In January 2019, I drove across the Great Plains solo from New York to Colorado to start my life anew in the mountains. I was broke, suffering from bronchitis, and dealing with some pretty intense post-Appalachian Trail (AT) depression. I barely knew a soul in Boulder, my new home, and I was starting a new job. The first few months were really hard. I had left my friends and family on the East Coast, and it was the dead of winter. During that time, I attempted to start writing a memoir about my Appalachian Trail thru-hike. I collected all of my notes and blog posts together and put them into a Microsoft Word document, where I started organizing my thoughts and writing. It was a short-lived endeavor, however, as I decided that in order to push past the experience and start building a happy life in Colorado, I needed to shelve the project.
Fast forward to October 2023, just over five years after completing my thru-hike of the AT. My roommate, Sharon, had left for a two-month stint at the Texas Renaissance Festival, and I had just returned from a thru-hike of the 90-mile Wonderland Trail in Mount Rainier National Park in Washington State. While I used to blog about my hiking and travel experiences, I had long ago stopped because I have to write so often for work. But something came over me in October and I felt a strong desire to pick up a pen, figuratively speaking. On a whim, I opened up the file of notes and blog posts that I had put together for the memoir. I started reading through what I already had and was surprised to find a significant amount of detail in the document.
The next thing I knew, I was typing out some additions. And suddenly, I was typing ferociously, as if possessed. I could think of nothing else but to get my thru-hiking story down on paper. Even when I was busy with other things, like my nine-to-five, I was writing and rewording the memoir in my mind. For a week and a half, I did nothing outside of work aside from writing this book. I knew that the motivation to do so might not strike again for another five years. So I followed the fire that was lit under me until I had typed out 90,000 words.
The writing was the easy part. It fell out of my brain as if by magic and it was finished in just 10 days. The editing, on the other hand, was the tough part. That part took three months, and even after countless revisions and several versions, I feel like I could keep editing forever. But “perfect is the enemy of good” as they say, so alas, after convincing five of my kind, generous, wonderful friends to act as beta readers and provide feedback, reading and editing the book time and time again myself including once on a plane down to South America, putting the book through some artificial intelligence (AI) editing programs, and hiring an artist friend of mine (Monica Aguilar of Chasing Trails Art) to design the cover and internal map of the AT, I finally have a finished product.
This memoir has been a labor of love. My Appalachian Trail thru-hike meant so much to me and still does. It completely changed my life, and has given me so many incredible gifts, including a community, expert backpacking skills, and a renewed interest in traveling to see and experience the biodiversity of the United States and the world. Writing the book allowed me to relive and process the experience five years later, to celebrate the wonderful parts and to grieve the difficult parts. I’m so incredibly proud of both my thru-hike and this memoir, and I hope that when it becomes available, in paperback and ebook form on Amazon and Kindle on February 8, you will pick up a copy. The title is “Where the Rhododendrons Bloom,” and you can find it here.
If you like the book, please write a positive review on Amazon or Kindle. It will help me immensely in getting it out to more people. If you don’t like it, well, please keep that to yourself. 🙂 I really think that you will though. Thank you in advance for the support—this is my first book, and as a result, I am of course learning as I go!
Audrey Adventures 