My friends, I have a new spirit animal.

So, I’ve been following a stud named Drew Boysen — trail name, Scooby — as he hikes southbound on the Appalachian Trail starting from Mount Katahdin.

From what I understand, starting this particularly grueling hike in January is almost unheard of. First, Boysen had to climb Katahdin during some of the worst winter weather we’ve seen so far. Then he had to climb down, patch up his blisters, abrasions and frozen parts and start heading south through the notorious 100 Mile Wilderness.

Watching Boysen’s journey on YouTube is like waiting for someone to die a cold and miserable death, yet day after day, the man just keeps on trucking, enduring long trails of unbroken snow and temperatures that dive well below zero. And he’s spewing hilarious, self-effacing jokes the whole way.

The man encounters a whole lot of trouble as he contends with killer cold and several feet of fresh snow, but he adapts. He figures out how he needs to change things up and as he makes those changes, he takes us along for the ride.

Every night in the LaFlamme household, Drew Boysen is on the big screen. I’m still on Boysen’s Day 23, but already I feel I’ve learned more from this ambling and rambling hiker than I have from a vast selection of YouTubers whose specific aim is to educate.

And the man is funny. Funnier by far than any of the stand-up yucksters you’ll find on the late-night channels. Why, just last night, on Day 23, Boysen riffed for 10-plus minutes on some perverted scribble he had found in one of the Appalachian Trail’s shelters.

Speaking in a high, hilarious voice, Boysen spoke of the cosmic dread inspired by that scribble and he kept on talking even after falling up to his shoulders in a fairly impressive tree well. Such commitment! Such unrestrained, solitude-inspired lunacy!

Maybe I like this cat so much because he reminds me of myself — my wife suspects Scooby and I might be brothers — and of how I would conduct myself if I were sent on an impossibly long, cold walk through Maine’s most rugged terrain. Trapped inside his own head for long hours in treacherous conditions, Boysen just adapts. He keeps himself amused any way he can, and those of us watching from our warm and comfortable couches are spellbound.

In the midst of all that, Boysen never loses his gratitude for the experience. He loves and appreciates the wilderness around him, even as that wilderness does its best to grind him down.

“Look at that boulder!” he cried in one recent video. He was near a mountain top, all winded and red-faced after stomping through the chest-high snow of an unbroken trail. “Look how big that boulder is!”

Sometimes he just stops, gathering his wind and looking about him at the glory of a forest few of us will ever get to see up close.

“It’s so beautiful out here,” he’ll say, breath frosting out before him. He’ll just stop and stare at the golden sunset, the knuckles of mountain off in the distance or just the snow-covered pines.

Then he’ll shrug his pack up a little tighter, start babbling about his outhouse woes, and continue to the next destination.

I’ve got so much respect for Boysen — not just for his skill as a backpacker, but for the can-do spirit that brought him out there in the first place. This guy is doing what most of us only SAY we’ll do one day, if we can only get out from under the daily rat race.

And in every other video, Boysen is there shouting and cussing and then following all of that up with a vow to stop swearing so much, which causes me as much mirth as the bit about the shelter scribble.

“I swear too much,” he’ll say with great solemnity. “I’ve got to stop that.”

Yeah, that’s the ticket. Try to quit cussing when your heel is so blistered, it looks more like raw hamburg than a human body part. Try to talk clean and sweet when you crash through the ice and into a frozen river just before reaching your shelter for the night.

Go ahead and censor yourself when your boots are so frozen, you have to use boiling water to thaw them out. Or when you lose your Nalgene bottle — your only way of carrying water — while crawling under your fourth blowdown of the day.

I’m one of those who resorts to long strings of guttural profanity if I so much as stub my toe. If I have to spend more than five seconds searching for a pen I’ve misplaced, I’ll swear enough to redden the faces of street gangsters. Same deal if I have to get out of bed early or talk to an editor.

The way I see it, Boysen’s blue streak of expletives during his death-defying trek are not just acceptable, they may be vital to his survival. After all, science has shown that swearing is an excellent way to lower blood pressure, reduce pain and warm the body in cold conditions.

You know, probably.

Before he started this hike, Boysen didn’t have much of a social media presence. Nobody seems to know much about him. He’s possibly from Iowa and has a brother he checks in with from time to time. He’s an accomplished hiker who has through-hiked some of the biggest trails in the country.

Beyond that? Not much. If I wasn’t watching his YouTube videos every night, I’d probably think of him as a mythical creature who doesn’t really exist. I mean, who starts the AT from Mount Katahdin southbound in January, anyway?

Boysen is now closing in on New Hampshire’s White Mountains, with its 4,000-foot peaks and unpredictable, tantrum-throwing weather.

You can catch each day of his journey here: youtube.com/@DrewBoysen

I suggest starting on Day 1.

Mark LaFlamme is an award-winning Sun Journal reporter and columnist. He’s covered the nighttime police beat since 1994, which is just grand because he doesn’t like getting out of bed before noon. He is the author of eight published novels and rides a dual sport motorcycle everywhere he goes. Unless it’s winter, in which case he just sulks a lot.