TrailWife

a journal of keeping the home fires burning while my spouse thru-hikes the Appalachian Trail

When it comes to being apart from your spouse for an extended period of time, the military is the first thing that comes to mind. In the military, there are support groups and workshops about how to handle your spouse’s deployment, but there’s nothing similar for the AT, even though there are countless amazing resources for the hikers themselves. I suppose there are other jobs like working on an oil rig or deep sea fishing vessel when you’d be gone for long stretches, too, and jobs like being a trucker or a first responder where you might be away for nights at a time, but regularly enough that you miss some of the normal rhythms of life at home. There are obviously many differences: military personnel and first responders put themselves in harm’s way during their work, and I’m not trying to compare hiking a scenic trail to that at all. It’s just the only frame of reference I could come up with to help me wrap my head around spending six months at home while Andy is gone.

There are any number of reasons partners might not want to or be able to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail together. Since I like to hike and have gone on numerous backpacking trips with Andy, some people have been surprised I wasn’t joining him. To be honest, I never had a single iota of desire to do so (not that I don’t love you, Andy!). After about three nights in the woods, I’m ready for a shower and a real bathroom! Not to mention, someone needs to provide the health insurance (thanks, America). So anyway, I’m the partner staying behind to keep the home fires burning.

I had a lot of anxiety thinking about what that might mean for our relationship. The only example I had heard of was a couple I was acquainted with where one spouse hiked the trail and decided he didn’t want to be married to her anymore. Undoubtedly they had many other factors that led to that decision (I didn’t know them well enough to ask), but that was the worst case scenario I kept bandying about.

Several nights of late-night Google searching turned up a few helpful articles, which I’ll link below, but also some Reddit threads about on-trail relationships that only exacerbated my worst fears. The most important thing I did throughout all of this was to TALK TO MY SPOUSE. He understands me better than anyone and can speak much more directly to my emotional state than some anonymous commenters on Reddit. We worked through both of our emotional concerns about the trip TOGETHER and laid a strong foundation on top of our already-strong marriage of thirteen years.

There were also plenty of logistical things we needed to iron out. In some ways, the prepping for the actual hike seemed the easiest, since Andy has spent years backpacking and already had a lot of favorite gear. He ordered some new things to optimize for weight and durability, and did a few practice hikes to try out some new foods, but you can’t really plan too much more specifically for a thru-hike than that, since it goes on for long. Every day will hold its own challenges, but ultimately he just needs to keep walking!

In the absence of a helpful guidebook for partners of AT thru-hikers, we’ve been figuring out as we went along. Here are some things we did that (so far) have seemed to set us up for success.

  1. Get your finances in order. Once Andy officially decided he was going to quit his job to hike the trail, we started putting money into a savings account to cover both his expenses on the trail and any of my expenses at home that aren’t covered by my income. Building this up while we were both still working helped us feel confident about what could have felt like a scary decision (giving up gainful employment).

    We also made sure that I was comfortable with handling all of our accounts and bills. We’ve been using YNAB to handle our finances for over a decade and have made our budget together every month for most of that time, but Andy has still always been the primary financial caretaker. So I took over a month before he left to get some practice while he was still around to answer questions.

    Between knowing I have the emergency fund buffer and getting hands-on experience before I was left to do it alone, I’ve been much more confident about money.

  2. Get your house in order. Similar to our finances, Andy has been the home maintenance guy (thank youuuu!). He’s gotten really handy and been able to do a lot of things himself. Before he left, he finished up some lingering tasks that had been on his list for awhile. We also literally walked around the house together, and he walked me through how to do various simple things that will need to be done while he’s gone, like changing the air filter for our HVAC system. He also compiled some lists of things he checks on regularly and people to call on in case something comes up that’s beyond my comfort level. I’ve actually never lived alone, and, if I did, it probably wouldn’t be in a house as large as ours is, so this again boosted my confidence that I can keep it standing without him for a portion of a year.

  3. Talk about your expectations for your time apart. Andy and I dated long-distance in college, so we have some experience communicating when we’re not together in person, but that was a long time ago, and the longest we’ve been apart since we’ve been married is right around two weeks. Six months is, uh, a lot longer than two weeks, so I knew I would want to have a loose plan for when we would see each other during that time. Thankfully, I have a flexible job, so I’m planning to meet up with him somewhere every four to six weeks along his hike. I picked a few spots that I would also like to see, so it will be fun in its own right, and I’ll be able to see Andy and help him with his resupplies at that point. We also discussed that we’d want to talk on the phone once a week or so. He has a Garmin InReach that can communicate via text when there’s no cell service, and much of the AT is actually near enough to civilization to have coverage, so we’re able to text quite frequently as we each go about our days.

  4. Spend plenty of time together. Andy actually quit his job several months before he planned to start the trail, and we were very intentional about spending time together during those months. When you’ve been with someone for a long time, it’s easy to fall into routines where you may be in the same place at the same time but not actually enjoying each other. We did things together that we maybe normally would have done alone, we went on a few nice dates, and we prioritized just talking to each other throughout the course of the day. The weekend before his hike, we rented an Airbnb near the starting point and had some really sweet time together eating charcuterie, drinking boxed wine, and watching Cocaine Bear (okay, maybe that part wasn’t so sweet). I was worried he might have just felt antsy to get started, but I think we both really enjoyed the interlude between our old normal and our new normal. I would highly recommend this to any other couples preparing for a long separation!

  1. Follow along! I affixed a map of the entire Appalachian Trail to a piece of form board and made a little marker out of a photo of Andy so that I can move him around as he hikes. Andy’s mom and grandmother also have a map, as do my parents, so it’s fun to swap photos of where Little Andy is and feel a little more connected to him.

I’ve said a lot, so I’ll leave you with some of the other articles I found that helped me start wrapping my head around what it would be like during Andy’s hike. Some of these are more for the thru-hiker than the at-home partner, but a lot of the advice still stands!

This has been all about supporting me at home. In a future post, I’ll talk more about how I’m supporting Andy on the trail!

Andy, my spouse of 13 years, embarked on a flip-flop thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail on April 17! Here’s a selection of some of the questions I’ve been asked the most often since we started telling people about his trip.

  • What’s a flip-flop, and why isn’t he just hiking the normal way? There are several ways to complete all 2000+ miles of the Appalachian Trail (AT) that are accepted as true thru-hikes, one of which is known as a flip-flop. For this type of hike, you start somewhere in the middle of trail and head either north or south from there to one of the trail’s terminuses, then go back to your starting point and hike to the other terminus. In Andy’s case, he started in Harpers Ferry, WV, and will hike north to the summit of Mt. Katahdin in Maine, then fly back to Harpers Ferry and proceed to the southern terminus on Springer Mountain in Georgia. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC) says some of the benefits of a flip-flop are that you have a longer period of mild weather to hike in, you can start on easier terrain, and you avoid the crowds that start all around the same time on Springer (“the bubble”), which is good for you and good for the trail. All of those are reasons Andy chose this method for his thru-hike. The cool part is that once he “flops,” as I keep calling it, he’ll be hiking home toward me, since we live in the Atlanta, Georgia area!

(Because I am an editor in my day job and pedantic by nature, I feel the need to offer this note on spelling. I would like to spell it “through-hike,” but the ATC seems to use “thru-hike,” and who am I to argue with their authority? So I’m going with it.)

  • How long will it take him? I’ll admit to being a bit surprised by how many times people have asked me this; I guess I’ve lived in a bit of an outdoorsy bubble where I thought “everyone” knew about the AT! That said, the trip can take anywhere from four to six months. Andy says it won’t be four (that tends to be people going for speed or people who are doing a supported hike, e.g. not carrying all their stuff) but I have a sneaking suspicion it won’t take him six, either, so I go with five months as my answer.

  • How long has he been planning this trip? Part of me feels like an AT thru-hike was an inevitability for Andy. He was an Eagle Scout, and he actually introduced me to backpacking in 2008. (Youthful Andy and Laura pictured below.) A few years ago he started doing a 1- to 2-week section hike in the summer and ultimately traversed the entirety of the AT through Georgia and Tennessee, and most of North Carolina. He went back and forth about whether he wanted to attempt a thru-hike or just keep chipping away at it in sections, but ultimately, several factors lined up to make 2023 the year that it made sense just to do it. Once he got more serious about it, we started talking and making loose plans in the fall of 2022. Thanks to his years of outdoor experience, and the fact that he stays in pretty good shape from running, there honestly wasn’t a whole lot that needed to be done! However, we did do some tangible things together to set us up for success, which I’ll talk about in my next post.

  • What will you do while he’s gone?! Honestly, I’ll mostly continue living my life! One of the factors that has enabled Andy to take time off of work and make this trek is that I’m employed by a company that offers health insurance coverage for a dependent, so I’ll be working from home doing my corporate job. My income will also enable us to continue, you know, paying our bills while he’s not employed. My parents live around the corner from us and we have a good group of friends in town, so I’ll continue to have opportunities to socialize. I’ll take a few trips of my own while he’s on the trail, some to catch up with him (more on that in a future post!) and some just for fun, like my family’s annual beach trip. Of course, being solo means I have to pick up some household responsibilities that Andy normally covered (I had to learn how to use the weed wacker!), so I’m not going to have six months of total leisure time. I’m actually already noticing that I need to be careful not to overfill my time just because I’m alone, since I am a homebody who requires a lot of alone time to recharge!

Andy and I are at in interesting juncture in our lives that’s not necessarily the stage at which many people attempt a long-distance trail thru-hike. (I tend to think of it more as a just-finished-high school-or-college or a retirement thing.) I’m starting this blog to feel a little less alone in the being the spouse who’s “left behind” at home, in hopes that there might be others out there who find themselves in this situation, too, and stumble across my words when they’re lying in bed at night panic Googling and not finding anyone else out there who understands. (Er, uh, maybe that was just me?) I’m figuring it out as we go along—join me on my journey!