“Joe White and Bryan Wolf expected to spend nearly six months hiking the Appalachian Trail, but after nine days the McNicholas High School grads had decided to call it quits.

They were feeling the pain of 70-pound backpacks (too heavy) and subsisting on 2,500 calories a day (too few). Maine’s 100-Mile Wilderness – one of the most isolated parts of the trail – had taken its toll, and a winter’s worth of snow and ice still lay ahead.

“I don’t think we knew what we were getting into,” says Wolf, 25, of Mount Washington. …”