A Walk in the Woods

by Bill Bryson

  Unfortunately for the entrepreneurs, then came the Great Depression, and the commercial impulse withered. Instead, under that dizzying socialist impulse that marked the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, the land was bought for the nation. The people were moved out, and the Civilian Conservation Corps was put to work building pretty stone bridges, picnic shelters, visitor centers, and much else, and the whole was opened to the public in July 1936. It is the quality of craftsmanship that accounts substantially for the glory of Shenandoah National Park. Indeed, it is one of the few examples of large-scale human handiwork (Hoover Dam is another, and Mount Rushmore, I would submit, is a third) anywhere in the United States that complements, even enhances, a natural landscape. I suppose that, too, is one reason I liked walking along Skyline Drive

  , with its broad, lawnlike grass verges and stone retaining walls, its clusters of artfully planted birches, its gentle curves leading to arresting, thoughtfully composed panoramas. This is the way all highways should be. For a time it looked as if all highways would be like this. It is no accident that the first highways in America were called parkways. That’s what they were envisioned to be — parks you could drive through.

  Almost none of this spirit of craftsmanship is evident on the AT in the park — you wouldn’t expect it to on a trail devoted to wilderness — but it is agreeably encountered in the park’s shelters, or huts, which have something of the picturesque rusticity of the Smokies shelters but are airier, cleaner, better designed, and without those horrible, depressing chain-link fences across their fronts.

  Though Katz thought I was preposterous, I insisted on sleeping at shelters after our night at the spring (I somehow felt I could defend a shelter against marauding bears) and in any case the Shenandoah shelters were too nice not to use. Every one of them was attractive, thoughtfully sited, and had a good water source, picnic table, and privy. For two nights we had shelters to ourselves, and on the third we were just exchanging congratulations on this remarkable string of luck when we heard a cacophony of voices approaching through the woods. We peeked around the corner and found a Boy Scout troop marching into the clearing. They said hello and we said hello, and then we sat with our legs dangling from the sleeping platform and watched them fill the clearing with their tents and abundant gear, pleased to have something to look at other than each other. There were three adult supervisors and seventeen Boy Scouts, all charmingly incompetent. Tents went up, then swiftly collapsed or keeled over. One of the adults went off to filter water and fell in the creek. Even Katz agreed that this was better than TV. For the first time since we had left New Hampshire, we felt like masters of the trail.

  A few minutes later, a cheerful lone hiker arrived. His name was John Connolly, and he was a high school teacher from upstate New York. He had been hiking the trail, evidently only a couple of miles behind us, for four days, and had been camping alone in the open each night, which struck me now as awfully brave. He hadn’t seen any bears — indeed, he had been section hiking the trail for years and had seen a bear only once, briefly, rump end and fleeing, deep in the Maine woods. John was followed shortly by two men about our age from Louisville — Jim and Chuck, both real nice fellows, self-effacing and funny. We hadn’t seen more than three or four hikers since leaving Waynesboro, and now suddenly we were mobbed.

  “What day is it?” I asked, and everyone had to stop and think.

  “Friday,” someone said. “Yeah, Friday.” That explained it — the start of a weekend.

  We all sat around the picnic table, cooking and eating. It was wonderfully convivial. The three others had hiked a great deal and told us all about the trail ahead as far as Maine, which still seemed as distant as the next cosmos. Then the conversation turned to a perennial favorite among hikers — how crowded the trail had become. Connolly talked about how he had hiked nearly half the trail in 1987, at the height of summer, and had gone days without seeing anyone, and Jim and Chuck heartily seconded this.

  This is something you hear a lot, and it is certainly true that more people are hiking than ever before. Until the 1970s, fewer than 50 people a year thru-hiked the AT. As recently as 1984, the number was just 100. By 1990, it had pushed past 200, and today it is approaching 300. These are big increases, but they are also still tiny, tiny numbers. Just before we set off, my local newspaper in New Hampshire had an interview with a trail maintainer who noted that twenty years ago the three campsites in his section averaged about a dozen visitors a week in July and August and that now they sometimes got as many as a hundred in a week. The amazing thing about that, if you ask me, is that they got so few for so long. Anyway, a hundred visitors a week for three campsites at the height of summer hardly seems overwhelming.

  Perhaps I was coming at this from the wrong direction, having hiked in crowded little England for so long, but what never ceased to astonish me throughout our long summer was how empty the trail was. Nobody knows how many people hike the Appalachian Trail, but most estimates put the number at around three or four million a year. If four million is right, and we assume that probably three-quarters of that hiking is done during the six warmest months, that means an average of 16,500 people on the trail a day in season, or 7.5 people for each mile of trail, one person every 700 feet. In fact, few sections will experience anything like that high a density. A very high proportion of those four million annual hikers will be concentrated in certain popular places for a day or a weekend — the Presidential range in New Hampshire, Baxter State Park in Maine, Mount Greylock in Massachusetts, in the Smokies, and Shenandoah National Park. That four million will also include a high proportion of what you might call Reebok hikers — people who park their car, walk 400 yards, get back in their car, drive off, and never do anything as breathtaking as that again. Believe me, no matter what anyone tells you, the Appalachian Trail is not crowded.

  When people bleat on about the trail being too crowded, what they mean is that the shelters are too crowded, and this is indubitably sometimes so. The problem, however, is not that there are too many hikers for the shelters but too few shelters for the hikers, Shenandoah National Park has just eight huts, each able to accommodate no more than eight people in comfort, ten at a pinch, in 101 miles of national park. That’s about average for the trail overall. Although the distances between shelters can vary enormously, there is on average an AT shelter, cabin, hut, or lean-to (240 of them altogether) about every ten miles. That means adequate covered sleeping space for just 2,500 hikers over 2,200 miles of trail. When you consider that more than 100 million Americans live within a day’s drive of the Appalachian Trail, it is hardly surprising that 2,500 sleeping spaces is sometimes not enough. Yet, perversely, pressure is growing in some quarters to reduce the number of shelters to discourage what is seen — amazingly to me — as overuse of the trail.

  So, as always when the conversation turned to the crowdedness of the trail and the fact that you now sometimes see a dozen people in a day when formerly you would have been lucky to see two, I listened politely and said, “You guys ought to try hiking in England.”

  Jim turned to me and said, in a kindly, patient way, “But you see, Bill, we’re not in England.” Perhaps he had a point.

  Now here is another reason I am exceptionally fond of Shenandoah National Park, and why I am probably not cut out to be a proper American trail hiker — cheeseburgers. You can get cheeseburgers quite regularly in Shenandoah National Park, and Coca-Cola with ice, and french fries and ice cream, and a good deal else. Although the rampant commercialization I spoke of a moment ago never happened (and thank goodness, of course), something of that esprit de commerce lives on in Shenandoah. The park is liberally sprinkled with public campgrounds and rest stops with restaurants and shops — and the AT, God bless it, pays nearly every one of them a call. It is entirely against the spirit of the AT to have restaurant breaks along the trail, but I never met a hiker who didn’t appreciate it to bits.

  Katz, Connolly, and I had our first experience of it the next morni
ng, after we had said farewell to Jim and Chuck and the Boy Scouts, who were all headed south, when we arrived about lunchtime at a lively commercial sprawl called Big Meadows.

  Big Meadows had a campground, a lodge, a restaurant, a gift shop / general store, and lots and lots of people spread around a big sunny grassy space. (Although it is a big meadow, it was actually named for a guy named Meadows, which pleased me very much for some reason.) We dropped our packs on the grass outside and hastened into the busy restaurant, where we greedily partook of everything greasy, then repaired to the lawn to smoke and burp and enjoy a spell of tranquil digestion. As we lay there propped against our packs, a tourist in an unfortunate straw hat, clutching an ice cream, came up and looked us over in a friendly manner. “So you fellas hiking?” he said.

  We said we were.

  “And you carry those packs?”

  “Until we find someone to carry them for us,” said Katz cheerfully.

  “How far you come this morning?”

  “Oh, about eight miles.”

  “Eight miles! Lord. And how far’ll you go this afternoon?”

  “Oh, maybe another eight miles.”

  “No kidding! Sixteen miles on foot? With those things on your back? Man — ain’t that a kick.” He called across the lawn: “Bernice, come here a minute. You gotta see this.” He looked at us again. “So whaddaya got in there? Clothes and stuff, I suppose?”

  “And food,” said Connolly.

  “You carry your own food, huh?”

  “Have to.”

  “Well, ain’t that a kick.”

  Bernice arrived, and he explained to her that we were using our legs to proceed across the landscape. “Ain’t that something? They got all their food and everything in those packs.”

  “Is that a fact?” Bernice said with admiration and interest. “So, you’re like walkin’ everywhere?” We nodded. “You walked here? All the way up here?”

  “We walk everywhere,” said Katz solemnly.

  “You never walked all the way up here!”

  “Well, we did,” said Katz, for whom this was becoming one of the proudest moments of his life.

  I went off to call home from a pay phone and use the men’s room. When I returned a few minutes later, Katz had accumulated a small, appreciative crowd and was demonstrating the use and theory of various straps and toggles on his backpack. Then, at someone’s behest, he put the pack on and posed for pictures. I had never seen him so happy.

  While he was still occupied, Connolly and I went into the little grocery part of the complex to have a look around, and I realized just how little regarded and incidental hikers are to the real business of the park. Only 3 percent of Shenandoah’s two million annual visitors go more than a few yards into what is generously termed the backcountry. Ninety percent of visitors arrive in cars or motor homes. This was a store for them. Nearly everything in the store required microwaving or oven heating or scrupulous refrigeration or came in large, family-sized quantities. (It’s a rare hiker who wants twenty-four hamburger buns, I find.) There was not a single item of conventional trail food — raisins or peanuts or small, portable quantities of packets or canned goods — which was a little dispiriting in a national park.

  With no choice, and desperate not to eat noodles again if we could possibly help it (Connolly, I was delighted to learn, was also a noodles man), we bought twenty-four hot dogs and matching buns, a two-liter bottle of Coke, and a couple of large bags of cookies. Then we collected Katz, who announced regretfully to his adoring audience that he had to go — there were mountains still to climb — and stepped valiantly back into the woods.

  We stopped for the night at a lovely, secluded spot called Rock Spring Hut, perched on a steep hillside with a long view over the Shenandoah Valley far below. The shelter even had a swing — a two-seater that hung on chains from the shelter overhang, put there in memory of one Theresa Affronti, who had loved the trail, according to a plaque on its back — which I thought was rather splendid. Earlier visitors to the shelter had left behind an assortment of canned foods — beans, corn, Spam, baby carrots — which were lined up carefully along one of the support rafters. You find this sort of thing quite a lot on the trail. In some places, friends of the trail will hike up to shelters with homemade cookies or platters of fried chicken. It’s quite wonderful.

  While we were cooking dinner, a young southbound thru-hiker — the first of the season — arrived. He had hiked twenty-six miles that day and thought he had died and gone to heaven when he learned that hot dogs were on the menu. Six hot dogs apiece was more than Katz and Connolly and I could eat, so we each ate four, and a quantity of cookies, and saved the rest for breakfast. But the young southbounder ate as if he had never eaten before. He downed six hot dogs, then a can of baby carrots, and gratefully accepted a dozen or so Oreos, one after the other, and ate them with great savor and particularity. He told us he had started in Maine in deep snow and had been endlessly caught in blizzards, but was still averaging twenty-five miles a day. He was only about five-foot-six, and his pack was enormous. No wonder he had an appetite. He was trying to hike the trail in three months, mostly by putting in very long days. When we woke in the morning, dawn was only just leaking in but he had already gone. Where he had slept there was a brief note thanking us for the food and wishing us luck. We never did learn his name.

  Late the next morning, when I realized that I had considerably outstripped Katz and Connolly, who were talking and not making particularly good time, I stopped to wait for them in a broad, ancient-seeming, deeply fetching glade cradled by steep hills, which gave it a vaguely enchanted, secretive feel. Everything you could ask for in a woodland setting was here — tall, stately trees broken at intervals by escalators of dusty sunshine, winding brook, floor of plump ferns, cool air languidly adrift in a lovely green stillness — and I remember thinking what an exceptionally nice place this would be to camp.

  Just over a month later, two young women, Lollie Winans and Julianne Williams, evidently had the same thought. They pitched their tents somewhere in this tranquil grove, then hiked the short way through the woods to Skyland Lodge, another commercial complex, to eat in its restaurant. No one knows exactly what happened, but some person at Skyland presumably watched them dine, then followed them back to their campsite. They were found three days later in their tents with their hands bound and their throats cut. There was no apparent motive. There has never been a suspect. Their deaths will almost certainly forever be a mystery. Of course I had no idea of this at the time, so when Katz and Connolly caught up I simply observed to them what an attractive spot it was. They looked at it and agreed, and then we moved on.

  We had lunch with Connolly at Skyland, and then he left us to hitchhike back to his car at Rockfish Gap and return home. Katz and I bade him farewell and then pushed on, for that was what we did. We had nearly completed the first part of our adventure, so there was a certain home-stretch perkiness in our steps. We walked for three days more, stopping at restaurants when we came to them, and camping in shelters, which once again we had mostly to ourselves. On our next to last day on the trail, our sixth since setting off from Rockfish Gap, we were walking along beneath dull skies when there came an abrupt, cold roaring of wind. Trees danced and swayed, dust and leaves rose up around us in boisterous swirls, and our jackets and outerwear took on sudden lives of their own, leaping and flapping about us. There was a roll of thunder and then it began to rain — a really cold, miserable, penetrating rain. We sheathed ourselves in nylon and stoically pushed on.

  It turned out to be an awful day in nearly every way. In the early afternoon, I discovered that I had lost my backpack raincover (which, may I just say here, was a completely useless, ill-designed piece of crap anyway, for which I had paid $25) and that nearly everything in my pack now ranged from disagreeably damp to completely sodden. I had, fortunately, taken to wrapping my sleeping bag in a double thickness of trash bags (cost: 35 cents), so it at least was dry. Twenty minutes
later, as I sheltered under a bough waiting for Katz, he arrived and immediately said, “Hey, where’s your stick?” I had lost my beloved walking stick — I suddenly remembered propping it against a tree when I had stopped to tie a lace — and was filled with despair. That stick had seen me through six and a half weeks of mountains, had become all but part of me. It was a link with my children, whom I missed more than I can tell you. I felt like weeping. I told Katz where I thought I’d left it, at a place called Elkwallow Gap, about four miles back.

  “I’ll get it for you,” he said without hesitation and started to drop his pack. I could have wept again — he really meant it — but I wouldn’t let him go. It was too far, and besides, Elkwallow Gap was a public place. Someone would have taken it as a souvenir by now.