WILLIAMSBURG — When Jason Phelps arrived at his family’s house on Tuesday morning, he kissed the ground.
Having just hiked alone for 872 miles over 85 days on the Appalachian Trail from Virginia, both his family and his favorite dessert — a cheesecake made by his mother — were waiting for him when he arrived on foot.
Three years ago, Phelps, 37, and his older brother had hiked from the southernmost part of the trail in Georgia to Daleville, Virginia, a town outside of Roanoke.
This past August, he decided he was looking for a challenge and some time alone to reflect, he said as he sat at the kitchen table in his family’s home.
“I wanted the experience of solitude,” he said. “I knew there would be no one else out there … I pretty much wanted the woods and mountains to myself.”
So he set out in Virginia in December and hiked through several mountain ranges and seven states, covering 10 to 25 miles each day with a 40-pound backpack on before reaching Dalton, Massachusetts. There, he walked about 30 miles on Route 9 to his family’s home in Williamsburg.
Hiking a long stretch of the Appalachian Trail in the winter is somewhat unusual; most people start in Georgia in the spring and head north or start in Maine in early summer and head south, according to the Appalachian Mountain Club.
“At first it was tough,” he said of the isolation. “I just got used to it, I adapted. I really enjoyed it as a break from everyday life.”
He did see some people on his trek, such as hikers out for the day in the woods or in towns where he would often hitchhike to in order to get more food.
“They said I was crazy,” he recalled. Several snowfalls and ice storms later, Phelps said he’s still sure he picked the right season to go. “I love everything that has to do with winter,” he said.
For a decade, Phelps worked as a snowmaker at Mount Snow in Vermont, putting in 12-hour overnight shifts blasting snow back onto trails.
That experience, along with warm gear, helped him get used to the cold.
But his trip still got off to a rough start. “I almost didn’t make it past the first day,” Phelps said.
He took off in late morning to trek the first 11 miles in Virginia, but an earlier snowstorm made the terrain challenging, and he didn’t have what he calls his “hiking legs” yet. As daylight faded, he got lost off the trail and panicked. He eventually found the trail and made it to his campsite.
After briefly passing out, he woke up the next morning, thinking: “I still have 800 miles to go — this is going to be tough,” he recalled.
To help with the discomfort, he took ibuprofen, or “Vitamin I,” as he learned some hikers call it on the trail. After hiking on rocky trails in Pennsylvania, he got shin splits, which forced him to take several days to rest. And he threw his back out getting out of his tent one day, admitting that he had stopped stretching before.
“It’s wicked important to stretch,” Phelps said.
On the trail, Phelps became known as “Rattler” — many Appalachian trail hikers get “trail names,” or nicknames. When camping in Shenandoah, he and another hiker were sleeping in tents inside the shelter, a three-walled wooden structure.
The next morning, the hiker gave him the nickname as a comment on his snoring. “It was so loud, I was rattling the shelter,” he said.
The people he met along the way, such as the hiker in Shenandoah, ended up being the highlight of the trip.
“It gets me emotional thinking about it,” he said.
In Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, for example, he met a group of Mennonites who fed him dinner and gave him kombucha and invited him to spend time in their house while they played fiddle and guitars together, he said.
“They still text me and say, ‘I’m praying for you,’” he said.
While he was looking for food in town in Vernon, New Jersey, a woman pulled over in a BMW. “You need a shower?” she asked him.
She offered him a meal and a place to rest, too.
Phelps’ plans for the next week are to rest and to start gaining back some of the roughly 40 pounds he lost while hiking. Sitting in his family home, he said he wasn’t that tired yet. “It’ll probably hit me in a couple of days,” he said.
He hopes to eventually complete the northern section of the trail, which stretches to Mount Katahdin in Maine — but not in the winter.
Greta Jochem can be reached at gjochem@gazettenet.com