Skywalker--Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail

by Bill Walker

  The first thing I saw heading up the trail’s steep ascent was my light blue balaklava, which had obviously fallen out of my rain jacket on the descent. The climb up was steeper than I had remembered, probably because I’d had so much adrenaline pumping the previous day. Finally, I got back up to the summit of Blue Mountain and hurried down southward, remembering that my backpack should be only a few hundred yards down and just off the trail to the left, in the bushes. I spotted it and anxiously checked to see if the contents were intact. They were. That probably wouldn’t have been the case in high summer, but bears weren’t hanging out at the higher elevations yet because the forest was still dormant.

  I was jubilant. Justin had said yesterday afternoon at Low Gap Shelter that he might go to Blue Mountain Shelter, which was only about a half mile south of where my backpack had been, so I decided to continue south and check on him. When I got there he was the only person in the shelter, still bundled in his sleeping bag.

  “Man, what in the world are you doing here?” he asked. After I filled him in on my mishap, he said, “Wow, that sounds like more than your average hiker bitch. You weren’t lying when you said how new you are at this.”

  But then he said, “You might have done the smart thing, not stopping here. I froze my ass off. I don’t know why they built this shelter completely exposed to the wind from the north.”

  When I hoisted my backpack to head back down the trail he perked up from his sleeping bag, and called out, “I hope you’re not gonna’ quit.”

  Looking back, I said, “No way, man.” As fate would have it this was to be the last time I ever saw him.

  One doesn’t just skate away from a “day from hell.” I may well not have been in as much danger as I had feared at the time. I honestly don’t know. But for days I would feel a deep down-to-the-bone weariness and nagging anxiety in the wake of the incident. And wild rumors of my having been carried off the mountain and revived in a hypothermia ward would proliferate among hikers.

  Two days later I arrived at Dick’s Creek Gap and hitchhiked easily into Hiawassee, the northernmost town in Georgia. This picturesque mountain village had an indefinable, mysterious quality. One guidebook described it as a place where “everybody is very white, very heavy, and very slow.” Indeed, I didn’t see a single black person in the entire town. This was especially noteworthy in a state in which African-Americans constitute 30 percent of the population.

  “What did you guys do around here?” the ever garrulous Vertical Jerry, a real-estate broker from New Jersey kept badgering me. “Did you kill all the blacks?” In fact—being hemmed in on all sides by mountains—little assimilation had taken place, thus occasioning the stereotype of the underbred hillfolk.

  Vertical Jerry, Linebacker, and I opted for the local buffet that night. “Skywalker,” Vertical Jerry said, “is there some reason all the locals have a stricken look when you walk by?”

  “Yes,” I replied, “they can sense my parents married outside the immediate family.”

  Continuing on his theme of southern provincialism, Vertical Jerry announced to nobody in particular, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Deliverance factor is alive and well in this town. Make sure all doors are latched and bolted this evening.”

  He, of course, was referring to the infamous movie, Deliverance, in which some north Georgia backwoodsmen rampage on some visiting urbanites to the point of their humiliation and doom. The good news is that over the course of traveling fourteen states from south to north many stereotypes would be exploded as hikers entered regions previously unknown to them.

  Linebacker continued being very quiet, especially to me. The previous day I had, with the best intentions, goaded him into attempting to make it over Kelly’s Knob and all the way into Hiawassee.

  “It shouldn’t be that difficult to make good miles tomorrow,” I said. “The weather forecast is good.”

  “You didn’t know what you were talking about yesterday,” he shot back. He then solemnly recounted how after going all out the entire day it had taken him three hours to cover the last two miles in the dark. Apparently, he viewed it all as his “day from hell.”

  “The car noise from the highway saved me,” he succinctly noted.

  “How much do you weigh, man?” Vertical Jerry brazenly asked.

  “Three-twenty,” Linebacker stated flatly.

  Good gosh, I thought. If I had known that I wouldn’t have recommended he try that yesterday.

  Vertical Jerry suggested that the three of us meet out front at seven forty-five in the morning. to catch a ride back to the trail. “Count me in,” Linebacker said. But Linebacker didn’t show up, and we never saw him again. From what I later heard he apparently never made it out of Hiawassee.

  Chapter 3

  At the end of World War I millions of American soldiers poured back into the country. Two trends—urbanization and mass industrialization—dominated the American landscape. However the trauma of the war—116,000 Americans were killed in one year of fighting while European losses were much worse—had created a contrarian intellectual philosophy.

  One prominent adherent to this contrarian ideology was Benton MacKaye, a patrician New Englander who had received a Master’s in forestry from Harvard. He plainly did not like the way America was moving and saw rapid mechanization and urbanization as hurting mankind. He even spoke of American cities’ tendency to “over-civilize.”

  In April of 1921, MacKaye’s wife, a prominent women’s suffragist, hurled herself off a bridge into New York’s East River. Soon after a friend noted that he seemed depressed, and invited him to his estate in the New Jersey Highlands. MacKaye accepted, and it was there he wrote the essay An Appalachian Trail.

  The customary approach to the problem of living relates to work rather than play,” MacKaye wrote. “Can we increase the efficiency of our working time? The new approach,” MacKaye asserted, “reverses this mental process. Can we increase the efficiency of our spare time? Here is an enormous undeveloped power—the spare time of our population.”

  MacKaye mentioned the great public service that the national parks in the West (Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon) had provided. However, he said, “For camping grounds to be of most use to the people they should be as near as possible to the population centers. And this is the East.” MacKaye noted the happy coincidence that throughout the most densely populated portions of the United States lie a fairly continuous belt of under-developed lands and ranges which form the Appalachian chain of mountains. Better yet, within these ranges lie “secluded forests and water courses which could be made to serve as the breath of real life for the toilers in the ‘beehive’ cities along the Atlantic seaboard.”

  The net result of all this, according to MacKaye, would be to reverse the migration from the cities back to the countryside.

  The Appalachian mountain chain actually runs from northern Alabama all the way up to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. MacKaye originally proposed a 1,700-mile trail that connected the various mountain ranges from north Georgia to Mount Washington in New Hampshire. About a third of this proposed trail, according to his estimates, already was in existence, mostly in the Northeast. MacKaye rallied his network of mostly New England friends behind the idea, and the first AT Conference was held in Washington D.C. in 1925.

  The idea of a linked trail running almost the length of the Appalachian mountain chain had wide appeal. “The Appalachian Trail is to the Appalachian region what the Pacific Railway was to the Far West—a means of opening up the country,” MacKaye told an enthusiastic conference.

  MacKaye also advised that the path of the trailway should be “… as pathless as possible. It should be a minimum path consistent with practical accessibility.” The idea was to disrupt nature as little as possible. True to this, the trail today is on average about two or three feet wide throughout its impressive length.

  The timing of MacKaye’s AT proposal was auspicious because a new bridge had just been built across the Hudson Rive
r in New York. This was to provide the critical link between the New England and Mid-Atlantic States.

  It was at this point in the late 1920s that the other seminal figure in AT history entered the picture. Myron Avery was born and raised on Maine’s majestic eastern coast. But oddly enough, he preferred the mountains on the western side of the state. Upon graduating from Harvard Law School Avery threw himself into the half-built AT project. He successfully lobbied to have the northern terminus located not at Mount Washington in New Hampshire, as MacKaye had envisioned, but all the way up at Mount Katahdin in north central Maine (Many a thru-hiker has regretted this decision!). This assured that the trail’s length would be greater than 2,000 miles.

  Avery also noted that the AT in its initial stages had been a mostly northeastern project, and he endeavored to change that. With fierce determination he rallied volunteers and helped form trail clubs in the southern Appalachians to sign on. He personally hiked through rugged, isolated backcountry areas in North Carolina and Tennessee (the Smokies) to try to find the best route for the trail to Georgia. Also, he oversaw the cutting of 265 miles of trail from central Pennsylvania to northern Virginia with used hand tools. And he became president of the ATC (the AT’s governing body) in 1931 for the next twenty-one years. He was a born leader, and an endearing set of old photos invariably show a man of action directing trail construction in the wilderness.

  Finally, on August 14, 1937, in rural Maine a six-man CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) crew completed the final link to make it the AT continuous footpath. It originally measured 2,025 miles and had taken sixteen years from the time Benton MacKaye had envisioned it in 1921 to its final completion. Myron Avery himself became the first person ever to hike every step of the trail, done in sections over a period of fifteen years.

  MacKaye and Avery were both Harvard men; without MacKaye the trail might never have been envisioned, while without Avery the trail might never have been built. So presumably they got on swimmingly, right? In fact they got along like a dog and a cat.

  For starters MacKaye took the community planning features (food farms, community camps, etc.) of his proposal with the utmost seriousness. He looked upon it as a higher human evolution, while others considered them socialist and utopian. For Avery a trail was simply a trail. He spent his every day strenuously trying to find a way to overcome the numerous obstacles to a continuous footpath throughout the Appalachian mountain range.

  In 1948 a World War II veteran from Pennsylvania named Earl Shaffer became the first person to thru-hike the AT. During the war Shaffer had spent four years in gruesome conditions in the Pacific, building landing strips and radar stations. A loner by nature, Shaffer’s only true friend had been gunned down on the beach at Iwo Jima. Depressed, he set off alone on the AT in the spring of 1948. “Much of it was very rough,” he reported, “with thousands of downed logs across it, and some areas so overgrown that finding the trail was practically impossible. Marking often was faint or even totally lacking.”

  Nonetheless, Shaffer completed the trail in fewer than five months to become the first thru-hiker. One reason is that the trail was not as difficult then. The AT Shaffer hiked had many logging roads and livestock pastures. Volunteers have since relocated stretches to more scenic, rugged mountain stretches. The irony is that during Shaffer’s initial thru-hike the ATC in its annual meeting had discussed the seeming impossibility of a thru-hike. Gene Espy of Macon, Georgia, became the second thru-hiker in 1951. “Earl was glad I did it,” Espy recalled. “Some people had questioned whether he really had done the whole thing.”

  The first and oldest woman ever to hike the trail was the renowned Grandma Gatewood. Emma Gatewood was a sixty-six-year-old great grandmother from Gallipolis, Ohio, when she set off from Mount Katahdin in 1954 for a southbound thru-hike. She had read about Earl Shaffer in National Geographic “… and immediately knew this was something I wanted to do. I got lost right off the bat,” she recounted.

  For three days and two nights she searched for the trail in the 100 Mile Wilderness, even setting signal flares to alert search planes. Finally, four rangers found her just as she was running out of food. “Go home,” they told her, and she did.

  But the next year she headed south to Georgia to hike northbound, carrying only eighteen pounds of essential items in a duffel bag. Her bare-bones luggage included a light blanket, a shower curtain, a lumberman’s jacket, and a Swiss Army knife. She ate almost all cold food.

  “I’m not afraid of anything in the mountains,” she had stoutly asserted at the outset. “And as long as I can still chop wood I’m not too old to hike.” As she entered the home stretch in Maine, Sports Illustrated started covering her trip. Maine’s rangers also picked up on her trip and rowed her across Maine’s streams. On a cold, windy September day in 1955 she summited Mount Katahdin and sang “America the Beautiful.” She had lost twenty-nine pounds, and her foot size had swollen two sizes. During the trip she wore out four pairs of shoes, and four raincoats.

  And she had some strong words about the trail: “This is not a trail. This is a nightmare. For some fool reason they always lead you right up over the biggest rock to the top of the biggest mountain they can find. I would never have started the trip if I had known how tough it was, but I couldn’t and I wouldn’t quit.”

  But, amazingly, she came back two years later and did the whole trail again.

  There have been other notorious female hikers as well. The Barefoot Sisters of Maine set off sans shoes (sandals for the very rockiest areas) from their home state in 2001 and managed to make it all the way to Georgia. The very next year they turned around and hiked northbound from Georgia back to Maine.

  The Mountain Marchin’ Mamas were six middle-aged women from Sarasota, Florida, who set off on the AT in 1978. Their goal was to hike 100 miles a year. In 1999, five of the six—the other dropped out in the fifteenth year due to injury—completed their marathon section hike. They were so gratified by the experience that they funded the construction of the Roaring Fork Shelter in North Carolina and started a still very active local AT Club in their hometown.

  The AT has had a steadily upward trajectory in terms of popularity and participation. By 2005 the annual hiker population had reached an estimated four million. Its thirty-one trail-maintaining clubs boast a combined membership of more than a hundred thousand people. One could credibly say it has worked out almost perfectly. It’s well within modest driving distance for many of the nation’s eastern population centers. It winds through the wildest and most mountainous areas in the eastern United States, including two of its greatest national parks. Its topography and terrain are extraordinarily varied, from gentle wooded walkways to bogs, streams, and steeply inclined rock scales. The plants and fauna are of the widest variety, and supplemented by a plethora of water sources. And the trail ends with that jewel of a state, Maine.

  With such a storied history it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking it would have happened one way or another, regardless of particular individuals or events. But a close look at its storied history reveals that in fact a linked trail running almost the length of the country so near major population centers was anything but a foregone conclusion. After all, the other large countries, Russia, Canada, and China, have no footpaths even approaching the AT in terms of geographic diversity or popularity. But from its inception the AT has been a model public-private partnership. The Appalachian Trail is an American success story.

  Chapter 4

  One of the more embarrassing scenarios for a thru-hiker is to set off for Maine, but not even make it out of Georgia. Apparently, 20 or 25 percent of wanna-be thru-hikers suffer just such a fate. Tales are legion (“Nobody ever told me about all these mountains out here”) of just such mishaps. Thus, I derived a small measure of solace upon crossing the North Carolina border, although I still felt unsettled from the abandoned backpack incident and it was going to be several days before arriving in town to re-supply.

  I climbed steadily
to the Muskrat Creek Shelter, which at 4,600 feet, is one of the most elevated shelters on the AT. I was delighted to see Seth and amazed to see Study Break on hand. “You’re the most improved hiker on the trail,” I noted to Study Break.

  “I’ve already dropped twenty pounds,” he cheerfully noted, “and am picking up speed.”

  Despite the beautiful weather, I was having trouble staying warm as the cool late afternoon wind wafted over the mountain. Further, the shelter’s open side was exposed to a stiff late-afternoon breeze. And Warren Doyle’s axiom that a thru-hiker should hike long hours on nice days still infected me. Thus, I decided to assert my independence and move on from where everybody else was going to stay. Before leaving, the conversation at the shelter turned to wild boars. “They’re nocturnal animals,” Seth said, “and can be quite mean.” With that soothing thought in mind I headed out from the shelter alone, at dusk.

  My goal was to find a lower elevation to set up my tarp and stay warm, but no appreciable descent presented itself. After a couple miles I came to an old jeep road called “Chunky Gal Trail” which looked like it had some spots flat enough to string the tarp to some trees.

  After setting up “camp” and climbing into my sleeping bag it became clear the terrain wasn’t as flat as I’d originally thought. Getting out of my bag to make some tarp adjustments in the dark, I was amazed at how cold it had gotten. Not only had the temperature dropped precipitously, but the wind was roaring. I was to be continuously amazed in the early going at how powerfully, almost overwhelmingly, the wind blows at night in the mountains, even after calm, nice days. Channels of wind could be heard originating from seemingly miles away as it thrashed through the forest toward me with gathering intensity.