We met in junior high school in the area of College Park, MD, a suburb of Washington D.C. and home to the University of Maryland at College Park, where both of our father's were professors. We became friends and kept in touch through college (Doug at Maryland, Aaron at Penn) and beyond and ended up in grad school together for about a year at Colorado State University. Doug left CSU early but stayed in the area and we hiked together a fair amount during this time until Aaron left Colorado and moved to Boston, MA.
Doug is a fairly avid hiker and backpacker who is also now enjoying x-country skiing and rock climbing. Past experience includes plenty of peaks in Colorado: twelvers, thirteeners and the occasional fourteener. Before the Wonderland Trail, "training" only took place on weekends... jogging and/or the gym would have helped. Doug stands about 5'10" and 155lbs. Biggest worries before the WT: consuming enough calories and not hurting a knee, ankle or foot. Doug currently does hikes with the CMC (Colorado Mountain Club).
I, Aaron, did a lot of hiking when I was young at the Farm and Wilderness Camps in the Green Mountains of Vermont and other places on the East Coast including Maine and the Adirondacks. Except for the two years of grad school in Colorado, though, I haven't done nearly as much in recent years. My biggest interests are games, computers/WWW, backpacking and reading. I didn't really do anything special to 'train' for the WT - just figured I would go and hike and hope for the best :) (Doug thought this kind of crazy). My biggest worry about the trail was that my right knee had been giving me problems; I was also worried about the rain and the bugs, either of which had the potential to make us miserable if they were too bad.
Doug carried the camera and took the vast majority of the photographs. He also kept a journal during the hike and the main text for each page is taken directly from that journal.
Other elements of these pages were added after the hike was well over.