Well, we made it this far but we don’t know where to go from here. That seems to be the theme so far with this journey. Not knowing. It can be fun sometimes, and at other times a bit of a pain, but we’re in it for both.

It all started with an idea, the idea that my brother and I were somehow able and driven enough to walk for 2,168 miles from Maine to Georgia. It sounded so crazy and so hard, but now we realize it’s been the easiest part so far.

After hiking the notorious Mt. Katahdin we dove head first into the “100 Mile Wilderness” without one scrap of knowledge about backpacking at all. Our goal wasn’t to become backpackers, but to become the first people to document an entire Appalachian Trail hike through the eyes of thru-hikers. We brought camera gear, pens, paper, open minds, and a willingness to accept that we knew absolutely nothing about what we were going to try to do. However, we did know that between the two of us brothers, there was a passion for photography and journalism.

Maine went by quickly, as did New Hampshire, Vermont, the rest of the Northeast, and all of our questions. We soon felt comfortable in what was once so foreign to us. There was nobody on that trail for the first three months of our journey, so the the two of us and our two friends seemed to make new people out of ourselves, maybe so we could meet someone new. It was funny to go through all the thoughts in each others heads and it seemed like the cold of winter slowed us and all of our thoughts to a halt. By December just us two brothers were left with nothing but a few hours of light per day and cleansed minds. We decided to go home.

Three months went by at home. We worked in the snow and longed for the trail. We knew we’d be going back in March, but we’d drive down to Georgia to make our way up to where we left off, Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania. We put on some weight and got a rental car.

The people that we met were amazing, southern hospitality was real, and we had a great new friend named Rob Wager on our second day. Rob was from Austin, Texas, and hiked with us from Georgia, to our finish line in Pennsylvania. Through ups and downs, literal and figurative, we stuck together. We saw sunrises and sunsets for the ages, we lived on canoes for a week just to say we did it, got sick, got really full of Chinese buffets and beer (which may have made us sick), and lived life to the fullest. The trail came to an end as quickly as it started, and now that we were all officially trail brothers for life, we parted ways at Delaware Water Gap, Rob ventured on to Katahdin and we finally made it home.

It was weird. The A.T. was now officially a thing of the past. We were both on to school at UMaine, and BU, with 17,000 photos and hundreds of journal entries to sort through. This was a new and completely foreign thing for us as well, but we thought “If we can walk the trail we can do this right?” We sifted through the material as carefully as possible. That took the entire summer on its own. After we knew what we wanted, and after we were a four hour drive apart and taking 4 classes each, we put our heads down and wrote a book.

Long days, nights, and arguments, accompanied by a long school year. This was harder than the trail itself. We did the designing over and over again. We edited the writing over and

over again. We edited the photos over and over again. We edited over and over again. After coming up with several designs we finally came up with something simple that would also allow us to be creative. We looked at each image and found a way that the image and text could flow together either on top of one another or side by side. That would be the idea behind the design, at least for this project. Sounded doable. Our simple idea took 9 months.

May came. We loved the month of May this year. Our book was done but we didn’t know what to do with it. We still don’t know what to do with it, and we realize that now we are on to the hardest part of the whole thing. We finally got our first 60 hard copies to sell around town to family and friends, but that’s all we’ve come up with. We are self published for now and clueless, but we are willing to keep going forward. We have to. As we brainstorm ideas together, we feel like we have finally come to terms with the idea that we have no idea and that having no idea is the perfect idea to have. We’ll make it work in the end, we just need to take it one step at a time.

* If you would like to help support us through the next phase of our journey you can buy an online version of our book titled “Hike Your Own Hike” on iBooks or iTunes for $6! If you would like a hard cover and are in the area email us at gordonbrothersAT@gmail.com. A huge thanks to everyone in the community for supporting us!

Click to view “Hike Your Own Hike” on iTunes! https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/hike- your-own-hike/id1111041122?mt=11&ign-mpt=uo%3D4