Dear Troverts:
Of all the trail journals I’ve been reading ya’ll are the ONLY ones able to update every day without fail. How is that done? Next year or the year after I’ll be on the trail and I’m wondering if I’ll be able to keep my journal alive. If you can clarify the details please do so.
Signed – Already Planning in Texas

Dear Planning,
Maintaining a daily journal while hiking the AT is a tremendous time commitment. There are many days on the trail filled with lots of happenings we would like to write about, but we often find ourselves dead-tired at hiker midnight with barely enough energy to make a short entry before falling asleep. Having two people to divide the task here on the trail certainly helps, but there’s no way around it, it takes a lot of time and effort. And equally important, we have a willing and able Base Camp Manager (BCM) back at home who makes it all possible.

But first things first, we use a word app on our iPhone called “My Writing Spot” to prepare our draft report. Whoever starts the report in the evening always places the iPhone in the same central location in our tent, so if one of us wakes up in the middle of the night, it’s easy to make an addition or correction. In the morning, a click or two with “My Writing Spot” puts an email to the BCM in the outbox. Likewise, we send pictures we want to post to the BCM as email attachments.

There are some nights when we have been in our tent or a shelter and had excellent cell phone reception. Usually this is not the case, so the first order of business the next day is to hike (most time that means “climb”) to a spot where we can send an email. Usually we can get that done by 10 or 11am. But that’s not always the case. For example, north of Pearisburg, we went two and a half days before we could send a picture, and wasted much time and iPhone battery charge life even getting the text to go.

If we had continuous cell service, we could make our own entries on Trail Journals, but taking valuable daylight hiking time to do this often tedious work (working inside of boxes and with drop-down menus on the small iPhone screen) would drive members of our generation crazy! So we send the rough material to the BCM, and she can check our draft for typo’s, etc., as she uploads to the TJ website.

At the cost of eight additional ounces, we carry a New Trent external battery pack. This device gives us the ability to recharge an iPhone three times. That plus liberal use of the “airplane mode” feature and limiting other Internet use to the bare minimum essentials (getting weather reports, making reservations, checking Duke Basketball Report) has enabled us to go for week long periods between town overnight stops, while staying current with our journals.

We think our numerous pre-hike posts helped give us the mental discipline to keep at it on the AT. However, we do feel the quality of our writing (such as it is) has gone downhill since we left home. We thank our readers for their continued indulgence. We’re glad neither one of us has to earn a living working under a tight daily deadline, as we would be terrible at such an occupation.

Anyway, hope that answers the question. We’ll try to keep it up as long as we are fortunate enough to keep walking towards Maine.