May 16, 2025 4 min to read

AT Blog: Day 125 and 126

Mental Challenges and Family Visit

Day 125:

I start at the stealth site near the top of Wyman Mountain. I’m slow getting out of camp, but eventually get moving.

I make a quick stop at the Hall Mountain Lean-to to use the privy and get some water.

Today is especially tough mentally. For so long I always had something big to look forward to on the trail. The Smoky Mountains, Grayson Highlands, Shenandoah, The Whites, etc. But now the next big thing is Katahdin itself. The problem is that it’s still 250+ miles away, which takes some time.

It doesn’t help that there are very steep climbs today. Moody Mountain has a 1,400-foot climb over 9/10 of a mile—a very steep climb. Meanwhile, I just feel tired of hiking.

After the top of Moody, I go straight down again to the stream and a road crossing, then right back up over 2,000 feet to Old Blue Mountain. I feel pretty exhausted by the top of it. I keep hiking across these stone balds with fir trees, swatting flies away from me. The flies constantly flying around my face can get annoying.

I end up going past Bemis Mountain Lean-to and hike to about mile 1,961, a 16-mile day.

Day 126:

I wake up at the stealth site to fog. I pack up and head out, with the plan to meet my mom and sister around 8:30 AM. I have over 2 miles to get there, and I head down into the valley to cross a river, then back up.

Near the river I see a female moose out in the distance. It’s quite far and I don’t get a picture of it, but it’s nice to put a face to all the moose crap I have been seeing. The hill isn’t a lot of fun, and it’s raining harder now. By the time I get to the top, I have to put my rain jacket on, and I stop at a bench to do that.

Mom and my sister pick me up at Height of Land, a scenic overlook with lots of plaques about the area.

We go straight to eat at Moose Alley, and I get a breakfast sandwich and the lemon zest pancakes, which are amazing. I eat my fill and we chat and catch up. I hadn’t seen my sister since day 1 of the trail.

Check-in at the hotel isn’t until late in the afternoon, so we head to a local gym for its showers. I didn’t think I smelled bad, but apparently it smelled like a “biohazard” in the car according to my sister. This is the first time my sister has seen me sense Georgia, so the difference is amazing. The gym had a shower pass that I used. They didn’t have shampoo, but that was okay since I would wash my hair properly after check-in. I also weighed myself there and found out I weighed 193 pounds, which is 35 pounds less than I started at. It also means I made it to “sub-zero weight.” Jolly on day one explained it to me: “It’s where your weight plus your pack is less than what you weighed by yourself at the start!”

My mom showed me everything she brought, and it was mostly everything I needed. We stopped by the grocery store to get the couple of missing items. I also got 2 Smart Water bottles to replace my leaking CNOC bladder bag.

We explored the town and went to an outfitter. We ran into Flipflop and Keystone again as they left town, and we gave them some cookies someone back home made for hikers.

As we entered another outfitter, I realized I forgot my hiking sticks back at the bench at the overlook. We all quickly got back in the car to get them, praying nothing had happened to them in the 4 hours I left them there. Thankfully, they were still there.

The rest of the day is a bit of a blur. We visited the Outdoor Heritage Museum that talked about the history of the local area, lake, and more. It had lots of trophies of fish, bear, and other animals. There was also a neat quartz Indian arrowhead.