Trail Log Blog

Your base weight doesn't measure your backpacking ability. TownShirt explains why cutting your toothbrush won't make you a better hiker and offers a free full-length toothbrush to make things right.

After thousands of miles on the AT and PCT, the biggest lessons weren't about gear weights. Here's why experience, judgment, and community matter more than another spreadsheet.

Merino wool is supposed to resist odor, regulate temperature, and keep you cool in summer. After wearing a lightweight merino shirt for roughly 800 miles on the Appalachian Trail, my experience was different. It stayed damp, wore through surprisingly quickly, and made me question whether backpackers are measuring the things that actually matter on trail.

Emily Keddie became the first woman to win the Grand2Grand Ultra overall. In this conversation, the PCT thru-hiker and ultrarunner shares what tested her across six desert stages, how competitors supported one another, and what hikers and runners can learn from each other.

I have a confession that probably isn’t ideal for someone who owns an apparel company: I don’t really know how to market one. TownShirt is the first business I’ve owned...

Chafing can turn a thru-hike miserable remarkably quickly. After learning that lesson the hard way in Virginia, one piece of trail advice changed how I manage it: clean it, dry it and grease your O-ring.

You don’t have to be a birder to start recognizing the birds of the Appalachian Trail. After enough miles, their calls become part of the thru-hiking experience. From Wood Thrushes echoing through hardwood forests to Whip-poor-wills keeping hikers awake at night, these five birds help tell the story of an Appalachian Trail thru-hike.

Clean laundry, chicken ramen, hiker funk, overflowing privies and a wet Appalachian forest. Some Appalachian Trail memories aren’t sights at all.

Before a piece of gear can prove itself to us, something has to convince us to try it. For thru-hikers, that evidence often comes from other hikers. Using Altra’s rise in long-distance hiking and one pair of shoes from my own 2016 AT thru-hike, we look at how gear becomes prevalent, why prevalence becomes persuasive, and the strange point where marketing starts becoming culture.

I thought the Appalachian Trail needed a mascot. I knew exactly what it should be. The Red Eft print didn’t start with market research. It didn’t start with sales data,...

After it rains on the Appalachian Trail, red efts seem to appear everywhere. Where do they come from, and why are these tiny orange newts suddenly all over the trail?

Moving efficiently down a trail has a lot less to do with speed than we think. After enough miles, the rocks and roots don’t disappear. You just get better at seeing them early, choosing a line, and moving through them with less effort.