Map Drops

Well, the days are slowly grinding by, moving me relentlessly towards the trail and this beautiful thing I'm about to do. Slowly, I say, but really I have only 5 weeks left before I fly out, and I'm now starting to finally feel the necessity of planning. I work better under pressure, I find; it's hard for me to get organized 4 months in advance, but 4 weeks? Maybe.

Right now I'm trying to get my map drops in order. That is, places where I'm going to send myself sections of the map set I had printed, they're really great maps, and you can download them for free and print them yourself, courtesy of a fellow named Half Mile. He does it as a service to PCT hikers, great guy.

This sort of planning would be easy if it were just me doing the hike, but since I'm not starting out solo, instead hiking with my AT buddy K-Bomb, it's more complicated. We're trying to make it so we resupply and pick up whatever mail drops we have in the same places, so as to streamline our hike by not going into more towns than we need to. Unfortunately he's out on the road, a long haul truck driver, and we won't be able to actually meet up in Austin until probably one or two days before we fly out.

There are a few easy ones. There's a hiker hostel called Hiker Heaven which I know I'll be at, since it's almost on the trail and the people are awesome, I hear; besides, I pick up my bear canister there. And Kennedy Meadows, also along the trail almost, the kicking off point for the High Sierras, probably take a zero day there (zero miles hiked, that is).

For myself, I hate mail drops. Hate hate HATE them. I'm out there for the freedom of the trail, more or less, and hate having to even think about some government schedule, about whether I'll make it to the post office before it closes, hoping I don't end up in town on a Saturday afternoon meaning I have to wait until Monday... virtual slavery. I'm not really all that into planning anyways; better to just wing it. It's just how I live my life; to spend all this time planning for a future that is utterly uncertain and full of curve balls seems a waste of energy. I prefer to just get a framework in my mind and leave it at that.

Plus there's the cost, I don't want to overdo it on the postage. So I'm trying to do a balancing act, weighing the cost and inconvenience of more maildrops against the benefit of a lighter pack. A lighter pack is certainly a worthwhile investment, not to be trifled with. If it were just the money I'd probably grit my teeth and spend it, but the inconvenience tips me the other way.

So I guess what I'm saying in this post is that though I have maps and Yogi's Planning Guide and myself all spread out on my floor, I'm still not much closer to decisions. Meanwhile, the excitement grows.