Book Mention: Three Hundred Zeroes

A few weeks ago I'd mentioned talking with on 40m and then by chance the next day stumbling across an interview with Dennis K1YPP – link here.  Following up on those items, I finished reading his book "300 Zeroes: Lessons of the Heart on the Appalachian Trail."  This is quite different than the how-to books I've been reading and the life-on-the-trail videos that occasionally cross my screen, in that the author truly pulls you in to see what the daily nitty-gritty on the trail is like: the good days, the bad, the good people all along the way, a major medical problem that knocked him off the trail for a year, the return, the final slog through Maine, and the triumphant-yet-exhausted finale on Mt. Katahdyn.  It's a real-life account of what he and others went through, and it seems to give a realistic picture of what to expect.

A nice aspect of this book is that, while the Blanchard does discuss the heart surgery that bumped him off the trail temporarily, he doesn't dwell on it.  One chapter with plenty of amusing anecdotes and not a whiff of woe-is-me, then it's over and he's back on the trail the next summer.  Well handled, both in the book and in actual life.  Additionally, while he did bring along a small low-powered Morse code-only radio and make at least one contact from each state along the way, it's not a book about hiking with ham radio.  Similarly, he does a little bit of amateur photography while on the trail, and that doesn't take over either.  It's just a book about his backpacking the AT with a couple of interesting hobbies thrown in the mix.  Mostly though, it's all about the people and the trail.

Finally, and I hate to say it, but there was a take-away lesson for me in this book: hiking the entire AT is not for me.  While I do love the local trails, and will eventually hike the southernmost end of the AT to the source of the Chattahoochee River, I'll take a pass on rock-climbing over bare granite way up in New England. But I do appreciate this book and did enjoy the journey, if only on paper.