Preparation: it is definitely needed when going on a big excursion like the AT. You need to have just your essentials, like food and cooking utensils. You definitely do NOT want to carry a bunch of gizmos and technology gear that you might never use. All it does is it gives you dead weight. One guy did that and it did not take him long to drop out. And you also never throw anything out when you’re mad, like Katz did. If you do, you might be filtering water with pink toilet paper and have pieces of it floating in your coffee.
Perseverance: when the going gets tough, the tough get going. When hiking the AT, you always want to keep a certain number of miles a day, like 20. Either that or don’t stop until you find a shelter on the trail. It’s much safer there than sleeping in the middle of nothing where all you have is a pair of toe nail clippers, which goes back to preparation: always bring a knife or two unless you want to give the bear a pedicure. A lot of people drop out of the AT because they don’t have the perseverance it takes to go through. They always say, “It wasn’t what I expected”. The guy driving the two men to the start of the AT said that to them and said, “What do they expect, escalators?”
Global awareness: they main topic of A Walk in the Woods. Here’s a quote: “Here in the Smokies, not far from where Katz and I now trod, the Park Service in 1957 decided to ‘reclaim’ Abrams Creek, a tributary of the Little Tennessee River, for rainbow trout, even though rainbow trout had never been native to Abrams Creek. To that end,