I surprised myself today because I hiked further than I planned. I had a shelter picked out as my destination for the day about 6 miles away. I woke up feeling great and the first 4 miles were completely flat so I made it to the shelter by 1pm. I decided I felt well enough to continue so I settled on a stealth site another 4 miles down the trail. I did great until about the last half mile and it just hit me that I was exhausted! So I threw out the idea of going to the next shelter 3 miles down the road and plopped down to rest before setting up my hammock. The camp site is by a stream so I had plenty of water to clean up (one of my REI purchases yesterday was a light weight, quick drying wash rag and I already love it). So I surprised myself by doing 10 miles today pretty comfortably even the uphill portion. I was a little nervous about how much being sick might have set me back. I’m happy it wasn’t nearly as much a setback as I was expecting.

I had lunch today looking out at the view above. It’s a pretty view, but what I really loved about it was that not only did I hike across that entire valley, I hiked over the mountains you can see in the distance to get to the valley. It was a pretty awesome and encouraging feeling to have such a beautiful visual of what I have been doing.

When I hike I listen to the forest around me. I don’t listen to podcasts or audio books because my brain wanders off on its own little adventures and when it comes back to whatever I’m listening to, I have to rewind because I’ve missed a couple of chapters. I don’t listen to music because me singing along out loud is not healthy for the forest or the animals in the forest much less my fellow hikers and I really can’t resist singing along. Also if you try dance moves on the trail, your feet get tangled up in tree roots, or slip on rocks, or splash in mud – guess how I know 😀.

So generally I listen to the forest around me and have entertaining little conversations with myself or sometimes other people (present and not present). Even in the forest I try to not to talk to myself out loud – I get some really weird looks when hikers ask me if I’m alone and when I say yes, their response is oh I thought I heard you talking to someone. My response of “Oh I was, but they’re not actually here,” has left a few people looking pretty unsettled. When you live alone you talk to yourself out loud a lot – or at least I do. So as the trails get more populated (everyone passes me, but people who started in Georgia in February and March are starting to catch me and with good weather there are lots of day hikers), I’m having to rein in the out load chatter.

So anyway today, as I was listening to the forest (I love the sections where there are no sounds of civilization, just forest sounds), I decided to try and catalogue all the different sounds. Bird song and buzzing insects is a constant. I regularly hear woodpeckers (super annoying if you are trying to sleep). Sadly you can almost always hear some sort of road noise. Airplanes overhead, big and small, is not constant but occurs frequently. Since I’m in Pennsylvania, I hear trains several times a day. I can often hear running water, especially since there has been so much rain this month. Squirrels are the noisy creatures in the forest and I can almost always hear one running up and down a tree or scurrying across the forest floor to find or hide a nut. All of these sounds and more combine to create this incredibly peaceful backdrop. It soothes me.