![]() ![]() Though I’d started that winter by diligently boiling grits or oatmeal, I soon realized how much time I was wasting, shivering each morning in my tent for the chance to eat something hot. This was, as you might guess from my gustatory zeal, neither my first encounter with Pop-Tarts on the Appalachian Trail nor my last. In 36 hours, the taste of Pop-Tarts still on my tongue, I’d finished my first thru-hike. Who had put those Pop-Tarts there, I wondered? Some hiker toting too much food? The ghost of John Harvey Kellogg? Uhh, God? I shrugged, stuffed those wondrously space-age and now empty wrappers into my pack, and continued north. Within 15 minutes, every one of those 12 pastries was gone, devoured in a trance more transcendent than the idyllic lake that stretched out before me like a gemstone. ![]() But then, there they were alongside a sandy lake shore, silvery wrappers shimmering in the August sunlight with all the universe’s collected opalescence: a half-dozen packages of unopened Pop-Tarts, just waiting to make me whole. Peeking beneath the lid of my bear can, I spied my dwindling supplies and began pondering a 40-mile sprint to the end, to stave off hunger I could already feel setting in. Three days earlier, I’d left Monson, Maine-the last stop before reaching the base of the trail’s northern terminus, Katahdin-in an unnecessary huff, hastily buying too few groceries for the arduous route between and over rugged mountains. It was the end of August 2019, and I was 60 miles into the 100-Mile Wilderness, the path’s much-feared remote Maine climax, where supplies, resources, and human contact barely exist.
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