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FIRST TIME BACKPACKER // Appalachian Trail // MY EXPERIENCE

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A YouTuber straps on a 40-pound pack for the first time and takes on 42 miles of the Appalachian Trail.

Elsa Rhae had never spent a night in the backcountry before she and her partner Barron set out for a four-day, 42-mile section hike on the Appalachian Trail. The result, “FIRST TIME BACKPACKER // Appalachian Trail // MY EXPERIENCE,” runs 37 minutes and 37 seconds and plays less like a highlight reel than an honest field report — sore shoulders, gear that either earns its weight or gets cursed at, and the slow realization that finishing on foot is its own reward.

• The trip covers 42 miles of the Appalachian Trail over four days, not a full thru-hike, giving Elsa a compressed but demanding introduction to multi-day backpacking.
• Published November 2, 2019, the video follows Elsa Rhae’s first-ever backpacking trip with Barron, covering gear testing, pack weight, camp routines, and the physical toll of the terrain.
• By mid-2020 it had grown into one of the pair’s most-watched outdoor travel vlogs, part of a dedicated “Backpacking w/ Elsa Rhae” playlist that kept pulling in viewers curious about first-time AT section hikes.

Gearing Up for a Section Hike, Not a Thru-Hike

Unlike the six-month odysseys that dominate Appalachian Trail lore, Elsa and Barron plotted a section hike — four days, 42 miles, a deliberately manageable bite of the 2,000-plus-mile trail. That scale matters: the video isn’t chasing Katahdin or Springer Mountain, it’s testing whether a first-timer can carry a loaded pack, read the terrain, and survive her own rookie mistakes over a long weekend. The gear checks that open the video — pack fit, weight distribution, what actually earns a spot in the bag — set the terms for everything that follows.

Viewers looking for a comparable jump-in-the-deep-end approach might also check out the solo 40-mile trek across the Trans-Catalina Island Trail, another first-person account of a multi-day hike built around similar logistics: water, weight, and daylight.

The Physical Toll of Mile After Mile

Elsa doesn’t gloss over the grind. The video tracks the cumulative wear of hauling a multi-day pack over rugged, unpredictable terrain — the kind of fatigue that doesn’t show up until day two or three, when adrenaline wears off and the miles start compounding. Camp routines, sore feet, and the mental negotiation required to keep moving are treated as the real substance of the trip, not a footnote before a scenic payoff.

Four days, 42 miles, and a pack she’d never carried before — that’s the whole premise, and the video never pretends it was easier than it looked.

Benefits of Section Hiking Format

Part of what made the video resonate with a large audience is exactly what it isn’t: a multi-week epic requiring resupply drops and trail names. A four-day section hike is achievable for someone with a weekend and a rental car, which is likely why it became one of the more-watched entries in Elsa and Barron’s outdoor catalog. It’s the same appeal that draws readers to accounts of walking thousands of miles with a single backpack — the gear logic scales down even when the mileage doesn’t.

For anyone weighing their own first overnight trip, the Outdoors category is stacked with similar first-person breakdowns of what actually goes wrong, and right, on a first backcountry trip.

Elsas Lasting Travel Memories

The back half of the video leans into the parts that don’t show up on a gear list: the fatigue that builds by mile 30, the small victories of making camp before dark, and the shift from dreading the pack to trusting it. Elsa frames the 42 miles less as a survival test and more as proof that a first-timer with the right prep can get through four days on the AT without it turning into a disaster.

Elsa and Barron have kept building out that backpacking playlist since, but this one — the 42-mile debut — is still the entry point most people find first, and it’s the one that set the template: pack it right, expect to hurt, and finish anyway.