Getting By with a Little Help from Your Friends – AT Support Notes

There are a ton of blogs from hikers but not many from those in the support vehicles. So here are “Foxtrot’s” thoughts after supporting my husband Diesel and daughter Bumblebee through Georgia and through parts of TN/NC. These are just a few of my ramblings and BUNCH of my pictures. Because pictures speak a thousand words if you’re planning for an adventure like this.

Our support vehicle is a Ram 3500 with an Arctic Fox 990 camper. It’s not like pulling a trailer since it’s on the truck itself, but it’s certainly not a simple thing to maneuver this rig in small spaces along the AT. And many Forest Service roads have some SMALL spaces. We are 8ft wide and 12ft 1in tall and somewhere around 22ft in length, so we take up some space. If you have a sprinter van or something, it would be a lot easier to get around on these roads, but the truck handles rough roads REALLY well so it’s not all bad.

I had no idea what I was really getting into when we took off for Georgia at the end of February. I mean, we had come to hike that first mile to Springer a year prior, just to get an idea of what we were in for, but that experience wasn’t exactly encouraging!😊 (And that time was me just riding along while Diesel drove.) For those that have done the drive from Amicalola Visitor Center to Springer, you know what kind of roads we’re talking about there. Don’t take the wrong way… Google Maps STILL says to take the hard way. Ask a local to make sure you’re going the right way!

You want the route that includes Roy Road, not Nimblewill Gap Road, just saying…

People talk about needing high clearance for these roads. We have high enough clearance, and we’ve gone on quite a few much more “iffy” roads in the past, mostly out West. But since we had never been to Springer before, we didn’t realize Google Maps took us the harder way until it started to make us question all of our plans for this thru-hike – it may have been slightly shorter in distance, but certainly was not a better road. But thankfully once we got to the Springer parking lot we met a shuttle driver who explained it all to us and when we returned for the “real” hike we were pretty proud of our “insider knowledge.”

Forest Service roads can vary a HUGE amount, depending on what kind of traffic they accommodate on a daily basis. GA-42 is no exception. The better way is much more well-travelled, especially by local shuttle drivers, though both ways have homeowners with horses so it’s not like it was impassable. It was just a slow and careful drive. Last year we were completely inexperienced in driving in that area and were coming straight from the interstate to Springer (we went to Amicalola AFTER heading to Springer) so we had no idea where we were going. And it was an adventure. We even had to work together to push a downed tree off the road that had fallen down the night before because we literally had no choice – there is absolutely no turnaround on a road like that for a vehicle of our size.

So coming into the actual real-life adventure that is a thru-hike the following February (two months ago!) gave me a bit of anxiety since once they started their hike, I would be completely on my own in unfamiliar territory. However… this time we were armed with FarOut and a healthy distrust of Google Maps!

Some things I’ve learned as a support vehicle driver:

• The hours of waiting for hikers are long. Bring books! It takes 20-30 minutes for me to drive to the next road crossing, while it takes HOURS for you to hike it. I am pretty much by myself for all those hours unless a hiker walks by and I can say hello. Sometimes they even know me! (Mostly because this year they’ve heard rumors of the big Arctic Fox camper that’s waiting up ahead) And then I feel like a small part of the trail community.
• A daily hike is dependent on availability of my road crossings. You want to build up your trail legs and hike 7 miles today? Sorry, the next road crossing is in 12, so if you want a bed in the camper, do the 12. I’ll see you there! (I’ll be patiently waiting…)
• Not having phone service is really hard sometimes when you want to know your location while driving…
• I have learned to ALWAYS screenshot my intended directions while I have phone service because I inevitably will lose service while driving. I screenshot the map itself with the route highlighted, and also the step-by-step directions with names of all the streets. But not all the roads have signs so they’re not always helpful.
• Google Maps doesn’t always know where the road is on winding mountain roads, so when the vehicle randomly falls off the road, Google Maps just might be lying. And that teeny little two-track up the hill that Google Maps says you should take? Lying again. Even if it yells at you about needing to reroute, ignore it. Stay on the main road! (in this pic the MAPPED ROUTE was a tiny two-track that went straight uphill and apparently just went to a tiny cemetery and the real road was where I am – and I’m sure nobody wants me turning that truck around in a cemetery!)
• Shuttle drivers are awesome. Helpful. Knowledgeable. Friendly. They are always willing to help me out and answer my (sometimes dumb) questions, even though most of the time they will never actually meet me. And they know EVERYTHING.
• The FarOut app should be your new best friend. Seriously. If the shuttle drivers suggest you don’t take a road in the comments, DON’T TAKE THE ROAD. Trust me, they know…
• I love seeing hikers that I recognize. Doesn’t happen every day, but when it does, it’s like a homecoming! Meeting new people and knowing you could see them again in a day, a week, a month, or never again, is so weird. There are no expectations of longevity, but when you find the same people, you enjoy the opportunity to reconnect. Everybody just acts a little differently, a little freer maybe, when you know this is how it works. Especially with trail names involved. You really can just reinvent yourself and be present in whatever the day presents.
• A chance for trail magic is the best part of any day. That and seeing my own family members coming down the trail at the end of their day, massive smiles on their faces when they see us too!

Types of roads I’ve driven to reach AT road crossings:

Gravel of varying consistencies, single-lane asphalt, nice two-lane (with yellow line!) asphalt roads of varying lane widths, 12% grade for 4 miles (up AND down) mountain roads, true highways. I obviously don’t have pictures of all of these kinds of roads because I had to stop driving to take pics – can’t do that on a highway! Or a 12% grade for that matter… And they make hikers cross all these roads, including the highways. Don’t get hit by a semi!

Sometimes we find ourselves in very narrow spaces and we often come across many very low-hanging branches that made me a bit nervous. But I’m getting better at estimating heights.

A well-known tiny tunnel and then a narrow section of blasted rocks. They could have used one more blast… We literally had about 6 inches of clearance on either side of the camper for that one. A little too white-knuckle-ish for me! But I wasn’t driving for that one, thankfully.

I have also found out that Tennessee is REALLY bad about low-hanging cable and phone lines. Can’t tell you how many times I had to stop on a gravel road to verify they were for sure over 12ft (last thing I want to do is pull some homeowner’s phone line down) by climbing up my ladder to access the roof and check my A/C height. I did have to ask one random neighbor to watch a cable for me because Google Maps failed me yet again and took me somewhere I should never have gone, on a road that was NOT made for anything bigger than a pickup truck, and the cable line to a house was 12ft 6inches off the road (which I only know now based on his ~5 inch gap indication as I slowly inched my way under it).

Parking areas have varying amounts of room for someone like me. They are sometimes just pull-offs on the side of a road, sometimes they are nice flat parking lots with beautiful views, sometimes they are very uneven or angled without any place for me to safely park, so I have to choose a different place to hang out until I know my family is close to being picked up. Or they are popular local hangout spots and it’s a bit of a free-for-all for parking spots (Beauty Spot, anyone?). So thankful for FarOut! It is a necessity as far as I’m concerned! Although their definition of a “parking area for 4-6 cars” does not really take my truck’s size into account 🙂

For spring break our son and our dog got to come along with me for a week of support, which made for a different support experience. Lots of fun and lots more to keep track of when not by myself this time. We had a blast!

I had to go home for the next couple months until school lets out so I’m missing pretty much all of Virginia, and I hear the towns farther north aren’t as “hiker-friendly” as the southern towns, so hopefully it all works out and I find places to park all along the way when I go back out there!

And I just found out that Baxter State Park (to ascend Katahdin) will not be able to accommodate the camper because vehicles have to be under 9ft tall. We definitely don’t fit that requirement.

Glad to know that now instead of when I get there later this summer, that’s for sure!

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