BECOMING GOLDFINCH
Becoming Goldfinch
One woman's journey on the Appalachan Trail
By Jenna Biter
“You follow the white blaze,” says Brandi Swarms, uncomplicating the Appalachian Trail. “The white blaze takes you.”
Brandi, trail name “Goldfinch,” is 35 years old, tall as a cornstalk and has eyes as blue as swimming pools. If she was a season, it would be summer. She’s upbeat but thoughtful and a touch romantic, with a quiet vitality bubbling up from her soul. It sprung up in the heartache of a broken childhood home and decades later carried her onto the Appalachian National Scenic Trail, the roughly 2,200-mile-long route that connects Springer Mountain, Georgia, to Mount Katahdin, Maine.
Benton MacKaye conceived of the Appalachian Trail in a 1921 paper. Through the work of trail club members and passionate volunteers, the route was completed in 1937. Somewhere around 3 million people touch the AT every year, on day hikes, long sections of miles lashed together or thru-hikes that push right through all 14 states.
“I heard about the AT from a dear, sweet friend and father figure,” Brandi says, swimming through memories. “I’d heard him talk about it for years. I was probably just enchanted by his stories, but then when I looked it up, I thought, ‘What is this beast?’”
Another five or so years passed, as did her fat, fluffy cat, before Brandi would actually approach the trail. “When she passed, I went to my house, and thought, I can’t live here,” Brandi says, remembering the loss of her beloved hair tie-chasing feline, named Garber. Brandi had gotten the green-eyed kitten when she was in sixth grade, and in turn, the multicolored furball had gotten her through a childhood split between Michigan and North Carolina. Garber died when Brandi was 30, taking her last breath on her owner’s chest.
“These walls are too empty,” Brandi says, recalling the heartbreak. She held a garage sale and came away with $600 to buy hiking gear.
“I had never spent a night alone in the woods by myself before,” she says. “I’m all or nothing. I’m like, all right, I’ll figure it out or I won’t.”
PART I
A plaque at the summit of Springer Mountain marks the official northbound start of the Appalachian Trail. It was March 23, 2021, and Brandi remembers the trailhead humming like a hallway on the first day of school: “Where are you from? What’s your name? Did you hike the approach trail?” Thirty miles to the north, Blood Mountain rises 4,458 feet and is the first real test. “I climbed it and was like, ‘Was that easy? No, but was that completely doable? One-hundred percent.’ And so I realized quickly that hikers are very dramatic.” Brandi laughs, with a voice like bells.
She breezed through Georgia, breaking in her “trail legs,” filtering water from clear Southern streams, and throwing a thumb to hitch a ride to a hostel shower or a resupply in town. She’d always return to exactly the spot she exited even if she had to re-hike miles to get there.
“I was an ‘AT purist,’ so I never skipped a mile,” Brandi says. Purists hike past every white marker, or “blaze,” between Georgia and Maine. That means no “yellow blazing,” bypassing boring or tough sections by car; none of the oh-so-creative “aqua blazing,” floating down nearby waterways; and not even any “blue blazing,” hiking alternate routes due to bad conditions.
The miles climbed into the triple digits, and the characters lined up like a sitcom cast. There was “Little John” and “Homer” and “Purple Haze,” a woman tired of being known as the lady who had been bitten on the butt by a bear. Like the others, Purple Haze is a trail name, the alias a hiker goes by on the AT. A trail name is a gift one hiker bestows on another at some point along the way. Brandi had already passed up lazy attempts like “Legs” and “Sunshine,” until one day, a Florida man burst from a cabin to deem her “Goldfinch.” He’d seen Brandi sharing lunch with the gregarious birds a couple days before.
“I met a lot of Legs and Sunshine and all that,” she says, smiling. “I didn’t meet one other Goldfinch.”
Jeff, trail name unknown, was in his 70s, smoked more weed than he ate food, and was attempting an extended thru-hike from Florida to Nova Scotia for the second time. (Spoiler alert: He makes it.) Jeff taught Brandi how to hike 20-mile days so she could try to traverse the Great Smoky Mountains before snow blew through. The new skill became a superpower.
“I’m hiking consistently 20-mile days at this point, and I’m feeling really good about them,” Brandi says. “Not only is there a freedom, but there’s a ‘well done’ every day.”
She bounced back and forth between Tennessee and North Carolina as the trail snakes north along the state border. She passed through some regular old towns and hiker-friendly towns and often turned bends to find goodies put out by “trail angels.”
“You’ll come around the corner, and there’s a huge chocolate cake, and you’re like, ‘Manna!’” she says.
About eight weeks and 500 miles into the hike, Brandi was approaching the Virginia border town Damascus, a magical but very real land of brambleberry milkshakes and “wild ponies.” (Technically speaking, they’re feral, the descendants of domesticated horses loosed on the mountainside meadows to keep them well shorn.) “Right before I got to the wild ponies, I came off the trail for a week to go to a friend’s wedding, and when I came back, I had gotten a text from my mom that she had found a lump in her breast,” she says. Brandi didn’t hesitate. She left the trail to be with her mom as she battled stage 3 triple-negative breast cancer.
PART II
Two years came and went, and the wild called again. It was June 6, 2023, Mom had beaten the aggressive cancer, and Brandi had a new companion to join her on the trail. “I had a new kind of difficulty with a dog. I had the dog food, and that was very heavy,” Brandi says, patting the red golden retriever at her feet. “Rapture got the trail name ‘Freeloader’ because I didn’t make him carry anything.”
The pair found a like-minded hiker, this one human, in “Happy Feet” — “Happy,” for short. “He was like a little brother,” Brandi says. “It’s weird to find someone on the AT that you want to spend time with because it’s low-key getting married. You have to be able to be silent, and you have to be able to have conversation.”
The merry band was getting along and hiking well through the Shenandoah Mountains. “One day Rapture literally stopped and I looked at him, and he looked at me, and he put his paw up, and I said, ‘You’re done.’” With Happy riding shotgun in a rental car, Brandi drove Rapture to Michigan before flipping a U-turn and gunning it back to the trail. The round trip took two days. “This time, I was like, nothing’s stopping me. I’m coming back right away,” Brandi says. “Nothing could stop me.”
Virginia is a long state. The AT runs 557 miles through it, making Virginia the longest stretch in any state. Many a hiker hangs up their boots. Injuries stack up. People get bored. Others are behind schedule to reach Mt. Katahdin by mid-October, when Baxter State Park closes for the winter. “There’s something called the rollercoaster in Virginia — you hike it in one day — but it is just a constant up and down four or five or six times.” It was hot. Brandi was steaming with sweat. She remembers crawling into her tent at night with a layer of salt crystallized on her skin. She kept hiking.
Home to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy headquarters, where thru-hikers officially register their hike, Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, is known as the “psychological halfway.” It’s also where Brandi was stung on the ankle by a honeybee. The site swelled to the size of a baseball and oozed green. In Pennsylvania, home to the AT’s actual halfway mark and one of Brandi’s favorite states, she was plagued by mosquitoes and tripped up by rocks. “I remember I hitchhiked with a woman. I got in the car, and I closed the door, and I said, ‘Man, I love Pennsylvania so much.’ And she laughed and said, ‘I’ve never heard a hiker say that.’” Apparently hikers refer to the state as “Rocksylvania.” Still, Brandi kept going.
She crossed into New Jersey and then New York. “The hiker drama is that you don’t know if the rocks are literally going to stop at the state line or pour over, and unfortunately, they keep going for a while,” Brandi says, setting the record straight. She scooched past a protective mama black bear and four cubs and day-tripped to Manhattan with Happy to see the city sights.
“It feels like slow motion now, but I was walking, I looked up and there was a huge hornet’s nest. I looked down and then all of a sudden, I felt like a hot knife on the back of my skull.” Brandi screamed, “Happy help me!” Her throat swelled, and she started to panic. “Will my breath leave me or not?” Brandi dug through her well-stocked first aid kit — “most people have two Band-Aids and a dirty Q-tip” — and popped some Benadryl while Happy found a shortcut off the trail. A hive-covered Brandi knocked on the first door they found. An old woman answered and drove Brandi into Pawling, New York, where she got another ride to urgent care a few towns over. “I had this looming feeling,” she says. Brandi left the trail again.
PART III
Another two years and countless immunotherapy treatments came and went. It turned out Brandi was deathly allergic to yellow jackets, white-faced hornets, yellow hornets and wasps. She also learned that the AT wasn’t her identity. “I think there was some of that wrapped up in me, but I wanted to finish what I started,” she says. Clear-eyed but nervous, she hit the trail again on July 29, 2025.
“When I got dropped off, I re-hiked the miles to where I got stung because I’m a purist,” Brandi says, remembering the overwhelming fear. The fateful spot came and went, but literally and figuratively, Brandi wasn’t out of the woods. Before leaving home, she had forgotten to check the status of her water purifier — it was broken — and the lapse brought her low. “I just felt such turmoil of, what are you doing? You don’t belong here.” She borrowed from another hiker, and his kind words urged her on.
“Next morning, I got stung by a bunch of yellow jackets.” Before starting immunotherapy the strings could have been lethal. She wept for two hours sitting in the front yard of what happened to be a medic’s house. “Then I got up, brushed it off, and just went on,” says Brandi.
She made it into Connecticut and back to 20-mile days. Vermont brought maple syrup everything. This time Rapture stuck with her until “the Whites,” the treacherous but beautiful mountains that run from New Hampshire to Maine. “All the hikers talk about the Whites, and I will say, it’s the one time they’re right,” Brandi says. They’re beautiful, and they’re grueling. “It was hard to leave Rapture, but it was almost full circle, how it would finish was how it had started.”
Brandi missed Happy but found like-minded hikers in a family of nine. “It was the dad, who had wanted to hike the trail since he was like 12 years old, and this incredible mother and seven children. I mean, there was a 5-year-old, his name was Jackson, and when I met him, he literally just jumped from rock to rock.” Brandi tosses her head. “What a childhood.”
She continues, “I got to Maine and something in my spirit blew up. I got so re-energized.” The famous hostel before the Hundred-Mile Wilderness is owned by a legend called “Poet.” “You hear about Poet all the way down in Georgia,” Brandi says. “So, I’m finally meeting Poet, and he’s as cool as you’d think he’d be, and the food is as good as you’d hoped it’d be.” He drives hikers to the wilderness edge for the last stretch of the Appalachian Trail.
I pop out of the 100-mile wilderness, and I just shout, and I holler, and I scream, and I run, and I was just so happy,” Brandi says. “Boy, I was just like, I don’t know, is euphoric the right word? I just felt like a piece of heaven came down and met me.”
Mt. Katahdin was an arduous climb, but she made it to the summit. It was totally gray. “It’s funny because a few days before I was like, I’m going to wait until it’s sunny up there because I didn’t come this far . . . no, I was just pumped to get up there, and then it was over.”
Brandi was at the airport that night: Sept. 25, 2025. Pieced together, it took her about six months to hike the Appalachian Trail from start to finish. “A few months later I was reading a book, and I just stopped and was like, dude, you hiked the whole AT.”
