With under a month left on his Appalachian Trail thru-hike, a long-distance hiker writing for The Trek has set up camp in Fishkill, New York for a rest day — a 'zero' in trail slang, meaning a day with zero miles hiked. The stop comes after one of his strongest stretches yet: nearly 199 miles over eight consecutive days of walking, helped along by mostly flat terrain and a lucky weather gamble.
The gamble was taking his previous rest day on a Friday rather than his usual Sunday. It paid off — he dodged a rainy day on trail and then strung together eight straight days of dry weather. Back in Fishkill, he spent the Sunday morning updating his blog while the Formula 1 Grand Prix from Austin, Texas played in the background (a race start late enough in the day to leave the morning free), and sketched out an itinerary for the weeks ahead.
The numbers now matter. He's aiming to finish the trail the weekend before Thanksgiving, and he's deliberately built in buffer time for at least one emergency rest day in case injury, illness or weather throws a wrench in the plan. The upcoming week looks similar to the last: gentle terrain, three two-day backpacking stints and three nights in the tent. The bigger challenge will be temperature — overnight lows in the 30s Fahrenheit, some nudging freezing, which is classic late-October reality on the trail in this part of the Northeast.
Fishkill itself is a practical resupply and recovery stop. The town sits in New York's Hudson Valley, just off Interstate 84, and long-distance hikers pass through this corridor as the Appalachian Trail crosses the region between the Hudson River and Connecticut. For anyone walking the trail's roughly 2,190 miles between Georgia and Maine, towns like this one are where you dry out your tent, eat a real meal and reset your head for the next hundred miles.
There's also a quieter thread in the post worth noting for anyone dreaming about a long hike: the writer reflects on how easy it now is to document a trek like this from a phone and a laptop, and how strange it feels to get credit for photographing terrain nobody made. It's a reminder that a thru-hike is as much a mental and logging exercise as a physical one — itineraries, blog posts, weather windows and buffer days all matter as much as strong legs.
For travellers, the takeaway is simple. Late autumn is still hikeable on the mid-Atlantic and Hudson Valley sections of the Appalachian Trail, but you'll want a warm sleeping bag, flexible plans and town stops like Fishkill spaced along your route. And if you'd rather just visit: Fishkill makes an easy base for day hikes on the AT and nearby Hudson Highlands trails, with the added bonus of a charming main street to recover in afterwards.
