Just after sunrise on June 21, McLin Sanders stood at the rocky peak of Mount Katahdin, next to a wooden, weather-beaten sign declaring him at the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail.
Sanders is the son of Krista and Edward Sanders, who lived in Columbus when McLin was born and for a couple of years after.
It was the end of the 19-year-old from Madison’s 2,193-mile journey across 14 states, from the start of the trail in the Chattahoochee National Forest in Northern Georgia to the top of that wet, windy mountain in Maine.
Sanders and his hiking partner, Virginia native Cole Miller, slept in a shelter at the base of the mountain and woke up at 2 a.m. with the hopes of making it to the top in time to catch the sunrise. They just missed it, but days later, Sanders said he still didn’t have the words to describe the end of his 10-month journey.
“I couldn’t even begin to describe what the feeling is once you reach that sign,” he said.
Sanders started out on his hike on Aug. 10, 2020, the day after he graduated from Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville, Georgia, putting his freshman year at Ole Miss on hold to complete a thru-hike of the longest hiking-only footpath in the world, according to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy.
Roughly 3,000 people attempt to hike the entire trail every year, with only about 25 percent of them making it the entire way within the 12 months required to be an officially recognized thru-hike (a hike of an entire trail hundreds of miles long). Most hikers, Sanders said, begin the trail in March and go straight through within a few months. Since Sanders started later in the year, he took a break from November to March, picking up where he left off in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia.
During the hike, Sanders met Miller at a hostel and they decided to hike the last 450 miles together.
It was more than the steps he took, though. It was the two bear cubs he saw in Georgia; the “trail angel” — the name hikers give to residents along trail towns who care for thru-hikers — who let him stay in her house while he recovered from an ear infection in Pennsylvania; hearing a wolf howl through the night while camped by a lake in New Hampshire; hiking Mount Washington in the same state and thinking its rocky peak “looked like you were on the moon;” and meeting “the codger gang,” three older hikers he and Miller ran into in Maine’s 100-Mile Wilderness and who they waited for at the top of windy, wet Mount Katahdin for three hours because the gang hadn’t wanted to get up at 2 a.m.
Even now, Sanders said, he can’t quite believe he finished his journey.
“It doesn’t feel real that I walked from Georgia to Maine,” he said. “… I don’t know when it will hit me, if it even will. I just know that I did it.”
The catalyst
McLin’s father, Edward Sanders, a practicing attorney with his own law office in Columbus in the early 2000s, introduced McLin to hiking through Boy Scouts.
Their first trail? A section of the Appalachian.
“We took off to North Georgia and we hiked I guess about 20 miles,” Edward recalled.
By 2014 or 2015, McLin said, he and Edward were hiking regularly, exploring trails in Alabama’s Sipsey Wilderness on the weekends and trekking through the Smokies over longer breaks.
It was on one such hike in Georgia when the two were staying at a hostel for hikers along the Appalachian Trail that McLin met one of its thru-hikers.
“I just talked to him and I guess he kind of inspired me,” McLin said. “That was probably one of the catalysts that motivated me to hike the whole thing.”
A week before McLin’s graduation ceremony, which had been pushed to August due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Edward suggested McLin take a gap year instead.
“I just figured with this whole COVID thing, what are you actually going to accomplish sitting in a dorm room in Oxford taking Psychology 101, not even in a classroom?” Edward said.
When Edward asked him what he would like to do instead, McLin had an answer ready.
Keeping his world small
McLin downloaded a hiking app that provides up-to-date information about trails, shelters, weather and where to resupply. He made sure he had enough food to reach the next stop. He focused on that, instead of the totality of what he was trying to accomplish.
“I didn’t think about ‘Oh my God, I’ve got 1,500 miles left,’” he said. “… I would just go town to town. I kept my world really small and I would go, ‘OK, I’m in Hampton, Tennessee, now. My next town is Damascus. That’s 50 miles, so … I’ll need about 50 miles of food and then I’ll get there and I’ll do the exact same thing.’ … Before you know it, you’re in Maine.”
He traveled light and walked from sunrise to sunset, averaging about 30 miles a day and munching on protein bars and candy after eating huge breakfasts. He slept about 75 percent of nights in his tent, with the remainder in hostels or, in the case of his birthday in October, with friends in North Carolina.
Edward Sanders said while he was appropriately nervous, he felt son had enough respect for the trail to handle anything that came his way.
“I had no qualms at all about his physical abilities to do it,” he said.
The bigger issue, McLin said, was mental fortitude.
“If you don’t have the mental strength, but you have the physical strength, you just can’t do the trail,” he said.
“You just simply can’t.”
But what neither of them knew much about — and what had Edward and Krista more nervous — was the stretch through New Hampshire and Maine, which takes hikers along snow-capped mountains and Mount Washington, which has the worst weather in the country.
“The highest wind speed ever recorded was on top of Mount Washington,” McLin said. “… The hike up and over Mount Washington, you’re above the treeline for 12 miles, and the weather changes within five minutes.”
When McLin was 11.3 miles through that above-treeline stretch, the wind began to pick up. He had cell service, so he checked the weather on his phone.
“It said 70 mph gusts,” McLin said. “And I was right there on top of Mount Washington getting that wind.
“These dangerous parts are very few and far between, but when you get to them you have to be well-prepared because something bad could really happen,” he added.
Still, McLin never regretted the hike. When he messaged his family from atop Mount Katahdin, his father was at a hostel on the southern part of the trail, surrounded by fellow hikers, therefore an instant celebrity.
“I said, ‘Oh, man, he just did it!’” Edward recalled.
The next hike
McLin will begin his freshman year at Ole Miss this fall, with, Edward feels, far more maturity and experience than he would have had last year. He plans to study film production so he can one day make nature documentaries and movies about being outdoors.
Before he completes college, though, he wants to complete “The Triple Crown” — thru-hikes of all three major trails in America, including the Appalachian Trail, the Continental Divide Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail.
McLin called the thru-hike “the best thing I’ve ever done” — even though he still can’t quite describe completing it.
“The only people who know what that feels like are the people who have done it,” he said.
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 46 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
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