Supernova Thundercat Lives in Memoriam

POSTER UNVEILED!!!

My very thoughtful and talented friend John Wolf sent me this awesome poster he created to commemorate my thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail in 2015. The graphical simplicity belies the fact that the composition is nearly flawless.

Supernova Thundercat was my “trail name”. Everyone that hikes the trail is given one, as common names are near sacrilege within the A.T. culture. So naturally John took the Thundercat logo (the musical artist Thundercat is one of my favorite musicians, therefore I gave myself the moniker for the trail) and embedded a cosmic background into the logo to represent the “supernova” aspect. That first part of my trail name doesn’t really have much personal history, it was basically used to make the “Thundercat” sound even more badass- kind of like adding hot fudge to a cool sundae. Also, the two-part name adds a bit of flair and theatrics. Speaking of theatrics, there’s also a good chance I was subconsciously thinking of Alexander Supertramp from the fantastic movie Into the Wild when devising a two-part name. Most people just called me Thundercat on the trail, a shortened version which I get,  because Supernova Thundercat can be a mouthful.

Since it was a southbound thru-hike, I started the trail in Maine (Mt. Katahdin) on June 30th, and finished in Georgia (Springer Mtn.) on November 21st. Just in the nick of time for Thanksgiving and my mom’s wedding in Florida the day after! In case you are wondering what the color-coded calendar means, well, the purple dots are days I was hiking miles and the white dots represent the days I was taking a “zero” day (A.T. parlance for a day off in a small town). I look back fondly on the experience, and have a healthy dose of nostalgia for those simple hardworking days of waking up with the sun, hiking 20 miles, and then going to bed when the sun sets. My ritual was to start every day with a Pop Tart and finish the day with Ramen noodles. I would usually fall asleep listening to music on my Ipod, partly to enjoy the music, partly to mask the sound of whatever critters (hopefully no bears!) were lurking outside my tent. I never got tired of my hiking routine, in fact, I still like to eat both Ramen noodles and Pop Tarts. It might be the nostalgia again.

Here is a picture of me on the trail, wearing my K-State Wildcat t-shirt. I wore this shirt almost every day, occasionally changing to my Tame Impala shirt when the Wildcat one got just a little too smelly! There were at least a couple of people on the trail I met with the trail name “Wildcat”, so sometimes people got me confused with those hikers mostly because of the shirt. Eventually other thru-hikers recognized me and either called me Thundercat or Supernova Thundercat if they “weren’t into the whole brevity thing.”

And to close out the post, I’m gonna share one of my favorite Thundercat songs, from his remarkable album Apocalypse (2013), “Oh Sheit It’s X”. Supernova Thundercat over and out!