Entertainment on the AT: Part 2, Music

Katahdin's Knife Edge. Final ascent of the AT.

I'm a human, and like all other humans, I love music (if you don't then you're not a human and no amount of evidence will convince me otherwise). I pretty much am always listening to music. I guess I like to have a soundtrack playing as I go about living my life. The same is true for when I'm out backpacking, and it won't be any different when I'm on the AT. When I picture myself summiting Katahdin, I imagine listening to something super epic and triumphant. You know, something by Hans Zimmer or Howard Shore.

So in order to make that happen, I need to have the potential to listen to music on the trail. As you're probably aware, I plan on taking my iPhone. But I will have deleted all of my music from my iPhone to make space for pictures. Cause duh, I'll probably take a million billion pictures. So how will I listen to music? Two ways, an iPod Shuffle and Spotify.

Pretty small, right?

Mostly, I'll be listening to my iPod Shuffle. Why a shuffle? Well, they weigh very little, 0.44 ounces to be specific. And they hold 2 gigs worth of mp3s. That doesn't seem like much, and I'll probably agree after a couple of months, but I guess the tactic is to limit my uploads to single songs rather than whole albums. They charge fast (in about two hours), and their battery lasts for about 15 hours of playback (which is pretty huge). Best of all, they cost 50 bucks new (and even less on Amazon). Another popular option is the Sansa Clip, which is pretty similar in all respects (and maybe easier to navigate as the shuffle has no screen to help select songs).

Gettin' my Howard Shore on.

The Spotify App for iPhone is great for thruhikers. At first glance it seems next to worthless seeing as how you need an internet (or 4G) connection to stream music from Spotify, but Spotify actually has a feature which allows you to create and download playlists for offline mode (assuming you have access to wifi). Why is that so awesome? Because of two reasons. One, the downloaded playlists take up a lot less space on your device than having the songs saved on iTunes. And two, I can swap the music on my phone throughout my thruhike. So lets say I've listened to my Jock Jamz Vol. 3 (just kidding, well, maybe not) playlist three thousand times by Harper's Ferry and I'm just plain sick of it. Not a problem, I'll just delete that downloaded playlist and create another on a day I spend in time. Voilà, a seemingly infinite amount of music options and very little weight.