It was a little bittersweet hearing NPR’s story about the half-gallon challenge this morning. When Appalachian Trail thru-hikers reach the trail’s halfway point, in Pennsylvania’s Pine Grove Furnace State Park, many stop at the camp store to buy and consume a symbolic half-gallon of ice cream. In the weeks beforehand, there’s much discussion about how to do it. Some argue for vanilla, the cheapest brand they have (Hershey’s, or so I recall), so that there’s lots of air. Others argue that that’s how you end up with diarrhea, and you’ve got to eat something richer. Then there’s the flavor/no flavor argument, whether it goes down easier with chocolate chunks, etc., or if it’s best to stick with something plain.
Pine Grove Furnace State Park is just north of the 997 mile mark, which is how far I’d made it as of July 31, 1996, when I broke my foot and had to get off the trail. I resumed six weeks later on Mt. Washington, where I met up with many trail friends, knowing I’d come back and make up the gap. So my halfway point fell, unnoticed by me, just a few miles north of Andover, Maine. That was just as everybody I was with was eagerly anticipating their 2,000 mile mark; with Katahdin only a few hundred miles away, my halfway mark didn’t occur to me.
The next spring my now-wife drove me back to the 997 mile mark, in Harper’s Ferry, where I met up with my trail buddy Chris Gorski. It wasn’t but a few days before we’d traversed West Virginia and Maryland, and made our way to Pine Grove Furnace. The store was closed. We kept walking.