![]() 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.Įven now, Sanders said, he can’t quite believe he finished his journey. ![]() It was more than the steps he took, though. 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.ĭuring the hike, Sanders met Miller at a hostel and they decided to hike the last 450 miles together. Most hikers, Sanders said, begin the trail in March and go straight through within a few months. 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). 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. “I couldn’t even begin to describe what the feeling is once you reach that sign,” he said. 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. with the hopes of making it to the top in time to catch the sunrise. 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. 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 is the son of Krista and Edward Sanders, who lived in Columbus when McLin was born and for a couple of years after. 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. Cole Miller of Daleville, Virginia, and McLin Sanders of Madison pose for a photo while hiking the Franconia Ridge, a mountain trail in New Hampshire, earlier this year.
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