EP 94 - Outdoor Vitals on the Appalachian Trail

[00:00:00] Joe: Welcome everyone to the Live Ultralight podcast, powered by outdoor vinyls. This podcast is about inspiring you to get Outdoors. Showing you how to lighten your pack and build your confidence. So you can start living your life full of Adventure. I am Joe and I am here today with Tyler and Jason and we're gonna talk about Tyler and Jason's recent trip to the Appalachian Trail Appalachian Trail and Appalachian Trail days. Is that what the title? Is that parade at trailers? I don't know if anyone calls it. Yeah,

[00:00:36] Tyler: at Trail days, so Appalachian Trail Trail Days.

[00:00:40] Joe: Putting two more Trails. What were you guys

[00:00:49] Tayson: doing? What were you setting out to do throughout the trip? We had two goals really to accomplish out there. One of us to go out and see Trail Days, see what it's like, you know, see if that's an event that we may want to attend if we can in the future, just kind of get a grasp on that. get the cultural fit a little bit too out there and then, you know, after that, we were gonna jump on the at, and do 100 miles section. And now let's largely in part to gain some empathy for what it's like to hike over there. So Brigham which you'll find out Brigham, you know, part part party ideas for me and bring them to do that since we're doing so much in design, just to understand how the gear performs there if there's any differences, just a really feel like we can put ourselves on the team when we're designing product as well. So we want to 100 Mi segment there. So those are the two primary reasons that we two days after the Grand Canyon hopped on a plane.

[00:01:46] Tyler: I think there was a third reason as well, which is kind of what what made us really want to focus on 100 Mi there and that it was just that we're doing UL member 100 challenge where we're helping people to learn, how to do 100 mile trip backpacking without any support or help. And so, we were able to do that section on the ATV, we did a half. Day. And three full days and then another half day. So essentially four days, we did 100 miles, that's a lot of mileage.

[00:02:28] Tayson: Yeah, especially when I was kind of thinking about it this morning a little more. It was, it was less than four days because we started at three and we were done by like 10 a.m. so like it was it was we did a lot of miles on the tri folding and three days that were like three full days. Were big days, big days? Yeah.

[00:02:46] Joe: Um, that's really remarkable. I've always wanted to do the Appalachian Trail. You wouldn't let me go with you. There was the plans in the works to possibly do some photography over on the elbow, on the Eastern side of the United States. If you say, if you see See see our media that we put out. A lot of stuff is near where we're at. We're in the southwest. We're in, we're in southwest Utah. And so there's a lot of deserts some like Rocky Mountains, higher higher elevation Mountain stuff but you never quite get that like East Coast Greenery like those older Appalachian Mountains, you don't you don't get that and so there was a bit of me there was there was a part of me and it's very jealous and not too happy that I didn't get to go. I just wanted to confront you about that. Right here on this podcast. Hey wait

[00:03:41] Tayson: I'm pretty sure. Derek calls the shots on your budget.

[00:03:44] Joe: He does. But but you are the big boss. I feel like you can go over that you know power I guess. No. Um so it's really cool that you guys got to go and got to experience that. Have you guys done any hiking on the East Coast at all?

[00:04:00] Tayson: Before this specific Northwest but not the East Coast for me really,

[00:04:04] Tyler: I had done a little I lived in North Carolina for a couple years. Okay. So I had a good idea of what it was going to be like I haven't hiked much in the Smokies or like in Virginia where we were but yeah I kind of what we were getting in.

[00:04:24] Joe: I have been yeah I when I was a teenager I was like a really late at night and on PBS or something they had like they had a Canadian public television program. Documentary on the Appalachian Trail. Nice. And so like pre YouTube, like it was that it was so there was a lot less people on the trail back then, and I had been like pretty obsessed with doing the Appalachian Trail for a long time. I don't think all I ever will at this point, but that was always something that like, I always thought it was cool. Like it was really inspiring to me. And then like years later, you learned about the Pacific Crest Trail and you learn about the Continental Divide. It's not the only one, but it is the most famous one. And the fact that we make gear here, that's our, that is our basically our core audience. Our people who do, who are really serious about backpacking and want to line their packs. So they can do like lots. So I think it's important from our company perspective, definitely got get an idea from the Eastern side of things, Eastern United States as far as what does through hiking look like on that side of things. So take us through the the whole trip was what was day one was that was that was basically got into Trail days and It was interesting Damascus. As a very small town. I feel like the population is in the hundreds, not 1000s when the trolleys are not going on, but it's right in the heart of the Appalachian

[00:05:58] Tayson: Mountains. So you're Um, well placed but the town's tiny. So we find some parking after driving around for a while. Go over and it was cool. It's it's very small it to me, I didn't know what to expect. I think Tyler expected about what we saw, but there's a little smaller than I expected. There's just, you know, they do the pop-up tents, they've got some people there, but I think the coolest part of that was, we had, you know, some other manufacturers approached us say hi. You know, they clearly knew us but then we just got to meet people that were stopping us. The newer Brands. So, you know, if you're listening to this and you're one of the people that stopped us on at Trail days and said, hi and took a selfie or something. I think it's fun. It's great to meet you guys and and so that aspect of it was fun too, but Yeah, I don't know. I mean, overall, I think it was just interesting to see the people and, and see the companies and just kind of how it was run. There's a lot of activities and we kind of capped it off. Looking at a height, watching the hiker parade before we hit the trail, but what? Okay, what is

[00:07:02] Tyler: So it's like a celebration of the Appalachian Trail and it has other manufacturers there. What is everybody doing? Their like, what kind of a Meetup is it? So it's it's nice because Damascus is right on the route of the 80. So the through hikers are coming into town, there's probably spending a little longer in town. And, and a lot of them were trying to paste their hiking so that they could be in Damascus by that weekend. And that's, that puts them at like the 450 miles in kind of range. I don't remember exactly what it is. But the idea is that, well, Damascus, like as a town, they just really celebrate the at. Like, you you'd walk through town and see murals that say, Trail Town, USA and like, like lots of other cool little things. There's like some really well, outfitted hiking shops there that have like just about everything you could want. Other than outdoor battles gear, because we're consumers. But But like so the town just puts on this little festival. And a lot of it is kind of like a fair that you would see at a County Fair where there's just booths with hand-painted artwork and little crafts and knickknacks and stickers and clothing. But then there's like the vendor Village which is where like the the big backpacking brands are and let's upgrade you halfway through the trail. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that

[00:08:36] Tayson: you'd be surprised. Yeah,

[00:08:39] Tyler: there's a lot of people ditching their three men tents for like

[00:08:48] Tayson: They've already run a backpack through or something. I decided that backpack wasn't working.

[00:08:52] Tyler: Yeah. Darn Tough was there replacing socks for people and just stuff like that, you know. So so it was cool because the brands that are really focused on on that style of hiking were fairly well represented there and and the through hikers had a really good opportunity to compare products back and forth and and decide what was going to

[00:09:17] Tayson: work best for them. That's

[00:09:18] Tyler: good for the hacker. Yeah,

[00:09:20] Tayson: definitely but it's definitely like a celebration. They had all sorts of little mini events and some of the brands are doing giveaways, you know, it's just kind of fun. Supposedly, I offered Brigham 50 dollars just to stay intense City that night after we separated off and he refused it. Because apparently, that's where

[00:09:38] Tyler: half the party goes on too. So they do it kind of like your style where it's like, tents are touching like, you're so can't so close in the grassy area that your tents are all touching and it sounded like people. Just party all night and

[00:09:49] Tayson: that's like a great time. I know Brigham, that's not freaking. Style

[00:09:54] Joe: freedoms are a product designer for those who are newer to

[00:09:58] Tayson: detail. But it's not like about half of the area was, I could have managed the other half was like,

[00:10:05] Tyler: Was like a family or room. Yeah. Yeah. They had to pay more to be in like the quiet family area but like had we known. What our hotel was gonna be like that first night. We probably would have stayed intensity.

[00:10:19] Tayson: Yeah, we pull up at like almost as after midnight. And I'm not even sure if the guy that put us in a room worked there or not, he might have just been a guy that hangs around the hotel. It was pretty sure we saw guys feeling a motorcycle. I mean, while we had a decently nice car, I was like, I hope this doesn't get broken into.

[00:10:40] Tyler: I'm sure this is not normal Damascus. Virginia. It

[00:10:43] Tayson: wasn't his mask. I don't think has a hotel in it or a motel we so we kind of stayed a little bit South but yeah we're

[00:10:55] Tyler: about 40 minutes south yeah it was

[00:10:59] Tayson: It wasn't the worst sleep but it was not the most the

[00:11:02] Tyler: mattress. I definitely traded out nice.

[00:11:16] Tayson: So after Trail days, it's crazy. People are going all out. Changing up their clothing to some pretty interesting clothes

[00:11:33] Tyler: on our coconut bras and mini skirts rainbow

[00:11:36] Tayson: stuff. Yeah. Trading out your shorts for dresses was pretty common, you know, that kind of thing. So that was quite a sight but it was really cool at the same time because there's you like the energy. They're still really high people, just love it and that was kind of an interesting clue, I think for us to as we getting on the at what we were gonna uncover. As we got out on the trail, it was so different from other Trails. So anyways, yeah, we got, that was at 2:00, we were on the trail but 3:00 that day.

[00:12:04] Tyler: My favorite part of the hiker parade was all the locals line up with squirt, guns, and then hikers, walk down the main drag through Damascus. They get squirted by all the locals with the square guns. Which was a fun thing kids. But then all the other coolest thing was, it wasn't all just current through hikers. Who were in the hiker parade. There was a whole lot of people who were just visiting Trail Days to reminisce about when they did at when they did it. So, there was a lot of people who would be holding up little cardboard things that they like, Class, 72 or class of 88, or class of 2013. And it was just cool to see how many people came back. To go to trailblaze and walk the parade and be excited about the whole experience of the at.

[00:12:54] Joe: That's cool. So I think it sounds like a good time. I would probably party.

[00:12:58] Tayson: Yeah. We were Greg Brigham tonight to Tent City.

[00:13:05] Tyler: We have the eye of the tiger though, because we knew we had to do 100 miles of three and a half days,

[00:13:10] Tayson: not only 100 miles in three and a half days, but the fact that you just got off of. Yeah. Because we the travel to this place was a little bit more expensive than we'd hoped. So we already bought Brigham's ticket but bring him in the Grand Canyon sustained. Kind of a knee injury that that we were hoping would heal hoping would heal but you know, plane tickets already bought before Grand Canyon and You know, he came out but he was not in any shape and honestly still isn't to do any kind of hiking. So, yeah, it's kind of a awkward situation where it's like, well, I don't do for three days but see you later Pals, you know? And, and I was, I mean, Tyler was probably in the best shape, he'd done some good recovery and was bouncing back pretty good.

[00:13:53] Tyler: My calfs were just barely

[00:13:56] Tayson: untying like they were, they were so tied after the Grand Canyon and I had I had knee pain as well and I was kind of just Very concerned about that. Starting that, it would worsen, you know, at best it stayed the same or got better, but that seemed pretty wild, you know, going out and trying to do 25 plus miles a day. That would, that it wouldn't get worse. And so, that was definitely top of mind for me. But, you know, we were out there and needed to make it happen. So like Tyler said, we we wouldn't just hang around until there's too long. We kind of went through it, as much as we felt like we could and then hit the trail which was we literally started from where we parked the car in the middle of the city and took off to get as many miles as it could

[00:14:36] Tyler: that day and to give a little bit of context, we did room to him in the Grand Canyon on a Monday. And so we did Southampton North trim down to Phantom Ranch which is 38 miles the first day. Second day was back up to the South Korean which was another 10 or so then we went so that was Tuesday, drive home, Tuesday, get real stiff in the car. Driving five hours home after that kind of mileage. Videos. Of astronaut too. Which is funny. But then so then we had we had a little break like we had Wednesday and Thursday break. Then it was Friday flying and driving all day to get out there when you want to see ya. When you live

[00:15:21] Tayson: in Cedar, you start any kind of flying. That's like the latest I've flown out of Vegas, but we still met here at 5:30 in the morning a.m. so and then we yeah, you drive to Vegas get on the plane. Take two airplanes over there. By the time we got to Mountain City in at our travel. Like I said, it was after midnight. Yeah. Full day of

[00:15:40] Tyler: with still stifling, you know? So then Saturday we spent all day on our feet at Trail days and then we started hiking at 3:00 in the afternoon after kind of hanging out. So so like there was not an ideal recovery window between the Grand Canyon and between the start of the 80 but that was just kind of how the scheduling felt because we're gonna turn. You got To have permits to do the Grand Canyon to Camp down in there. And then we had to pay for flights for AT&T and they just hit in the same week. So people thought we were nuts when they said, you know, when we would start talking about hiking the previous Grand Canyon,

[00:16:22] Tayson: I went to the Grand Canyon. Hey, so do we on Monday? What So anyways, we take off on the 80 that day and I just had a curiosity. Tyler, how many miles? And how many feet did we climb that day? Don't you're gonna,

[00:16:42] Tyler: um, I think it was right around 10 miles. We started at 3 p.m. didn't take too many breaks other than water and stuff and then camped up on a ridge. I think it was right around 10 and then as far as elevation gain, it seemed like we were climbing a lot that day just like up and up and and then back up and so my guess would probably be like 1500. That's the famous thing about the abolition Trail is that it's supposed to be like Triple Crown. It's supposed to be the hardest one because it's continually up and down and there's way more elevation game and lost and on the other two.

[00:17:20] Tayson: Yeah, I think that's something that would be interesting to talk about because and so Heather in though, I want to talk about that but yeah I didn't I pulled the numbers just as we were starting the podcast so I was interested it was actually 2800 feet of elevation climb in those 10 miles. So I mean it's funny. We met a guy later on the trail. Who's like you actually did the at right there? Everyone just walks on the Creeper Trail, which is the trail just goes by the river like, five miles and cuts out this 10 miles second, that's Straight up. And down that was definitely the most climbing in the shortest amount of like miles but yeah I was definitely a lot of climbing but yeah almost 11 miles is what we ended up doing. And then we found a camp and I would say it was really nice. It's quite pretty. We got you got kind of to walk by a river at times or crossing these Bridges which you know we're like Bridges aren't normal, you know what I mean? It's like it's like a little creek and they've got a whole Nice Bridge and people don't build Bridges out here. No. So we we really enjoyed it. It was a lot of climbing and then we got into camp, we We kind of, we probably should have stopped a little bit earlier that day because ended up finding the camp spot. We picked was a little sloppy and stuff, but I would say the most memorable thing for me, there was man, the lights go out and the spiders come just climbing out, and there was so many spiders. It was, it was insane. So, yeah,

[00:18:49] Tyler: we were in an undeveloped campsite. So we were just like, because we're getting rained on and then it was getting dark like, right at that time. And then the rain, let up a little. And so, we're just like, all right, we're throwing it down in the leaves. and, That's where the spiders live in the leaves. No, I mean, that's just more bugs their overall. Like, you don't have to worry about ticks nearly as much out here. Still are out here but not new is Matt much and then there's chiggers I don't know if you guys had to deal with those. We avoided The Damp. Heavily shaded grass. Okay? And yeah there's more there's just more life out there, I don't know. Yeah

[00:19:30] Tayson: we're pretty lucky that. The bugs hadn't come in a full force. We were expecting a lot more bugs, didn't get as many bugs, just

[00:19:37] Tyler: the rain helped, keep the bugs at Bay, I think. And we were a little early in the bugs season for my experience so that was nice. It was we actually had great weather. Like we got rain on pretty hard a couple of times but it was great. Timing is for his weather.

[00:19:55] Tayson: Yeah. So one of the things to know here is we started the trail. I had my Max carrying was just under four liters of water. So I started the trowel with just under four liters of water. Let's do all this climbing with so much water. We got like right before the biggest climb we stopped and filled up more water. Started. The learning path which is the next day. We're like, filling up with water. We're carrying water, we're climbing. And yeah, I think by the end of day two, we finally learned that two liters of water is plenty out there. You don't need to carry for leaders of water. Currently, yeah, desert mode. Yeah, we're coming from Desert mode. Where we, we camel up and haul the water. And yeah, we definitely were carrying way too much weight. The First week, two days I'd say before we started to dial that in. But yeah, day two is, was pretty awesome. We got up at the trail nice and early. walked a little ways before he met up with Boone who he knew our brand. I think he had a few things from us as well, and kind of walked for a little bit with him, got to know him,

[00:21:05] Tyler: he's a contractor from Alabama, right?

[00:21:10] Tayson: yeah, I just out there making it happen and yeah. So that was that was a really good time. And then we separated off from him and just kept Trucking because we were headed. Let's see what would have been this day, I think. George Grayson, Highlands that day. So we were kind of excited to get to that but also just nearly had a lot of miles to cover and There's much more to say on that. I mean, Boone had added 500 miles to his at

[00:21:37] Tyler: Adventure, which was impressive, because he did two Trails through Alabama, that then connected him to the

[00:21:43] Tayson: bottom of the 80. And then, so he just walked from home to

[00:21:46] Tyler: the 18th. That's what His dream hike was so, yeah, he he was impressive.

[00:21:52] Tayson: That's pretty cool. Yeah. So anyways, we climb up and this is when it started a good because at this point, we were probably 20 miles on that 20 miles, maybe 15 miles in. We're like man a lot of this sure looks the same, right? Like we're starting to like get that that green tunnel a little bit of it, right? Like it was kind of early on still for us to be saying that I guess but eventually though we finally got up to a vantage point because it seems like every time I get up to the top of the hill, I'd like to turn around and want to be able to What we'd climb where we came from? Just not the case, right? It's just so fake out there that you just can't see out of canopy. So around 1:00 that day, we were able to climb up to Buzzard or something like that. And we stopped had lunch and it was really nice to be in the Sun and be able to see, for ways. It was really, really pretty, so I really good lunch. Their kind of sprawled out, I think I Trying out, you know, or my quilt or something, and let it dry out just a little bit call home, which is nice. There is there's quite a bit of service out there, which we weren't expecting it all. We both brought in reaches enriched Minis and but yeah, I had tons of service called home and I got my legs burnt in like The 20-30 minutes we sat down. So like my upper thighs are nice and red by the time, we're done with that and then we hit the trail again. So, Back on our way, we're definitely playing yoyo with a few people on the trail, which turned into like a real big pattern out there, which was kind of comes into play, I think too is we got closer to the end, but went through that went down, another couple good clients and got up to Greece and Highlands for that evening and had dinner on, probably one of them will be one of the most memorable like dinner spots. I think that we've ever had, we're just perched. Clear on this rock in the middle of Greece and Highlands

[00:23:47] Tyler: the very highest point of our trip elevation wise could see along ways.

[00:23:52] Tayson: Yeah, so Sunday evening, we had a group behind us, doing a sermon up on the up on the Rock and so we we tucked off a little behind him and just kind of Out there and had our dinner and watch people approach, these ponies that they were so excited about these ponies. So there's ponies and Grayson Highlands that help we later learn just that they're planted there and they help keep Down. So they want and, but the hikers love them. They're all chasing around, trying to pet them. So we kind of had dinner and a show and an amazing view there. But

[00:24:25] Tyler: yeah, the pony thing is funny because it's the opposite of out here where we have lots of wild Mustangs and most of the ranchers and Farmers. Absolutely hate the Mustangs because they eat like the grass and stuff, they pull up their roots and kill the plants and make it so that it's bad range for cattle and sheep where he's like help with the environment and we're like well this is different. Well it grows a lot faster out there. Yeah, yeah. So but it was fun that area was really, really pretty and we kind of like Go through it faster than I expected. Really, so

[00:25:10] Tayson: Yeah, I mean, we were just, we were trying to, you know, clock the the miles that we needed to for the day. So we we moved through there. And that's when we passed our first and our first, but our first shelter in the evenings, when people were starting to Group up out of them. So that was quite interesting as well, because For us, Brigham. Wait. So I actually tasked Brigham with doing the research on this, as I, you know, you know, learn about the water situation, learn about the camping situations, learn about the bear situations and brief us on it, and So anyways, he's like yeah, don't say to shelter. I've never stayed a shelter. There's mice there and there's that, you know, there's there's More rodents and, you know, probably more bears if they're gonna be any. That's where they'd probably anyway, so on so forth. So yeah, we pulled up first one, and it is Packed. And I mean packed, I think by the time we got all the way through it, we probably were up to like, 45 tents at this shelter and the shelter itself, only sleeps, like four people, maybe five if you like there

[00:26:13] Tyler: was seven or eight people packed into that. Yeah

[00:26:16] Tayson: that one was interesting too because I'll say it. I feel like we, you know, looking at data. It never really comes up, but there's, there's a lot of drugs on the at which, which really was surprising walking past that shelter. In particular, you could hardly see across the campfire. I'll just put it that way. It was intense so and there was a lot of tents as well. So 45 tents, they were just sprawled out but why they do it is at the shelter, there's a toilet typically and there's a water source nearby so they can go filter water, get water, they've got a toilet and then there's people there. And a lot of people that had out there are doing the solo, right? Like, they're a lot of them or they start with a friend and their friend drops or whatever it is. And so It seems like even if they're hiking all day, they enjoy being able to stop in the evening where there's other people. I think there's some safety in it, right? Like not a lot of people like camping alone in the woods. So Sleeping in a shelter almost guarantees that someone else be around and there's a little bit of safety in it. But yeah I think there's a lot more socially happening in and around the shelter so that was interesting but we I don't know if there's much to say there but we we talked to a few people there and then we kind of scooted on through and other three or so miles that night to get past the 25 mile Mark.

[00:27:37] Tyler: Yeah started to get rained on at the end of that day. So we were setting up camp in the rain as it's getting dark which was not our plan. But you know, we had already done dinner on the trail up in Grayson Highlands. So it wasn't like we were stressed about like, Having a place to hang out at Camp because that's not usually our style. So it wasn't bad. That was that was a good day. Was a good day.

[00:28:06] Tayson: Yeah, I mean one one quick little plug here too. Setting up in the rain and dealing with that. I have the basically, the the newest sportiest, one person tent, and its really nice to have a pitch. It in the rain, not have any water get inside. But then because of that, we're kind of hanging out in our tents, a little bit longer than we normally would usually be walking outside. And that thing is really is impressive. How much Headroom and space it has in there because of the spiders, I took my backpack inside of my tent every night and then kind of pull everything out of it, stuck the frame underneath my feet and then just space for everything in there with a long white pad. So that was really nice. I folded over my pad actually and sat up for quite a while. I can't remember what I was up to but

[00:28:53] Tyler: I'm doing some recovery stuff because at that point we were, you know, right around 30 seconds

[00:28:58] Tayson: from scratch. That we probably have it on the website, Tyler know better than me, but

[00:29:08] Tyler: I don't think it's listed yet. It will be soon, so

[00:29:11] Tayson: that'll be there. But yeah, that's always nice to end the day with, with the

[00:29:17] Tyler: Yeah, we're just in their kind of stretching and and doing all that, but did everything feel like a spider,

[00:29:24] Tayson: everything. Feel like a spider killer. That's it. I'm not in the tent, know, I have safety in the tent but it was more like when we sat down took a break. You're just like you always had our little eighth inch close-up on pad. Sit on, you never want to sit right in the leaves. If you ever stirred the leaves up, it was just like spiders coming out of them, you know? Or when we had to walk at night, you'd see spider eyeballs under all the leaves, you know? Yes. He could see him or flexing back at you, but but I was a good day. I was probably, I don't say the best day on trail but like views, Advantage points and just the trellis self was really good. It seemed like a lot of those people that made it to that shelter. They'd either left on Friday, or they had taken the Creeper Trail and bypassed a lot of the ten miles of climbing. We did. It was yeah, there's a big cluster.

[00:30:15] Tyler: Yeah, that they all the hikers called it a bubble, but essentially what would happen is and and we were probably in front of a giant bubble but because of Trail Days Hikers would all congregate at trailblaze then they all get on trail at the same time and then you have a huge amount of hikers on the trail. Doing the same miles each day for a while until people's Paces start to spread them out. And so we were kind of like just barely stay in the head that like early Trail Days, visitors bubble like the people who hung out at Trail Days on Friday and then hiked Saturday. So we had caught up to those ones and we're hiking through those ones as we were going. So I can't imagine what it would have looked like with the big bubble coming out of trailblaze know that would have been like kind of like standing in line on trail like what it would seem like, because they were so many people.

[00:31:12] Tayson: Yeah, yeah. So another good night of rest had some fun hanging bear bags. That are the most annoying part of not staying at a shelter, was the bearings. Not a lot of trees with crossover

[00:31:25] Tyler: branches out there like horizontal branches.

[00:31:29] Tayson: so, it was always like you're dead tired into the day going like, Throw sticks in the air about getting hit by him, you know, like that kind of stuff. But now so we got the next day though, started off the trail quite early hiked with a By the name of Sir Elton, he was a doctor out of Canada. So I talked with him for a while, that was that was a really, you know, telling and again, that was something I was trying to consciously. I think both of us are trying to consciously do was was Eng People that we were hiking by to learn, right? You're trying to gain empathy for the people out there. Understand them and understand their needs. Why they're out there in the first place. So, we did, we tried to be pretty social specially when we're hiking, right? Because we didn't have enough time to just stop and talk to a lot of people more so we'd laugh on people or people would latch on to us. And we we'd hiked together. So how to morning heightened with hiking with straight. Elton Tyler, wasn't feeling great that morning, but then we stopped and had breakfast and At another really good vantage point. And probably the last like bigger view of Grayson Highlands, before we really exited that area kind of lost. Some of those bigger more expansive views. So yeah, day two. We did 25 miles 5500 feet of climbing. And then we started on day three this day and first first four or five miles had some views and then it kind of got into just the thick of it. so, Walk in. I don't know what they're saying about this day. We're cruising and started to rain on us a little bit. We're kind of putting rain gear on putting my rain kilt on, you know, just look in the look in the part. People started asking us what our Trail names for though and around the office here. People have kind of bounced around between Wizard or Gandalf, for me. And so I I told the first guy that my trolling was Gandalf and then we found out there's again off on trail that was a little too popular. You know what I mean? So decided to just go with wizard. Yeah, everyone was all he's looking for. They're always looking for Gandalf. So, Standoff from the trail, all right. but, No, I mean, I don't remember what their, I mean, a whole lot that to share. I mean, we recorded this video so all the like, He tells them, I'm sure that we're shooting overall be in the video that will eventually get published on our channel.

[00:33:56] Tyler: YouTube channel, that day. We got rained on pretty hard from probably. 10 in the morning till about 1:45 in the afternoon.

[00:34:05] Tayson: That's Day. That was like, we took the brunt of the rain. Yeah. Yeah. That was

[00:34:09] Tyler: water and it was raining hard like so much rain that like, noon came around and Mi, you know, like 12 or 14 came around and we're like, oh Mi 14 is the halfway point of our trip like we should stop and film something and have lunch. But no, we're not, we tried it was way, way, way too wet. Try To get our phones out. They

[00:34:32] Tayson: were not Cooperating they couldn't even unlock the screen because everything's so wet and then I got the tried to get the GoPro out. It was malfunctioning. So we tried

[00:34:41] Tyler: Yeah, so we just for a long time through the middle of that day. And one funny thing was there saying that there was a river crossing and the bridge was out and that you should only take that section of Trail like at your own risk, you know, and we're like, oh cool. Pouring rain, it probably high water, like, how gnarly is this River Crossing going to be and we get up to it and it's like there was a lot of volume in the creek, but there was still good, like, rocks and logs to hop around on. So nothing like a flash flood out here. That's for sure. Yeah,

[00:35:19] Tayson: it was very manageable.

[00:35:21] Tyler: Yeah. So it was that one that portion of the trip was a pretty big grind, because, You know, your feet are just totally socked through. We're still putting in a lot of miles and and it's just west comfortable to be being hammered with rain. You know, we had good rain gear. We always have our stuff in dry bags, and we've got our rain jackets that we've been testing for about a year that are Coming up? Yeah, they're coming out. Stay tuned soon. We actually just put the preview up on the members website today, so you can go check it out. But so make sure you join the Live Ultralight membership. You can get discounts on gear to some talk about the tent earlier. There should still be a discount up for you guys. What is that through June or something?

[00:36:14] Tayson: Yeah, it'll be through. We haven't picked a date but mid to end of June will be the biggest savings. So 65 dollars off of each of those tents right now. Yeah, yeah. So I mean Jack will be sweet. I mean, I don't know, I know we're not trying to harp on that but there's a lot of really cool Tech in it and we got some really good. We've already tested at a time but this was just just, you know, Sean Howell. Unclaiming it is in this type of scenarios and how well it does its job. So

[00:36:42] Tyler: yeah, so that rain was pretty rough. I think we got to like this road crossing at about 2:00 in the Yankees. Yeah. So we got there and the rain finally let up and there's like this little patch of grass and we're just like, sprawled out gear everywhere so that we can let it breathe. And that was probably my favorite lunch because it was just so needed.

[00:37:07] Tayson: Um this is also. So we started to kind of hike with a few people that day. There's a couple guys from Europe. There's a guy that we talked to quite a lot from Germany. He's really cool guy. Worked in like the Aerospace industry for their government and their space program. Yeah, yeah. And just a really cool guy. I don't know if I remember his name or Trail. Name off top my head right now which Anyways but we actually think quite a lot. He was really cool guy. He got to know us a little bit. What we're doing out there and stuff and so we played tag with him, but We're kind of laughing because it was like we powered through didn't eat lunch till like, after 1:00. and, Then this group behind us comes in, they stopped and it's these two European guys and a guy from Austin, Texas or around there and he you know starts talking your ear off about stuff. He's pulling out all his lunch stuff and next thing we know has European friends are like we're going and they're just gone. And we're like what the heck? And he's like, he's like scrambling throwing stuff at his pack to take off with them. We just funny and counter. So then we started walking Later with like German guy to these other guys started kind of ask him out that were like, because they were only going another five miles in the whole day to the shelter. And we were planning on doing still another like 10 or 15 that day or something. So we're like why are they in such a race you know like it was weird like why not when you stop. And because most of these people at this stage in the you know like they kind of get people separated out, you got to do in 20 miles a day, are already farther up. The trail. You got the people doing this many miles, which typically they were doing about 16 miles a day. They were kind of that's that's what most of the people in our area were doing was 14 to 16 miles a day. Sometimes it was even less, but rarely would they go past 16 and anyways, we so we kind of asked him like, well, what's the deal, like, why are they like racing to the next shelter? And we never really got a solid answers, like some of the guys we even we don't understand it, you know? Like cuz there's one guy hikes with those people. But I think it had to do something with maybe getting the best spot at the shelter, the

[00:39:13] Tyler: forecast, the weather forecast was still forecast for more rain and stuff. So I think that people want better campsites when it's raining or maybe you just want more rest time, you want to hike faster. I

[00:39:26] Tayson: think that we're cooking. Yeah,

[00:39:28] Tyler: they were hiking faster than we were but we were doing more miles in the day, you know.

[00:39:33] Tayson: Yeah. But Many miles is that day. So by the end of that day, we did 27.3 Miles and it was like our easiest elevation day with only 4600 feet of climbing. so, I mean, might be a good time to talk a little bit about the climbing there because Coming from the Grand Canyon. I think what was the most unexpected is? How much that beat us up versus these Hills, especially polar opposite. And the reason why I say that is most of us and me especially talk for me is that on The Descent of the chi about Trail in the north room, the grand or Southwestern, the Grand Canyon, It was very steep, very technical. Lots of basically are having to like pinpoint where your feet were going land on like the the ball, your foot, the total, your foot, and doing that for for seven miles. So you're not Landing flat-footed, you're not landing on your heels,

[00:40:27] Tyler: every step, you know. Like

[00:40:30] Tayson: but then you're taking the brunt of the downhill energy, it's like 5,000 feet of just on the one, one shot. Yeah. Seven miles of that and that like blew some of the guys in the office including my calfs that just kind of blew him up where you got to the bottom and realize, like, hey, we didn't even run that fast, but I'm feeling it and I still got 30 more miles. compare that to this, where typically your biggest climb, it wasn't our biggest climb, but typical climbs range between about 700 and 1,000 feet of elevation But you're way lower elevation levels like like see if there's way more oxygen compared to what we're typically used to and doing that amount. It was like you'd get you get working, you know, but you have tons of oxygen, which helped you. So we never had a Slowdown on any of the hills and we could talk Every single Hill. Even the steepest one, I kind of notice to see if Tyler is going to stop talking on this one because it was This one that we got, there's no switch back to just extreme. Yeah, yeah. And not like he was able to talk the entire way up the hill, which is not common in Utah. A lot of times you have to stop breathe hike. Another 100 yards, stop breathe because there's just so much less oxygen. But so, yeah. Typically those 700 to 1,000 feet of climbing and then you go down the other side and doing only like those shorter increments. Way more forgiving on the Lakes, like way more forgiving on the Lakes, it did not feel on any of these days in my opinion, like we climbed 5,000 feet or 6,000 feet compared to what it feels like when you hike 6,000 feet of elevation out here in the west because typically just long climbs for like four hours straight and you're just just killing your your muscles. So,

[00:42:09] Tyler: there's a couple of other factors in that, like, we live at 5600 feet. Let's see. Level and the highest point we reached on the trail out, there was 5400 feet so we had an advantage there but then two the trail. On like the trail conditions on at is generally quite nice. Like the trails really worn in. How

[00:42:32] Tayson: do you put it? The ATVs not about getting from point A to point B it's about taking the most scenic route you could possibly imagine yeah we

[00:42:41] Tyler: joked that they really get their their distance out of each Hill because they kind of like wind around each other and then you're like, when you're looking out you're like oh, we're just on that hill and recent

[00:42:51] Tayson: Island. You know, and you get back in like

[00:42:55] Tyler: it's like a mile. We

[00:42:57] Tayson: just hiked hard miles to get a mile. Yeah. Yeah. So we probably

[00:43:01] Tyler: going around private land or something.

[00:43:02] Tayson: I think it was awesome just because it's a pretty area, you know? Like it's kind of like a Scenic area of the trail. Yeah.

[00:43:08] Tyler: And the other thing is like, like when you look at the at And you look at like how the trails originated back in. Like colonial times the most direct routes from town to town or through the mountains are now highly, right? So the the actual at Route is just oh you know they had to Pure Recreation yeah they had to make some connection trails and and like make it all worked, you know? Through there. And so so like we didn't mind that because we were there for the experience, it was just steep. Yeah, but I think the other thing is, like, part of the reason we felt really good doing all of that climbing was just because we've been training a lot, we've been trail running a lot and before the Grand Canyon we had both been kind of in that like 30 miles a week of trail running range with elevation

[00:44:09] Tayson: game added in. I was I was hitting about 6,000 feet of elevation climb for week in those training sessions. To just I started to ramp up my elevation as a part. That's one of the things I track is Miles and elevation, so I've been pushing out but yeah, it definitely helped out there even on very tired legs and sore feet and stuff like that. The hills really didn't knock us down too hard even though I'll tell you the number at the end. A lot of. Elevation. So anyways day two, we hiked up, we get to a little turnout where there's a shelter, I don't know if we need to tell that story or not,

[00:44:49] Tyler: well, that was day three. The three on the trail, you're right day on the trail and by then we had passed the 500 Mile mark on the at if you're going northbound. So a lot of the hikers were kind of talking about that and that was cool, you know, that's a big milestone for, for any hiker to have done 500 consecutive miles. And so that was cool to hear people's like, how they were feeling about being there at that point. And we got the feeling that like, the people we were hiking with were like the ones who were gonna make it like the whole way, you know, because they had had time to work through their issues, almost everyone. We talked to had to work through pretty big issues to make it that far, like they either got sick or had foot problems, or had something else that. And so, they all had these stories of time that they had to spend off Trail like in a hostel, or a hotel, or a hospital in order to get to where they were. So, that was On because we felt like we were in really good company just getting getting to know really capable people and and hearing really interesting stories. That's where we met Turtle.

[00:46:03] Tayson: Yeah, yeah. We had a experience where we had to help one of the three hikers, figure out which direction she was supposed to be hiking. And then after that, we were hiking along. And there's this, this kid that we passed. And then, you know, we're trying, I was trying to Gap him a little bit so we could stop and do some shots because we walked across this Meadow. So, I set the GoPro up and we were doing like a walk by shot. And he comes over the hill and I'm like, oh but we just like him out because he's we turned around. We're both dressed in in the same color of shirt. You know, running short, same backpack. I think we've been on the same backpack color even though they're and, you know, so people looked at us and they kind of they'd be like what's going on here? Oh, you know, we work for a company, some of them we'd tell them that we were Generous and they believed us. Yeah we kind of had like a uniform look for sure. So it's funny because you know, Turtle comes up over the hill. We're both turned around on the trail and we're purposely walking right out of you know, and then anyway, so we go a little bit further. We stopped at this water source and he stops too. And so we start talking to him. And yeah he was he was just this this 20 year old kid out there. He'd already finished a degree in economics degree and it was kind of like his Time to. How would you phrase? That

[00:47:24] Tyler: decompress know, like, he was looking at completing the 80 as, like, a

[00:47:29] Tayson: right Coming of Age, Coming of Age kind of thing,

[00:47:32] Tyler: you know, he likes, he was really focused on doing it and proving to himself and to everyone else that he could do it, which was, it was pretty cool. He was out there alone, you know, like he, he had a friend that started with him that couldn't Quite make it. And so, so his friend getting off Trail. And, and then turtle was just out there, like doing this on his own. He was, I'm pretty sure the youngest person that we met. Yeah. On trail. It was doing the whole thing.

[00:48:02] Tayson: Yeah, and so we kind of basically, he's just latched on and we started with this that day and we were just swapping stories. We're asking him about things, he's asking us about things, you know, he's, he might be asking us about gear. We're asking him about like, what are you eating out here? You know, and stuff like that and he probably had the worst eating habits that we'd heard, you know, he told the stories of like packing around 12 cans of Vienna sausage for like 100 miles and then he's like, I don't

[00:48:31] Tyler: want to, I didn't want to deal with the trash, so I just ended up leaving them anyways. He's

[00:48:34] Tayson: like for someone else.

[00:48:35] Tyler: Yeah, he literally told us The trash was so annoying to deal with that. He only ate two cans so he carried ten full cans for more than 50 miles before, ditching them. Which he just left in a hostel, you know, for a cleaning ratings. And

[00:48:51] Tayson: But he mainly lived on Jolly Ranchers, like anytime I start to feel hungry I just use a Jolly Rancher. Yeah, yeah. Like I just go into the store and I just look for the stuff I wanted as a kid. Gosh yours Jolly Ranchers were like Oh yeah.

[00:49:05] Tyler: Eating peanut butter and gummy worms on tortillas. That

[00:49:13] Tayson: together? Yeah, that's pretty good. But then you're like, wait, the gummy worms. Did you find anyone? Who did the white? When I told you. What I,

[00:49:28] Tyler: what I've heard of the jar of peanut butter and they take a stick of butter, in the jar of peanut butter, and they mix it up. We didn't see that

[00:49:35] Tayson: a lot of meals with people like Him. But he didn't ask almost everyone what they're eating because we're curious. And we learned that a lot of people are probably, they're asking their body is to be athletic and they're feeding themselves. Like they're a 13 year old kid,

[00:49:54] Tyler: eating junk food, and it wasn't fair. For us to judge too hard or for us to tell them what we were packing because like we were looking at this like we're doing 100 Mile Sprint. So we're gonna like we both wear the Garmin watches that. Tell us how many calories we burn when we run and hike and so we're like, okay, we're gonna be burning 8,000 Cal this day. We're gonna pack 4500 and we're gonna get like all the best things. And so like we were going out and access

[00:50:26] Tayson: to a lot of really good food here that we retail. Like so

[00:50:30] Tyler: like we get down, we sat down with turtle at dinner time because he wanted to just hike with us as long as, as we could, we enjoyed his company and he was enjoying talking to us. And so, he was like, okay, with you guys tonight. So we sit down for dinner, which we, we do this almost every time we have dinner around 5 or 6:00 in the evening with Three to five miles left in the in the evening because there's a few reasons for that. Like, performance-wise, it makes way more sense to get those calories in earlier and finish the miles without as much of a deficit. Like, if you starve yourself from three in the afternoon till eight or nine when you finish the your hike, you're just not gonna feel good that night or the next day, so we do that. But also we like to have dinner out on trail at Golden hour. When you can see wildlife you see the prettiest, you know, time of the day. And so Turtle wasn't really used to that. He was used to eating dinner like at Camp, wait or whenever he gets the camp. So we're like sitting there fixing up our Peak meals. No tasting. Had his homemade one, his homemade, super good. What is it?

[00:51:40] Tayson: Zuppa Toscana? Yeah, so he

[00:51:45] Tyler: was chasing, was like filming a video about that and I'm like, chowing down on this big peak meal and and I look over at turtle Turtles. Like, are you gonna eat dinner? And he's like, I had a Jolly Rancher.

[00:51:56] Tayson: Like he's literally sitting there like talking to us. And the only thing he had was a single Jolly Rancher. Wow, I was trying to give him food. He was like rail.

[00:52:06] Tyler: Food. He said he had lost about 15 pounds in those first 500 Miles. He wasn't crazy thin and he did say he was gonna have Pop-Tarts when he got to camp.

[00:52:18] Tayson: We gave him I try to. Yeah, I can't be. Finally started taking some food from me. Yeah, we adopted him. Yeah, that

[00:52:28] Tyler: was one of the things that we came away from the trail like learning the most about and still talking the most about like situation on the at is hard, because You're trying to budget a little finite amount of money for a really, really long 2200 miles, right? Yeah. So you're trying to make your money stretch, but you're also trying to act like an athlete and you're feeling it with junk. And so we were, we were really curious to talk to like everyone. We talked to. We asked what they were eating and turtle was on the extreme of the one side we were on the opposite extreme. A lot of the people we talked to were kind of in the middle like they were, they were paying attention to, you know, getting a balance of fats and carbs and proteins and they were trying. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the biggest thing Turtle ate was

[00:53:24] Tayson: And him protein bars. And so he like one or two of those a day, but I can't imagine.

[00:53:30] Tyler: He said he was packing salami too. Oh yeah, just Joe's.

[00:53:33] Tayson: Yeah, that was good because he needed it too like he needed some protein and fats and that's a good source of that for him. But yeah, so yeah, I think there's some lessons here that will get into the next day, too, about like hiking some of these longer days as well. But so I ended up packing up finishing that hike it was really pretty found a good camp spot best Camp spot, it was yeah, probably was, It was kind of by dirt road and so we had some solar lights in our Camp Tiki. Torch didn't feel like we were like, out in the mountains so much, but it was

[00:54:07] Tyler: the best to me, because we're up on a High Ridge. We had a good little breeze here. There was Zero condensation when we woke up, like just because we were usually when was drying out, people don't realize the majority of their condensation comes from being in low way campsites. So like, If they're camped next to a water source, they're gonna have a lot of khand. Area with very low Breeze or something like that, they're going to have more. So we really enjoyed that camp spot because of that

[00:54:40] Tayson: we even got into camp at a pretty decent time of sat there for a little bit eaten snacking a little bit. One of the easier bearings. Probably that was a good, a good evening, internal total pitched, he had a hammock and So he slept there with us and then the next morning we hey, he wasn't about getting up at the

[00:55:00] Tyler: hours. We told him like, okay, what time are you getting up? Because we're gonna get up early and and we were another 27 miles and he was like, how are we? And we're like, we're like we'll probably wake up at like 5:45 you know, right as it's getting light and he's like, nope. And so we're like, don't be offended. That, when you wake up, we're just gonna be gone. Like, it was fun hanging out, but we're out of here. And so, So yeah, that's fine with that. Yeah. Do you sleep in? And it's not like he woke up usually between about 8 and 10.

[00:55:34] Tayson: Binance goes quite interesting because there was a group, definitely, the younger group on trail was waking up. It seemed like it those hours. But then there were times when we were like, just waking up in our tents and there were guys, passing us on trail. These like, usually it was like, the guys that were, you know, hiring their jobs and they're doing the shelter races. But, you know, the guys that are like in their 50s 60s, early risers, they get up, they get those miles out early. And, you know, I've always been more of that crowd too. But obviously, when you're a big miles, you kind of have to burn both ends of the day.

[00:56:05] Joe: I think. If I were on there, I would just whenever my body decided to wake up. Well, we go,

[00:56:11] Tyler: we didn't even say this, but on day

[00:56:13] Tayson: startup day, three day, three day two. Yeah. Remember waking up, we have white, the alarm clock. We had Birds just ripping our tents apart with noise. It felt like and then we had

[00:56:27] Tyler: turkeys gobbling next. It

[00:56:30] Tayson: like 5:30 a.m. and it's like well we're up that was the morning of day three. Yeah yeah. So that was first burning counter just super loud. But anyways so we get up Leaf turtle and keep going. So we finished that day with 27.3 Miles and 4600 feet of climbing and started this next day which was gonna be our last full day on trail. We hacked with

[00:57:01] Tyler: a couple of older guys one was there so there's the trail family thing where people kind of like link up and Hike together and do things together and share resources and The I really wish I could remember the German guy's name.

[00:57:17] Tayson: Oh yeah, or mentioned later. But

[00:57:20] Tyler: yeah, so the the German guy was one of the few people who had a hard deadline for his at hike because he had a visa to be in the US. So he had to be done with the through hike, by September 1st so that he had two days to get on plane and get home. And so this other guy was trying to catch up to him because he had just decided. Okay, I'm gonna hike with the German guy and I'm gonna finish at the same time as him. So they're forming a new Trail family essentially and they were getting after it. Like they knew that they had to average 16.7 miles per day for the rest of the time in order to make it by that date. And so we caught up with him and hiked with him for a couple of hours talking about just their goals and stuff. And it was interesting because 20 miles is like kind of the biggest threshold. The most people do on trail per day out there and he had just done his first one the previous day. So he was kind of like, wondering how he'd be feeling and all that. And we're like, dude, you're hiking fast.

[00:58:29] Tayson: Like he was. He was really moving because he was trying to catch

[00:58:32] Tyler: a shuttle at a Visitors Center that we're gonna pass. And so that was actually where we saw the crazy. Crazy ass shelter on the whole Trails like a mansion. But it was the shelter was like kind of part of the visitor center thing, but it had like a shower and super fancy. Log Cabin, shelter thing. But that was just an interesting morning, guys, hiking a lot faster than we would have liked.

[00:58:58] Tayson: But we talked a lot to him about backpacks is really interested in the backpacks were using and it's probably a good time to just interject something that we saw on trail a ton, it was a big takeaway and that was that. That People really don't know how to use frames of backpacks. And a lot of them like their frames are just null and void by the size of the frame. So, We're seeing a lot of packs out there. You can tell a lot of them are probably like They're not waiting them, right? They're putting heavy things on the outside, that probably should be closer to their back. But the biggest thing was like, were big fan of having a frame and using your load lifters because after even just a couple days that that back really, really start to feel heavy even if even on day one, but that was just a big thing. So we were kind of talking to him about it because he had packed from one of the biggest Pac manufacturers out there. One of the most common ones, and we're ultralight packs. Yeah, and the frame the frames on are so short that you can't even get him above your shoulders, and they don't even put load lifters on the backpack. Because what's the point, if the frame is on above your shoulders, you can't get a load lift but Seen our video about how to wear a backpack correctly and fit it and things. Definitely go check that out. If you know the name of that Joe,

[01:00:17] Joe: you're wearing your backpack wrong. You're wearing your backpack wrong. You guys. Maybe the dummy.

[01:00:22] Tayson: Yeah, there was the was The Mannequin in that one. But yeah, fit your backpacks, right? Get backpacks with load lifters with frames that are 22 inches or bigger. It really makes a massive difference. Otherwise you, there's not a whole lot different between a frameless and a framed backpack. If you got a frame, that's 18 inches. Or or your backpack doesn't have load lifters, you know, those types of things, it was just it was nonsensical, the amount of people that we saw like that and honestly the ones that about the only ones that even did have like any load lift going on. Where the people with like Osprey backpacks because they're they're just really a lot bigger. Usually those were like 678 liter packs and so you could tell they were Ultra Lite guys but at the same time at least their frames were being enough that they could get a load lift. So and those were the minority.

[01:01:15] Tyler: As far as packs being used on the trail. A lot of the Ultra Lite Brands were way more popular than osprey. there, which is, it makes sense, but at the same time, if you're not using your ultra light pack, The best or if you choose one that doesn't have a tall enough frame or any load lifters. Then you're not

[01:01:35] Tayson: doing yourself any favors or you buy an ultra light pack that doesn't have the support of a bigger pack. And then you cram it full. Like it's a big pack that has a full frame system in it. Like that's something you a lot of these guys have these ultralight backpacks look like beach balls on their back, like they're just big rounds of things like clear down their back and looked incredibly uncomfortable. So it was actually interesting because we talked to that guy about it a lot. Tyler up the trail. We meet a guy named chip that was his Trail name and and Chip kind of latched onto Us. In fact, we crossed we passed. We crossed paths with him, right? As we were crossing paths. With this, this lady who stopped us and said, hey, I know who you guys are. Can I take a picture with you? And and she's like, yeah, hiked it, you know, Northbound last year. I can a southbound this year and yeah, she was she was getting after it for sure. And so then she was like, Oh I thought I need you guys and then he wanted, he started to kind of latched on a start with us that day. I'm interesting thing was, is when we passed them, he was going super slow, like, not super slow. He was quite slow but then he latches on with us and he's just keeping Pace at this the whole time and talking with this whole time and that was very common actually, which is kind of but one of the questions, He brought up to us. Was, how do you guys hike, 20 mile days? You know, we're doing 25 miles a day, but, you know, to them, like I said, all of those guys' goals was to get to 20 miles a day. They wanted to get to the point where they could hike consecutive 20-mile days. And, and that was a really interesting thought exercise to kind of talk through with him, one of them. I mean, and I'll give a few of them and Tyler, you can get a few of these. But one of the ones we already talked about a little bit to hike at 20 miles a day or more, to me really means you plan your day accordingly which typically and Tyler's not quite a big as big of a fan with this just for his gut doesn't like as much but well is all wake up. Let's say, let's say we hit the trellis 7. Wake up at 6. Sorry 6:30. And then we just pack up camp, super quick. We get on the trail by 7. We hiked about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, so you log, you know, between two and five miles, and then you stop for breakfast it. Like, 8:30, let's say, or 8, Breakfast, you hike, another couple hours. You may be taking other little break hiking. Other two hours, then you stop for lunch hiking, other two hours, then you stop for an afternoon break for another two hours. Just stop and have dinner for another two hours, the days done. And you've done 25 to 27 miles? Yeah. And if you break it up like that, it's it's it's Way. Less than hiking six straight hours. Have a lunch break six straight hours or something like that. It makes it feel a lot less getting your feet up in the air for even five minutes can really make a difference. And

[01:04:15] Tyler: that's the thing is like for the breakfast lunch and dinner. We're taking 40 minute, 45 minute breaks, you know. So we have time to take our shoes off. Air out any gear that got wet just like have a real good rejuvenating

[01:04:29] Tayson: break. I would say it feels like 45 minutes but I bet if we clocked it a lot of those were 30 minutes even and that's Still pretty rejuvenating. One of the first things to do is sit down, take our shoes off, get comfortable, and then start making the food that we're gonna eat, but also doing it this way. Can help you eat properly in trouble, which is kind of the one of the next tips that we have for him. Was, you know, we talked all these people and no one's really stealing their body, right? And feeling your body, right? Goes into a lot of things. If you want your body, right? Means less risk of injuries. You know, maybe helps you deal with an inflammation or maybe you know, maybe your body can actually recover correctly so that you're not just Being it down day after day after day but you're giving it the building blocks that it needs and in the structure that's needed, which is me. Tyler eat a lot of snacks on trail. You gotta keep those those calories coming in consistently because you're burning, you know? 400 calories an hour or more you know excuse me 800 calories or more an hour sometimes out there and you're trying to replenish at least half of those as you'd go. So that consistent drip of calories is very helpful. So if you kind of structure your day like that that's helpful or you know, packing your little snack bag and having that accessible like basically, every time we stop for a meal we're repacking the snacks and the things we want accessible so that we can eat as we go

[01:05:51] Tyler: the only reason I'm not a fan of the The schedule that takes in. Put out was because I feel like if you and this comes from my mountain biking racing kind of experience. If you start the day with the calorie deficit, you have a hard time catching up energy wise throughout the day and Performing your best. So usually what I will do because I do like the routine that we described this, I'll just try to eat something while we're packing up camp, and then I'll have second breakfast when we stop. And and so like doing that allows you to stay ahead on Cal get those complex carbs that you need in that will start helping you to have the energy longer. But I really like that routine and and that's why the dinner really works. Well is because you are getting calories when you need it and then you're finishing your last five miles. Mean to wait for dinner. And so, So that's that's part of it. It's a little to like as far as 25 miles goes, that may just be too many miles for a through hiker because they're just not gonna be willing to spend as much money on food as we did or pack as much food as we did, you know, but 20 miles I think is really doable

[01:07:11] Tayson: things, if they're planning and and working on it. The other thing is I feel like we spend a good amount more time on on recovery and stretching, then most people do. So, when we get to Camp, we'll sit there and roll out knots in the muscles with our trekking poles or will. Like, sometimes, I'll just sit down and roll a rock under my foot, like, find a nice round, golf ball sized Rock and just work out little Crunchies and in the feet. And then

[01:07:45] Tyler: We just make sure that we're stretched. And And doing that Muscle Recovery. So that when you're stacking big days, it's not an issue.

[01:07:55] Tayson: Yeah, I think, I think, you know, day after day after day things just start to get Amplified so if you don't hit them early with recovery, they're just gonna get worse and so we're pretty conscious. I feel like I try to be very conscious of my body, anything? I'm feeling and try to react to it. If I feel like it's, it's something that could build one of the other things that I would say that makes a big difference, is hydration, we're going to be putting out a video about a sweat test here soon. But people really don't understand how much hydration matters to the body. You can always go and like eat more food and have that get into your system pretty quick. But if you get at a hydration deficit, you can get in a really bad position really quickly and along with hydration comes salts and electrolytes, right? And and so If you are under hydrated, your body is basically running at a deficit all the time to repair itself to flush things out of its system, you know? And like You know, blood it is like your blood is like the lifeblood of your body and stuff. But water is, I don't remember what percentage of the body, but it's like 90 90% of the body is just water, right? So it's like, I think people really that's one thing that will help them day after day after day. Because if you get dehydrated, let's say in a day, you're gonna feel like crap. You're gonna feel like stopping and most people catch up on hydration sitting around Camp doing nothing, but if you don't ever get to a hydration deficit, your body can continue to work and function and then when you get to Camp it can repair itself better through the night flush, things out that it needs to and just like keeping good oil in your car at all times, you know, and set of letting it get down and start to create engine damage or something. So

[01:09:42] Tyler: and the salt is it a lot bigger deal than people give it credit for. I think salt helps regulate bodily fluids it helps regulate nerve function. So people who are getting headaches on trail or they're getting cramps, like that's from the lack of salt, not necessarily always just the lack of water because people may be getting enough water, but if they're not replenishing that sodium, they're going to have nerve issues, muscle issues, cramping issues, blood flow issues, which will then lead into extra or extreme Or, you know, they're not going to flush lactic acid and so that's like all hinges on getting enough. Sodium back into your system as you're sweating it out.

[01:10:35] Tayson: yeah, in the in the UL member 100 challenge, we've got some Guiding principles in the framework that those that are part of that will be able to see. But just a kind of a high level example. I don't know, like how much salt and stuff like that right now, but in the Grand Canyon, I'm an incredibly salty. Sweater me and Brigham are very salty sweaters. I'm sure. I think there's some good footage of Brigham. Yeah,

[01:10:57] Tyler: they have like eight inch thick salt lines on there. Clothing nuts.

[01:11:04] Tayson: Yeah. But in the Grand Canyon I was trying to drink as much as I could injury as much as they could. I was very conscious about it. But at one point that I just realized, like I'm going to the bathroom way too frequently and it's way too clear per se. And so I kind of realized like, It's like, I need to be drinking this much water, but it's not sticking. And so I significantly, I took basically some big hits of salt really quickly. Suddenly, my body was able to retain the water that I was giving it and I felt way better the last like two three hours the day after I took that big hit assault. So it's already taking a salt, the whole day. But I mean, on that day, I drink 12 liters of water in the Grand Canyon. That's quite a bit about average, but still on trail people. Definitely under hydrate but that's Stuff that day after day, after day hiking, we'll start to compound and I'll knock you right off of a, 20 mile a day schedule. So,

[01:11:53] Tyler: yeah. And and not all electrolyte packs or mixes are created equal, you know, you have to really look at the sodium content and and you know, there's a lot of people who only drink when they're thirsty and I think that that's kind of wrong, you need to drink based on effort not on First or desire. And and you know by the time we get done with these long, big mild days, I'm pretty dang sick of drink mixes and all the snacks that we carry, but it's a necessary part of doing that much mileage, you know. So there's there's a lot to that, there's a lot to experimenting with it and Yeah, if anyone's really interested in the science of it, we can point you in the right direction. You just send us an email. We can help with that.

[01:12:47] Tayson: Yeah, so taking us through the end of this day. We hiked with chip for quite a while. He got to his mileage for the day. So he stopped and we kept going

[01:13:00] Tyler: Forever. Yeah, he stopped at a great campsite and we and that was like, at Mile 23 for us in the day, right? Yeah. So we went another couple miles and we were thinking like, okay, We were kind of planning backwards for the the last day. We're like, okay, we need to be completely off Trail by 11. We've got to find the place to shower, then we've got to be at the airport in Charlotte by, you know, whatever time. So we're like, okay we have to be done by 11 so it's like the more miles we can get in tonight. The better that will allow us to like, maybe have to hunt kind of hard for a shower. We would be real embarrassed if we had to get on the plane and that signal. Yeah, and so. So we get to like mile 26, we're having a good. We're having a great philosophical religious discussion, and then we're like, we get to this beautiful spot it's golden hour but the campsite is Tiny. It's like the size of this table so it only

[01:14:01] Tayson: fit one of our tents, you know? And we were hoping to go farther than 26 miles. We were thinking hey we could do 28 today or something.

[01:14:09] Tyler: Oh yeah. So we get, we passed this last little campsite and start to descend a lot. And we get down off of this big mountain and cross the road. And then we hit the sign that says, A private property. Next ten miles. No camping allowed without written permission from landowners. Do not stray from the trail like all this stuff and we're in, we're like, well, we're at Mile 28. Right now and we've got 10 miles to where we can camp. We were we're kind of stressing it so and we were also at Mile 28 and it was like just about Dusk and then at that same point, we had some weird stuff happen on our Maps, like like, where we came out and cross the road was a little different than what our map was saying, we where we would cross the road. So then we're like, walking up this hill. Not knowing if we're 100% on the trail then it gets dark.

[01:15:09] Tayson: Wait wait right. Know what did him it gets dark

[01:15:13] Tyler: only taste and pulled out his headlamp and I was like oh just On this day, run off of his borrowed light, so I can conserve battery, and then taste and see these eyes in the bush realizes. It's a skunk and he just takes off running down the trail. And as I

[01:15:32] Tayson: turn and see the skunk, all

[01:15:33] Tyler: I see, is it. But then I really run and luckily we didn't get sprayed, but then we were just like, where the heck are we gonna camp? Like we were,

[01:15:43] Tayson: we were looking for campsites, for a lot of miles.

[01:15:45] Tyler: So, yeah, we went probably another like three or four miles and we get into this River Crossing area and we had a really beautiful moment even though we were frustrated because we didn't plan our our camping very well, which is awesome. Plug for the far out. Yeah,

[01:16:03] Tayson: well, I think we get through this week, we've got to talk about the far out.

[01:16:07] Tyler: Yeah. So but as we come through this little opening in the trees, which was rare, it's really dark probably like 9:30 or 10. Pm and we just see like a million lightning bugs just like coming up off the grass and they're just like, you know, lighting up and then turning off and just sparkling like all around us. So that was cool. Even though our feet hurt and we didn't know where we were gonna camp. That was a nice little moment.

[01:16:36] Tayson: Yeah, at that point. We're like well, we crossed this road up ahead. We automatically Camp there so

[01:16:41] Tyler: camp on the yellow. Blaze,

[01:16:42] Tayson: Ya Ya. Yellow Blaze is a road. For those of you that don't know that the

[01:16:47] Tyler: white Blazers in the trail we

[01:16:48] Tayson: found out. So we get out there and we're like oh sweet, there's big like parking lot. We can camp right here, Tyler's ready to just sleep and I'm like wait that sign says no camping.

[01:16:59] Tyler: It's like why did you look around? Yeah,

[01:17:01] Tayson: like well, how did you look around sleep? And then there was a sign that there's a hostile like right up the road. So then we walk, you know,

[01:17:09] Tyler: ice cream what else? Say said, ice cream, candy bars, shower showers something like that. This would be fantastic.

[01:17:19] Tayson: So we walk up there and the business hours were over. It was, you know, because again, where it after It's like

[01:17:25] Tyler: there's a million hiking shoes all around on the deck. So we needed it was probably

[01:17:30] Tayson: heard that you people that you camp on the grass for a couple bucks. But we weren't sure there was no signs. So we decided to Not Camp there and trespass.

[01:17:41] Tyler: So then we walked another quarter mile back down to the trail. Put us right around 29

[01:17:47] Tayson: Mi and we were at 31 miles straight.

[01:17:50] Tyler: Oh yeah yeah. So then we get back to that like area the parking lot area and when I go okay so then we walk a little further into trees and we realize oh there's camping allowed right here. And then we realize oh there's tents everywhere right here and everyone's asleep. And we're like we kind of tried to like set up camp.

[01:18:13] Tayson: Tyler was gonna set up camp. I was ready. He was done. I was like this is I didn't feel like it was like I was just gonna be too noisy, like it's so noisy setting up. Your Camp hammer and stakes in the ground

[01:18:25] Joe: as a person who was asleep when you guys came in on the Grand Canyon and you guys are way too loud. When you go to sleep at 7 p.m.,

[01:18:33] Tyler: yeah, we didn't feel bad for you. Yeah. But

[01:18:38] Tayson: for the group next to us, it was the midnight group. No. Oh,

[01:18:43] Tyler: so in case me like, I'm not camping here.

[01:18:51] Tayson: Because we knew from that point on that,

[01:18:57] Tyler: it really steep climb. And we're like at Miles, 31 and a half. And so, we're like, all right, I guess we're doing this. I got so dumb, so we like we're like looking at the topo maps on our phones and we're like, okay, there's a knob right here. Maybe we can camp on that, where it looks a little flatter. So we get to the knob. No. Clear ground just straight trees everywhere. So then we go to the next little saddle. No, clear ground. We get on to the next Peak and there's a shelter full of people and we're like, holy crap, we're gonna just hiked.

[01:19:30] Tayson: Know, you got about the time that we set our tents up. No, I'm the show that shelter before it. No. No.

[01:19:37] Tyler: Okay. So so we found, we found a spot. That we're like, okay, this will do its on this weird. Little Ridge. There was like one. Spot where people kind of camped often, where it wasn't in the leaves. Then we found this little, like, group of trees where people do stay on this. And

[01:19:54] Tayson: there's like this circle of perfectly Circle tree. I don't it was Eerie

[01:20:03] Tyler: so he's been set up in the spider on Leaf area. I set up in the good spot and then pay some goes to like hang a bareback. And he's like, Tyler. See eyes. And I was like oh my goodness so like we go over there and there's like probably 50 or 60 yards down the Steep Hill. There's these eyes looking at us from behind the log and They were like pretty good sized eyes, super bright. And we're like We've been here and stuff about the Bears constantly, like all everywhere. You went, there are signs about bears, there's bear boxes of the shelters. They're really adamant that you use bearings if you're not at a shelter. So so we're like looking at it and we're like is that bear like we couldn't really tell, it looked like a big animal, they got, we've got our

[01:20:59] Tayson: headlines on full blast our phones out, you know, trying to look at we're moving all around and we're like, just down, I'm like yelling out a bear. Hey, you know, just staring at the face,

[01:21:11] Tyler: it won't move. So we sit there and do

[01:21:14] Tayson: that for like probably four minutes, it felt like and you can look because I filmed a lot of it on my phone, free, Joe. Tyler takes a big old logs that cleared on the hill, right out, the thing probably gets within 10 yards of it doesn't blink, doesn't move nothing, just ice in the veins. And we're like,

[01:21:32] Tyler: alright, that was nothing like the

[01:21:35] Tayson: deer in Utah. If that's a white tail deer, right?

[01:21:37] Tyler: And we've been scaring up white There a decent amount while we're a couple of days, you know. So we were like that does not seem like a deer, that seems like a raccoon or a bear waiting for us to hang our food up so it can come steal our food like

[01:21:52] Tayson: that. It turns its head. We're like that's not a raccoon it's a lot bigger than a raccoon.

[01:21:56] Tyler: Yeah. Yeah the distance on the eyes and stuff made it look like a big animal and so we're like Well, this is stupid. We've been hiking

[01:22:05] Tayson: for like 50 times. This is the stupidest thing, right now, just stare off with some animals in the woods. It midnight at this point. It's midnight.

[01:22:14] Tyler: Yeah. And and so then the question became like well, Can you sleep with something lurking, 80 yards away from the tent? Do you know? Is there? And we kind of like look at each other. Like, we're really tired. We're like well, just think if this is a bear, do we have enough energy to do anything about it? If it does come up the hill. So then so then we're both kind of like well, Really. Don't feel like we'll be very comfortable sleeping here with this animal. Just working totally unafraid of us. so, Like I already had my top quilt in his hand like all my clothes out of the dry bag. The tents are set up is like like my pitch on the tent was perfect. That is gonna be a great spot. I just picked up the whole entire tent with all the stuff in it and just jammed it in my pack and then we just like kept walking we're so pissed off.

[01:23:10] Tayson: We were very pissed off. I mean because in retrospecs like and we talked about this quite a bit after but like you know we were like All things considered, it should have been a deer. You know what I mean? Like, the where it was bedded location on the ridge? Like we, we hunt, right? So that It just tripped us out. I think one it's midnight. We're not thinking that clearly too. We cannot see it with our lights, which means we got to go closer to the animal before. We can see it, three in Utah, you throw a rock at a deer or a log. At a deer. They wouldn't even stand there. And look at you, let alone, like, you throw something out of him. So it's just different behavior of the deer there. But like all things considered just probably a freaking white tail deer and we just Just decided to move

[01:24:01] Tyler: my dad. Actually had a bear tag here in Utah, and shot a bear last weekend and I went and helped him recover it. And I measured the eyes and I like looked at the eyes from the distance that we were looking down at the hill. I'm embarrassed to say, I don't think it was a bear. Yeah,

[01:24:20] Tayson: I don't think it was either. It just was one of those things where it's like, do you think you can sleep? Do you want to walk any closer to it? And do you think you can sleep? And the answer was like, no, and no. So it was like, I guess we'll just finish the hundred miles

[01:24:32] Tyler: the night. Well, that we, we really considered just finishing 100 miles. And then we're like, we'll be at the hostel by seven and then we could like maybe sleep there or something in the morning,

[01:24:42] Tayson: you know. And because to get our 100 miles, we're gonna have to backtrack this lip

[01:24:47] Tyler: last little section that we're hiking up and so

[01:24:50] Tayson: we couldn't get picked up on our original plan, to hike, like, Retrace our steps for like four miles? Yeah,

[01:24:57] Tyler: didn't want to drive our rental car up, dirty, dirt road.

[01:25:02] Tayson: So we hiked off of that Hill looking for schools. Looking for Animals. We get to a shelter. People everywhere no room in no room in the end. So we now getting knocked on the door. 1:00 in the morning, we go another half mile and we find an excellent terrible.

[01:25:21] Tyler: Like like, literally all it was, was like a little seven or eight foot like Space where there was no trees growing right next to the trail like like literally

[01:25:35] Tayson: almost trip on my tent stake in the trail

[01:25:37] Tyler: and we're like this will do and there's like a fallen log in between. And so like both of our tents are butted up to the log. We're like tying our guy outlines to the log. This guy outlines are like going into my vestibule, like, our tensors, so jammed close. And then there's this huge hole under my tent. So I like, put all my gear under the hole and then put my pad on top of it and then fell asleep. Yeah, it was not swept in a little bit.

[01:26:04] Tayson: Let ourselves sleep in till like 8, but of course, at about 6 a.m. we had the birds just going haywire and we had this stupid bird that went right above our tents. Would make this super loud squeaking noise. I think it was against the tree super loud. I don't know what that thing was, but it was like the laziest loudest woodpecker

[01:26:26] Tyler: ever met because it only do like one loud pack on the log, but I thought it was on the log in between our tents. The thing

[01:26:34] Tayson: that sounded about loud.

[01:26:35] Tyler: I don't know. It was Some extra sleep.

[01:26:40] Joe: How many miles total now?

[01:26:41] Tayson: So that day finished at 33 and a quarter and 68, almost 6900 feet of climbing So

[01:26:51] Tyler: getting close to 7,000 feet of climbing that day. The good news was we only had like three and a half miles left left in our trip. So we slept in a little bit, we basically went down got water turned around and like back. And actually felt pretty good. Like we were we were pretty surprised that we probably doesn't really like, well, we just did 33 of the same nothing. Well, yeah. Really like I didn't have any muscle soreness my feet were Tender by then but no muscle soreness, not really aches or pains like So like it could have probably kept going if I could give my feet. So a little bit of a break, you know? So for me

[01:27:33] Tayson: yeah so he kind of quit talking about my knee but essentially my knee did really good on uphills on flat. On light descents, it was okay but anything that was like a steeper descent. My knee would just flattered up and really hurt. And so I had to really, I never actually sometimes I had to slow us down. Going down the hills. So it was it was a blessing for sure that we were able to log the 100 miles with my knee, the way that it was acting. You know thankfully thankfully for a lot of the twists and turns and stuff like that I'm a trail. There wasn't a whole lot of like times when I Have to slow us down for my knee, and the pain was pretty manageable. So that part of it was good. I just remember that, like the last mile of that was really steep, big step downs, and Rocky. And I had to just,

[01:28:26] Tyler: which is what we went up at midnight. Remember,

[01:28:28] Tayson: yeah. But yeah. So, I just had to crawl that last little bit and man, I was, I was glad to be to be done with that, by the end of it. So we found Brigham. Yeah.

[01:28:40] Tyler: We walked up to that hostile and they let us shower. Five bucks a shower, which was fantastic.

[01:28:48] Tayson: Yeah, that's and slippers for our feet. Great. And

[01:28:54] Tyler: we met a cool guy from the Air Force. Who was part of a church group who was organizing organizing a pancake cook, Trail magic event for the hikers. The trail magic was a cool thing that I wasn't two. Like I didn't realize how much of it there was on the ATV, but a lot of people just really like the hikers and want to support them in some ways. So they just do things. Forum. Like, you'll come up on a random shelter and there'll be a bunch of supplies for people to just take as needed.

[01:29:24] Tayson: Most, of the hostels or things like that. There was like, bins of stuff that we're getting donated or or like kind of like, you know, leave what you want, take what you want, scenarios, the

[01:29:36] Tyler: coolest one which you'll see in our video is we came up on this Schoolhouse from the late 1800s and it, there was a sign that will come hikers into the old school house and you get in there and there's Just Bins of supplies for people and and then you got to see the cool historical schoolhouse. Also. There's a lot of

[01:29:59] Tayson: you were able to talk about guy that morning though and it seems like a lot of it at least where we were at this point in time was like church sponsored you know which was kind of cool. They said there's a lot of people that go out there on trail to kind of find themselves and learn more about themselves and seems like inherently when they're spending time in nature. They're you know they're asking the big life questions like their purpose and and you know, questions about God and stuff like that. And so they seem to go kind of hand in hand. I think a lot of the donation specific money type stuff like where there's donations bins, they seem to be kind of sponsored by these little local churches and that hostel we actually went to. He had his own little Little Chapel like built onto there and

[01:30:46] Tyler: I didn't see that.

[01:30:47] Tayson: Yeah, he told those guys that they could go check it out when we were, when I was waiting for you to in the shower and

[01:30:53] Tyler: that's why people believe this. When we said we were Trail missionaries,

[01:31:00] Tayson: Flat it either like, oh, yeah. Oh,

[01:31:02] Tyler: we looked funny. We're in the same shirt and the same pack and the same

[01:31:07] Tayson: was better when I had a different color shirt on, but the next day, I switched and then we wore the same color shirt.

[01:31:15] Tyler: Yeah. Yeah, we're just spreading the good word about her vitals

[01:31:18] Tayson: of what stats do you have here for us? So, to finish off the trail, we did 101.1 miles. And we did 20,000,841 feet of elevation climbing. so, yeah, elevation out. There is no joke. It's for real. There's a lot of climbing but I think sum it up. Oh man, we missed two things here. That's still talk about. the far out which will kind of what kind of, but Sum it up. The climbing is a lot but it felt manageable because it's you know, climb 700 feet, descend 700 feet. Climb 700 feet since 700 feet so you wouldn't burn your legs out lower elevation. So you could have oxygen was kind of our take on it. But but yeah, I mean at the end of the day, it's still 25 miles and we felt it. We felt every step of those 25 miles. So there's really interesting, but I know that in the beginning when I first planting this. Yeah, I was, I did not expect us to be doing those kind of elevation climbs thankfully, you know. We're kind of looking it up and realized that we needed to plan like one extra day on truck because we were thinking like oh we could do 30 plus miles every day so we mapped it out and we're like oh all right yeah and I think at the end of it too were like we can do 25 Mi days. We can do 30 Mi days. I think the sweet spot for what I like on trail is the hike somewhere between 2025 so you can take a few more breaks during the day and just slow pace. Some of those Down. But I still hike the same schedule seemed method but you know if you're doing 22 miles a day or 224 miles a day like you could you could slow down a little bit more. Often take longer lunch breaks, take an afternoon break a little bit longer and I think those are those make for a little bit more of an enjoyable experience instead of being a little Mission driven About this is none of that would have happened that 33 mile day. Would have not happened. If we had the far out app which if you've heard of the gut hook app, it's they've rebranded it to the far out app that is like having a personal guide holding your hand. I swear every step

[01:33:34] Tyler: almost like a concierge because there's phone numbers in there for hostels and people who will take hikers in turtle with telling us he's like yeah there was something in far out that said there's this lady in action who takes people in for free like big,

[01:33:48] Tayson: we should check if you still alive

[01:33:49] Tyler: that sounded a little sketchy but he's like yeah we're gonna go have a, you know, free night at this lady's house and it was on that but it was interesting because on the app you could click on any landmark and it would tell you your miles to that Landmark from where you were at. So people with everywhere, we went people would be looking at the next water source and they'd be like, okay, next water's two miles. I'm only Carrying one leader and we're over there, carrying four leaders, and then and then for outside too, like they far out had Turtle said, it was about 90% of the campsites were on there and the shelter's were for sure on there and it just made planning your day. Way easier. So you didn't end up doing a 33 Miler like we did.

[01:34:40] Tayson: Yeah. They all know to not do the next mile that we It turned into. I don't know how many a lot. Yeah. So that was really interesting. The other thing that's kind of interesting like takeaways from the entire Trail as Really, you're gonna be able to get to a city like every couple of days so you can resupply really often and that seemed like a really nice aspect of say doing the at versus the PCT. Where you might have a section, that's like, seven or 10 days or something, I don't know. 10 might be excessive, but lots of days between stops. Whereas here, you're able to get in to cities quite frequently. There's shuttles, you got the far out that tells you You know, you shuttle services, you could just book through the far out essentially or get the numbers we did, learn that we could have got the section that we hiked in the far out for less money, which would have paid for itself time and time again. So we would recommend that. But, yeah. So that's kind of an interesting side of it. And then I think we definitely left the child just realizing that the at experience is an extremely social experience. It's it's just not like out in the west where you might, you might not see anyone all day long, you know what I mean? You're passing people all day long, you're communicating with people all along your latch on and talking to people all day long. You're camping with people you know what I mean and and so it becomes this very social Trail which was really cool really different. You know I think by the end I think at first it felt awkward to us and by the end it felt like we we could kind of embrace it and liked it and Cool Pros. I think to the central aspect if

[01:36:26] Tyler: they're really unique culture, that's kind of built around the trail and, and buy the people who do it. And I think that was the highlight for me was experiencing that culture and just seeing how people do things and why they do them. And, you know, seeing like just how certain through hikers were very picky about only following the white blazes and doing the AT&T and it's Parish form. There was a whole lot of others who are all about the slack packing and and you look at shuttles and, you know, doing whatever. And it was cool because people are just out there doing their own thing. You can be social when you want, but you don't have to be, you know. So like that was a really interesting

[01:37:10] Tayson: thing shift. Actually, I was just thinking about when we tee off with chip chip actually, at State, at a hostel, the night that night got shuttled up, the trail hikes, like a mile in the trail and we met him. And then City. He stated a different hostel so he was too hot, which was pretty rare but he stayed at Two Hosts Hospital in a row. Yeah, which is like man out.

[01:37:32] Tyler: He did a big day with us like he said, it was one of his only 20. miles, you know that he was Doing but he was staying at Alamo Farm. Yeah, that's right. But yeah, there's good to hear stories. Like

[01:37:46] Tayson: I'm just thinking back to like, what she did for a living and where he lived, you know, you just Swap and stories the whole time. It's fun because Tyler knows all my stories, right? Well

[01:37:55] Tyler: now we for sure know all of our stories but when chip comes along it's like, hey

[01:38:02] Tayson: I can tell some stories again that he hasn't heard, you know what I mean. It just just The day. So yeah. And he

[01:38:08] Tyler: gave us some good hikes that we needed to do up in that, Great Lakes area.

[01:38:12] Joe: How was the flight back?

[01:38:18] Tyler: You smell, okay. Sucked. The showers at the hostel made. Sure that we were normal. Yes. Good

[01:38:24] Tayson: good. Mexican food. And then we drove down to Charlotte. The man, I tell you what, the airports are busy as can be. Now that I think it's partially The Mask mandates and other things, but it's back. It's rolling at the airports, the flights aren't too bad, but the thing that like I said, the sucks about living here is Then you get to Vegas. Don't

[01:38:46] Tyler: want to get your car.

[01:38:47] Tayson: You've got a three miles away

[01:38:49] Tyler: or three hours away.

[01:38:50] Tayson: So, then you gotta drive. Yeah, so we, we got back. I think I went to bed that night or got to my house at 4 a.m. Yeah. So that's, that's the joys of living where we live, for sure.

[01:39:02] Joe: Well, guys, feel free to send us your comments. Questions about backpacking. Cool. After stories or ideas for future episode topics. If we think it'll bring value to our audience, we will read it out. I'll show you can send them by commenting on our live. Ultralight podcast YouTube channel, or you can send us an email at Live Ultralight podcast@gmail.com. Also, I haven't seen an iTunes review for a few weeks. If you could send us a positive, iTunes review, we will read that on the show on the show and just be sure to subscribe to this podcast wherever you get podcasts. ITunes Spotify YouTube. Subscribe to our little tiny podcast YouTube channel, I really appreciate that. And if you want links to any of Outdoor Vitals, cool gear. You can check it out down below, we will have a video on the Appalachian Trail experience on our regular YouTube channel Outdoor Vitals. So go check that out when that comes out and I think you guys for sending down with us and see you next time.