[at-l] pt 1: A question of money: estimation of throughhike costs

[sloetoe@yahoo.com (Sloetoe)]

        TOWNS = MONEY;    TOWNS = TIME;     TIME = MONEY
OK, a lot of people have posted wisdom on this subject;
hopefully I'll have left nothing out. Assuming a NOBO hike:

1) allow more time for recovery days down south.
2) allow less time but more food for increased mileage by
Damascus (for those starting conditioned) or Harpers Ferry (for
those starting UNconditioned).
3) allow less time needed for recovery from Connecticut north.
4) allow more money for off-trail spending in CT, MA, VT, and
NH.
5) minimize time in town and you minimize town expense.
6) minimize the number of visits to towns and you minimize town
expense.
6) arrive at edge of town and camp that night; rise early, hit
town and do chores (post
office/laundry/diner[breakfast]/shower/grocery/post
office/diner[lunch]), and you're back on the trail, bounce box
headed north, clothes and backside scrubbed, and belly filled,
before noon. Money went into clean clothes and filled belly, not
into a room that you were mostly unconscious while using.
7) Skip the second diner stop; instead hit a grocery and head
out of town with fresh food 'treats' that will be out of your
pack in less than a day, but provide a real morale boost, and
are 1/4 or 1/2 as much money as the diner.
8) If you want to have a good time in New England (and who
doesn't???), press yourself in the Mid-Atlantic states. You'll
hit New England stronger and more durable, and will reap a
marvelous reward all the way to Katahdin. You'll see this in
your cash, too: you'll need a lot less recovery in New England,
where the trail turns tough and the towns turn 'spensive at
exactly the same time.


MY STORY:
In general, I found that the better I ate on the trail, the less
I wanted or needed to spend in town -- spending money or time.

I started out with  the intention of buying all my food along
the way. (I mean, how's a  person supposed to know how to make
a food drop, anyway? How much food for X meals? How much time
to cover X miles?) When my parents started sending me Care
Packages, I raved and they sent more and more and  more. I
spent less time in town (and spent less money there and less on 
food) as I went north.
     
When I hit my old home state of Connecticut, I took five days
off and planned out the rest of my hike. I averaged my
hiking-day mileage, projected that to Mt. K, and bought and
packaged and mailed everything  off for $150 in 1979, (about 800
miles' worth?). From then on, I only stayed overnight in Gorham
(I was wiped! and three weeks without a  shower!!!), I ate
better than the whole of the previous trip, I was never hungry
and was always psyched. AND I was cheap, cheap, cheap. Got my
half-gallons on sale. Naragansett Beer at Abol Bridge. And timed
it  perfectly: ate emergency rice rations at Katahdin Stream.
(Boy, there's a memory.)

I think the key here is to buy in advance and to plan perfectly.
The planning part you can do in stages. Try to assemble enough
pre-knowledge to plan the food drops through perhaps Damascus,
450 miles and six+ weeks up. At that point, you can take some
time off and plan the next 1000 miles (with new menus, I'll
wager), and then do it again in New England. (BTW, your GORP
peanuts will get a bit, ah, chewy if you premix and mail 6
weeks' worth. But you won't care much, either.)
     
How do you acquire said pre-knowledge to allow for perfect
planning? Take every hike you can and inject an element of your
throughhike into it. A careful, careful mix of pain and
pleasure, trying to do the "do without" of a throughhiker
without burning out, allowing for (and making) mistakes as you
go. Continue to evolve methods and means towards what you
imagine you'll want for just the first 450 miles. The basic idea
is to finesse all the  experimentation and operational
expectations now, but into smaller bites that you can learn from
before you leave on the big one.

Lastly, AND MOST IMPORTANT, develop some sort of metric that you
can use against some "known" portion of the AT, and use that
metric as your key to estimate your performance on the rest of
your throughhike.

For example, Indiana's Knobstone Trail runs about 48 miles S-->N
in the southern third of the state. It has a deserved reputation
as a tough AT training ground, roughly comparable to the NC
Nantahalas. Now, if I know I average 1.5 mph/15mpd (which I do)
in fair weather on the Knobstone, and that the Knobstone is more
ruggedly routed than a goodly portion of the AT from roughly
Massachusetts south, then I can look at a given section of trail
(Fontana-->Hot Springs, 75+35=110 miles), reasonably estimate
1.6-2.0 mph/16-20mpd in fair weather (which I do), and come up
with an estimate of 5.5 days' food needed for that stretch.
Having developed such a metric, you can extrapolate that measure
(in a like manner) over the rest of the entire trail!
(.........with the ah, exception of the Mahoosucs, which seem to
reduce EVERYONE to 1mph, and durn grateful to be making that...)

There are some very important things that you'd want to consider
to adjust you mileage metric -- personal conditioning, extended
weather (rain, drought, sneaux, wind), and daylight come to
mind. In the case of the Knobstone vis Appalachian Trails metric
being used for costing a northbound throughhike, down South I
might summarize conditioning (-10%), rain/mud (-10%), and
daylight (-5%), and turn out a 0.75 versus the rate of passage I
might expect for a few days any ol' time on the KT. For the
summer months tooling through the MidAtlantic states, I might
look at the toughness of the trail (+10%), my own conditioning
(+10%) and extended daylight hours (+5%), and figure I'd be
doing 1.25 times the KT-expected rate.

=====
Spatior, Nitor, Nitor, In Nitor!

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