the A.T. totals up to an approximate 464,464 feet!



With this understanding, it is important to give your body enough recovery time: a zero-day during the week, or three nero-days every other week.

High-carb foods are supposed to help with altitude adjustment. It's also important to keep very well hydrated, especially at higher altitudes. An electrolyte drink mix in your water may help; it does for me.

Soupy foods on the trail are surprisingly effective; there is an excellent article on this topic here.

For different people, it's going to be different things, and often it will be different combinations of things. Keeping these elements in mind, you kind of have to design a plan that works for you. It took me a lot of experimenting to find a diet that works well for me and to confirm that if I'm going at high intensity for full days, I'm not really going to feel very hungry for the first week and a half or two of backpacking.

Three Creepypasta to enjoy while Night Hiking

(3) "Candle Cove"

This story starts off with a forum thread that talks about an old children’s show from the ’70s, which was about a little girl who imagined herself to be friends with pirates. As memories of the show were shared back and forth between the commenters on the thread, it became clear that beneath the show’s “cute” and low-budget appearance, there was something dark and disturbing.


(2) "The Russian Sleep Experiment"

Russian researchers in the late 1940s kept five people awake for fifteen days using an experimental gas based stimulant. They were kept in a sealed environment to carefully monitor their oxygen intake so the gas didn't kill them, since it was toxic in high concentrations. This was before closed circuit cameras so they had only microphones and 5 inch thick glass porthole sized windows into the chamber to monitor them. The chamber was stocked with books, cots to sleep on but no bedding, running water and toilet, and enough dried food to last all five for over a month.

The test subjects were political prisoners deemed enemies of the state during World War II.

Everything was fine for the first five days; the subjects hardly complained having been promised (falsely) that they would be freed if they submitted to the test and did not sleep for 30 days. Their conversations and activities were monitored and it was noted that they continued to talk about increasingly traumatic incidents in their past, and the general tone of their conversations took on a darker aspect after the 4 day mark.

(1) "The Harbinger Experiment"

"The world we live in is full of things we don’t understand. Being the curious humans that we are, we naturally try and seek these things out. Doing so has lead us to remarkable discoveries and inventions that we never could have imagined a hundred years ago. We have defeated disease, built to the sky itself and even created machines that could take us beyond the clouds and into the stars. If our ancestors could see us and what we have created, I’m sure many of them would see us as gods.
Our innate curiosity and lust for knowledge has not always led us to greatness, however. True evil and darkness have also been uncovered in humanities conquest of knowledge. And in the end, I fear this evil will be our doom."