SCOTT & AIDAN DURKIN aka MR SHOES & KANALKANUT ~ THRU HIKING GEAR & TRAIL WISDOMS
“There’s a million excuses not to do a thru hike and there’s just one great excuse to do a thru hike because YOU CAN and IT’S THERE.”
GEAR
FOOD
• Half Gallon Challenge
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FEET
• KEEN Footwear
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MISC
• “Walk in the Woods” by Bill Bryson
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• “Walking” by Henry David Thoreau
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• “Walking with Spring” by Earl Schaffer
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• AWOL Guide for the AT
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• ATC Guide
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• Mountain Laural Inn in Damascus
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• Garmin InReach Explorer
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• Lightning Safety
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• Leave No Trace rules
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WISDOMS
THRU HIKING
• The first shelter or campsite out of any town is the worst campsite or shelter that you can possibly find. It’s either strewn with broken bottles and litter or its completely packed with the people who don’t want to pay for a room in town.
• The trail never ceased to surprise!
• Sometimes we lose that person to person contact and I think that’s what we wanted
Aidan to experience firsthand.
• Inexplicably we were two of the fastest hikers. So we’d always break through the next hiker
bubble into another and in a day or two we’d be through it and onto another.
We weren’t trying to go fast, but because we weren’t in these social groups we didn’t spend a lot of time hanging out or spending a lot of time in town.
• We’d always say to each other “The trail is ours!” because it was very solitary a lot of the time.
• It makes it very difficult to hike your own hike when there are these very strong personalities (in the bubble you are hiking with).
• We would only resupply after we hiked 100 miles… so we passed a lot of towns.
• We had a rule… we had to be at least 2 campsites away from a road before we stopped.
• If you’re going to do the lodges in the Whites, don’t show up at a lodge before 4 o’clock cause they’ll turn you away. They’ll make you keep hiking. But you have to get to the next lodge because you can’t camp anywhere cause there’s no stealth camping.
• If you want to do it, there’s a way to do it. There’s a way to be a thru hiker. You don’t have to put it off.
• There’s a million excuses not to do a thru hike and there’s just one great excuse to do a thru hike because YOU CAN and IT’S THERE.