Benton MacKaye Trail
10/05/23—10/12/23
I completed a southbound thru-hike of the 290mile Benton MacKaye Trail in the southern Appalachians, setting a new, overall, unsupported fastest known time by 12hrs, and completing the first ever women’s unsupported hike of this footpath in 6d18h0m54s.
The miles on the BMT were mostly hard won; every day I’d wake up early thinking, this is the day I get to camp before 9PM, it really never happened. I’d get ahead and then get hit with a climb like the one up Haoe Bald, or the creek walks that wound up being up and down and bushy and thorny and full of snarled roots. The rocky, rooty, stick-filled tread of the trail played a huge role in how slow I was moving, too. It was full of debris—twigs and branches, whole trees, acorns, brambles, rocks, fallen leaves which obscured what lay beneath, mulch and grasses as tall as my face.
It felt rugged, it felt overly hard, it felt like an adventure in the truest sense.
Visit my trip report on the Fastest Known Time website to read about my adventure.
