Mike Lecompte’s Facebook posts made hiking the 2,180-mile Appalachian Trail look easy.

There were Oreo cookie sandwiches, stories about trail magic, blurbs about people he met, videos of mountaintops that many will never climb and, behind an endless growing beard, an always-smiling face, even while hitch hiking in the rain.

“I wanted to keep my posts positive,” Lecompte said.

On July 3, three months into his trek, Lecompte quit smiling.

“I want to deglamorize the AT a little bit,” Lecompte posted via video from a campsite named after a Connecticut swamp.

“The bugs are unbelievable … I’m usually drenched from sweat … I stink really bad, and my feet are totally soaked,” Lecompte said while picking bugs from his eyes.

“I was showing all the great stuff about the AT,” Lecompte said from the back porch of his Lewiston home. “But the reality is, you work your butt off.” He felt that by posting only the good stuff, people might think it was easy, he said.

“It’s brutal. There is nothing easy about it,” Lecompte said about the Appalachian Trail. “I am happy to be done.”

Lecompte started his hike April 7, hiking the approach trail in Georgia with his 20-year-old son, Logan. He finished five months later in Maine on Aug. 29 with his 18-year-old daughter, Lauren.

He met all sorts of people in between.

There was “Alpine Pirate” from Austria, “Taz” from Tasmania and “G-Bird” from Germany.

He hiked on the heels of the Kallin family until Hanover, N.H. Lecompte had heard stories about the Dresden family of four and wanted to meet them.

David and Emily Kallin and their two children — Nathan, 9, and Maddy, 8 — were always a day or two ahead, Lecompte said. He read their logbook entries at shelters along the trail.

Lecompte finally caught up with them when the family pulled off the trail for an ultimate Frisbee tournament in Hanover.

While resting in a lean-to in Virginia with three others, Lecompte discovered one hiker was from Lewiston and a father and son were from Waterville. The Lewiston man earned the name “Free Man” along the trail, and the name fit him well, Lecompte said.

“It’s a great community of people,” Lecompte said about the AT. “Everyone is there for each other. Especially toward the end.”

The start of Lecompte’s journey was a bit too crowded for his taste, but as he hiked north, he encountered fewer and fewer people.

“It gets weeded out by New Hampshire,” Lecompte said. People drop off the trail for many different reasons — health, family emergencies and even weddings, he said.

“It takes a fair amount of luck to finish,” he said.

Boredom takes a big toll on many, he said.

“It’s such a mental game. You’re doing the same thing day after day … the trail begins to look the same. You get to a point that you say it’s not fun anymore,” he said. Some come to the conclusion that if it’s not fun anymore, then why continue, he said.

The search for bright spots are what kept Lecompte going.

“A lot of the time, it’s boring, tedious and the same, but the bright spots do come,” he said. 

Mountain vistas, cool people and neat little towns are the bright spots Lecompte hiked toward. “The trail is funny and you don’t know when (bright spots) are going to come.”

Lecompte lost 25 pounds on the trail and celebrated his 53rd birthday on April 12 by crossing from Georgia into North Carolina. He hiked up to 25 miles a day and wore out four pairs of shoes.

Lecompte said he made a trade along the trail. He had Super Glue to fix one hiker’s boots while the other guy had Leukotape to repair Lecompte’s blisters. 

Lecompte said the remoteness of Maine made it difficult for hikers nearing the end of the trail on Mount Katahdin. He said he witnessed friends with things on their feet that barely resembled shoes. “They were trashed beyond the point of fixing … but you can’t buy new shoes in Caratunk,” he said.

“My feet are still numb,” Lecompte said a week after finishing the trail. “They call them Christmas toes because you don’t get the feeling back until December.”

Lecompte said consistency was key.

“The people that progress are ones that don’t take a lot of zero days,” he said. “Zero days” are when there’s no hiking. Those days really do a number on your average, he said.

“I used more nero days than zero days,” he said. “Nero days” are four- or five-mile days that Lecompte would use when approaching small towns.

Lecompte could get into town early enough to get laundry done, shop for food, take a shower and a get good night’s sleep in a motel before moving on the next morning.

Lecompte’s wife, Ronda, met up with him for four days in Pennsylvania. “It was great to see her. I missed her a lot,” he said.

Ronda’s visit allowed Lecompte to “slack pack,” carrying the bare minimum in his backpack while his wife shuttled the rest of his gear to road crossings up ahead. “I would hike til (3 p.m.) or so and then we would spend the rest of the day together.

“My wife was a huge supporter of this. I could not have done it without her,” he said.

Soon after he returned, Lecompte made a presentation on the AT at Auburn Middle School where Ronda teaches. “The kids were engaged. It was a topic they really latched on to,” he said. “The kids had a lot of great questions.”

Lecompte said Maine has the most difficult mile — Mahoosuc Notch — and the most remote section — Hundred-Mile Wilderness — of the AT, but not the most bugs.

That honor belongs to Connecticut and Massachusetts, he said.

“There were times when the bugs were really bad. “I would be trying to focus on my next step and they would dive bomb into your eyes.”

Bug repellent was useless, he said. “You would sweat it off in 15 minutes.”

Five months of hiking, often by himself, did allow Lecompte to come to a few conclusions about life. 

The first was dealing with fear.

“I did let go of fear. I put myself into some situations that people would definitely fear and things always worked out,” he said. “There is no reason to be fearful.”

Second, Lecompte realized he was not always in control. “There was something greater in control … I need to just let it unfold naturally, just see what happens, let the greater power take care of it, and it all works out.”

Now that Lecompte’s “journey is complete,” the retired Auburn firefighter is settling back into city life.

“I gotta get a job,” he said. And the beard that he had been growing since April 1 was recently shaved off.

“Try eating an ice cream cone with this,” said the hiker with the trail name of  “Scuffy.”

“I like ice cream cones. I want to eat them again,” he said.

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