Are you hiking alone?

Yes.

What? your hiking alone!!!

Yes.

Well... kind of.

technically - yes, but actually - no.

let me explain....

Yes I am hiking by myself, and by that I mean that I have not made any plans with another hiker to start and finish with them. Will I be by myself on the trail, probably not. I'm not the only one going on this crazy adventure, there are others! Last year aprox 1300 people started at the Southern Terminus in Campo California.  Most of those people will start in April, with some in March and May, that is a lot of people starting every day! All these people will hike at different speeds, but after awhile you will fall into a group of people that hike similarly to you. Most people tend to camp at water sources, I may be by myself during parts of the day, but most likely will not be at night (which is ok with me). I'm kinda looking forward to meeting the total strangers that will become my family in 5 short months...

Speaking of 5 months... OMG I leave in 5 months! (4 1/2 months actually)

So what have I been up to since my last post, a month ago? A lot of researching gear... struggling with decisions... Buying stuff... working my butt off and sadly, very little hiking. Thankfully I am pretty much done with buying gear so I can move on to other things... like my food plan.

Oh! Remember the shirt that took me forever to decided on? yeah, I'm second guessing it again. haha.  After I bought the shirt and wrote the blog post I had to laugh at myself at the struggle I had with shorts!  I found some that I liked a lot, but they were way too expensive! But thanks to a 50% black friday weekend sale, I decided to splurge and I bought them!

  

I did manage to get a little hike in at the Grand Canyon on Thanksgiving day.  Life is good.