Walking the 3500km Appalachian Trail, Max Mason encounters black bears, snakes, a stabbed hiker, and a woman with a titanium leg called Bionic. He talks to Juliet Rowan about adversity, camaraderie, and insights into mind, body, spirit and nature he gained during his six-month trek in the American wilderness.
Max Mason's toes are numb. The former chief executive of Tauranga's Chamber of Commerce finished the Appalachian Trail a month ago, but has been told it could be several more before he regains feeling in his feet after walking an epic 3502km in one week shy of six months.
Max was a "NoBo" - trail lingo for a northbound hiker - and one of an estimated 3000 people to attempt the journey along the crest of the Appalachian mountains between Georgia and Maine this year.
Only 25 per cent of those who start the "AT" finish, such are its perils, and Max - who chose the trail name "Happy" to remind himself that happiness is a choice - still struggles to believe he achieved the feat.
"It's like a dream," the 55-year-old says. "If I can do it, anybody can do it if motivated."
After three months of training with long walks around Tauranga and climbs up Mauao and Mt Te Aroha, Max began the hike on March 20.
Overnight temperatures dropped as low as -8C but as he followed the spring north, he saw vast landscapes transformed by wild flowers and enjoyed the shelter of hundreds of miles of rhododendron forests, coming to understand why hikers call the trail "The Green Tunnel".
Inside that tunnel, he saw bears, coyotes and countless snakes, including venomous copperheads and a rattlesnake. Of seven black bears he encountered, one came within metres as she ran to protect her cubs.
Born in Zimbabwe and spending his childhood in the African bush, Max was unperturbed by the wildlife, but less enthused about being bitten by spiders, hornets, ticks and more.
Ticks are the biggest threat to humans on the trail, spreading Lyme disease, and Max is thankful to have received the all-clear after a dozen hikers he met succumbed to the potentially fatal illness.
MAX WAS 54 when he started the trail and had already lost friends the same age to cancer.
"You start getting that realisation that life is finite and you've got to smell the roses. That was part of it really - to stop and reflect on life and to have a glorious adventure."
As a university student, he studied psychology and was influenced by 19th century philosopher Henry Thoreau's book Walden, or Life in the Woods, which recounts Thoreau's experiment to live simply in nature for two years, two months and two days.
"I also wanted to do something exceptional, to have an incredibly big challenge," says Max.
Max shared Thoreau's love of nature and felt a hankering to escape the ease of his fifty-something life and what he calls "developed country complacency".
"Everything's comfortable. Everything's nice. Everything's easy. Life isn't supposed to be like that. It's too easy. I wanted to go back to a more elemental existence for a while. Also, I wanted to become really, really, really incredibly fit and strong, and I did."
Despite having never hiked any of New Zealand's Great Walks, Max calculated he needed to cover 140km per week on American soil before his six-month visa expired. He typically walked 25-30km a day, taking one rest day a week. The furthest he walked in a day was 39km, wanting to avoid the fate of another New Zealander whose visa ran out a week from the trail's end.
The deadline and support of family and friends - and not wanting to let them down - kept Max going, as did other "thruhikers" (the term for hikers doing the trail in one go). Everyone takes trail names, and among his inspirations were Bionic, a German woman with a titanium leg; Why Not and Ice Fire, two visually impaired men in their fifties (one of whom smashed his ribs in a fall from boulders and two weeks later was back on the trail); and The Family, a couple with five children aged 9 to 17.
The 9-year-old was called Mud Magnet, and would race ahead of Max, shaming him into continuing when he wanted to stop.
"When you know a 9-year-old is beating you, you're motivated to go the extra mile," Max says.
Injuries such as bruises and cuts were common, and Max saw one hiker stretchered off the trail after he fell on his hunting knife and stabbed his thigh. Max says the man was lucky not to bleed to death, and this week, a university professor died after falling 14m down a cliff on the trail.
Max was also injured, tearing a muscle in his right thigh and suffering the effects for two months. He got through the worst of the pain by "slack packing", or paying someone to transport his belongings ahead but, as he continued, his body repaired and he says the trek has given him confidence to tackle physical challenges, including maybe kayaking around the North Island.
The Appalachian Trail crosses 14 states and the terrain is gruelling, requiring hikers to traverse mountains, valleys, rivers and hundreds of streams. Max recalls setting off one morning and looking for the white blazes that mark the trail, only to find the path led down a waterfall. It took more than hour of climbing down the rock face to reach the bottom while the trail over New Hampshire's Mt Washington was, says Max, "a game of two halves", with a relatively easy climb to a cafe at the 1917m summit, then a torturous 10km scramble down the other side as it was getting dark.
The toughest stretch is the last 160km known as "the hundred mile wilderness". Hikers have been known to come within a few days of the final destination, Mt Katahdin, and quit.
"That's the extent of how thinly strung out you get," says Max. "It's a head game for sure."
BY HALFWAY along the trail, only 50 per cent of hikers are still going, and by the last quarter, just 25 per cent remain. Max credits the support of his family - wife Helen and son Mungo - with giving him the strength to finish, saying he watched many without support give up the challenge.
Helen, who works at the Bay of Plenty District Health Board, was on a year-long research fellowship in Boston while Max was doing the trail, and sent him regular texts and food packages as well as visiting him four times and hiking with him for two separate weeks. "It was a journey of love for me in many ways because my wife was so supportive," Max says.
He also took a weekend away from the trail to meet her in New York and says the experience of being in Times Square fresh from the wilderness was surreal.
Nineteen-year-old Mungo, former head boy at Tauranga Boys' College, joined Max at the halfway mark and shared a saying that became Max's mantra: "This is tough, but I'm tougher."
Max also lived by Sir Edmund Hillary's words, "It's not the mountain you conquer, it's yourself."
The trail showed Max the capacity for human endurance at times "when you don't actually have a choice about whether you're going to carry on or not".
"It can be raining, you can be halfway up a mountain and you're actually knackered and you've hurt yourself and it's getting dark but there's nowhere to pitch your tent. You literally can't stop. You have to keep going. Doesn't matter how tired you are. And you always find the reserves to do it. You always do somehow. There's always something left in the tank."
Max also left the trail with faith of another kind, saying he began as an agnostic but now believes God exists.
"It's walking through the forest and the trees and looking down on these amazing vistas. I just have this certaintyIt is very much about nature and the connectedness of things."
LIFE ON the trail meant living in tune with nature, and Max was asleep by 7.30pm or 8pm most nights and awake at 5.30am.
Mornings were when he felt most energised and enjoyed a Zen-like connection with the environment. "You're surrounded by all this magnificent scenery and lovely, beautiful, big old trees and moss and fungi and all that kind of stuff, and the endorphins are going through you and you just feel euphoric."
After lunch, when he began to feel mental and physical fatigue set in, he listened to podcasts and audio books on religion, art, history and nature. As the day wore on and the challenge to keep going became greater, he turned to music and fiction, discovering the Game of Thrones and Dan Brown books. "It was the power of story that took me through those very, very tough afternoons."
Often, he was in the company of other hikers and enjoyed long unhurried conversations during which he learned a tremendous amount. Among those he met was Mountain Dew, "a real mountain man" from West Virginia with an extensive knowledge of Appalachian flora and fauna.
Max likens being on the trail to being at a cocktail party where you converse with different groups over the course of the evening.
Even during weeks of hiking alone, he says, it was uncommon to go more than a few hours without seeing another person, and on the trail's most difficult final weeks, familiar faces at the end of the day provided welcome relief. "It was a wonderful feeling actually, pretty much walking into any shelter or any restaurant in any town along the way and I'd know somebody. It was a little bit like Tauranga."
For someone who typically represses his feelings, it was also an emotional journey, particularly in relation to his family. "My emotions on this hike were more raw and closer to the surfaceWhen my wife left me [after her visits], I was upset, and my son, tremendously. The whole day after he left I just felt an enormous sense of hollowness."
Learning how much he valued company was one of the great insights Max had on the Appalachian Trail.
"I always thought I could get by by myself if I really had to, but I do need people."
There were two average hiker ages - 22 and 55 - and Max revelled in long conversations with both. He is now friends with about 20 twenty-somethings, joking that he has heard every conspiracy theory known to man. "The nature of the feeds on my Facebook page has totally changed," he says with a laugh.
The young ones also tended to be the party crowd, heading into towns to get whisky and beer and smoking lots of pot, but as the journey wore on, their ranks thinned and only hardier souls remained.
The trail was also a journey through small-town America, where Max realised the extent of US gun culture. "There's a real sense of amazement that you don't carry a weapon."
But despite differing lifestyles and political views, the hikers lived by the ideal of "hike your own hike" and a lack of judgment and generosity permeated the walk. At points the trail intersected roads, locals held barbecues or left chilly bins of cold drinks "just for no other reason, other than pure kindness".
Max survived primarily on instant noodles and lost 10kg, regaining 2kg since finishing on September 13. Noodles were light in his pack because when walking such distances "every ounce counts", he says.
Many young hikers wanting to look like wilderness legends began with large bowie knives but these were quickly discarded, as were Go-Pro cameras. Shiny new shovels for digging toilets also lasted a matter of days and hiker boxes in hostels dotted along the trail revealed the degree to which people lightened their loads.
Max chose to sleep most nights in his tent but camped near shelters because they were always located by a water source. He cooked with a burner made from a cat food can as he had seen on YouTube because it was lightweight, and stored his food in a special bag tossed over a high branch to keep it out of reach of bears at night.
Max, who before embarking on the trail worked as manager of Bob Owens Retirement Village, says the journey gave him a deep sense of gratitude for his life in Tauranga and he hopes his next job will be one that makes a difference to people's lives.
He encourages anyone considering a big physical challenge to follow their dreams.
"Through adversity we can learn a lot about ourselves and become better people," he says.
-See bayofplentytimes.co.nz website for Max's video of his closest encounter with a black bear.