You think all the kids are glued to their TVs and wrist-locked to their Xboxes? One poster at Whiteblaze.net is agonizing over whether to start college or hike 2000 miles first, then start college. Many of the Whiteblaze veterans insisted: “Hike now, college will always be there.” Others said the opposite: “College now, the trail will always be there.” Another advised a mantra — “do you want fries with that?” — to be repeated at all times of weakness when thoughts of returning to school arise. And this advice struck me as most useful:
Before committing to a thru-hike, plan some long hikes first, meet a bunch of thruhikers, and see what you think once you’ve hiked in the rain and been cold and have run out of food and can’t get that ride out to the town and your shoes don’t fit right and there’s no space in the leanto and all the other annoying little experiences that come with distance as a goal. This could easily take a summer.
Then, you’ll either really want to thruhike or really not want to thruhike.
You will have your equipment figured out, and probably have friends to hike with. Then you’ll KNOW what you want to do.
I knew so many kids who partied their way through the first couple years of school and had to spend years recovering. Seems to me the discipline needed to plan and execute a six-month hike would offer excellent hardening of the spirit that would come in handy in college, where the temptations to goof off far outweigh the temptations to get an education. Or you could just join the Marine Corps.
I can’t imagine anyone who has ever thru-hiked telling an aspiring thru-hiker to postpone his or her hike. It just doesn’t seem right.
It’s a shame that taking a gap year isn’t more common in the US. I didn’t take one, but I’ve learned much more about the world (and about myself) during my thru-hikes and travels than I ever could’ve hoped to learn in college.
My thru-hikes have been among the most complex and rewarding actions I’ve taken in my life. Taking a break from school to bring together the diverse resources needed for a distance hike must be one of the best ways to get some experience with making things happen in the world, especially before being plunged back into an abstract academic environment.
I found that I never took college seriously until I stopped thinking of it as “school” in the high school sense, and started thinking of it as a job in the grownup sense. I was 25 when I got my BA.
So, in the sense that a thru-hike is much like a job in that you have to get up every day and address the task at hand, and keep doing it day after day for months at a time, it actually does seem like excellent preparation for getting an actual education while in college.