Skywalker--Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail

by Bill Walker

  We hiked until dark and were able to root out 21.3 miles for the day. At the William Penn Shelter on Blue Mountain we watched 4th of July fireworks exploding in the distance. All that probably inspired my trail journal entry:

  William Penn Shelter—mile 1,175

  7-4-05: At the Continental Congress, which decided to rebel against mighty England, Pennsylvania’s Ben Franklin famously said, “Let us all hang together, or else we shall hang separately.” We hikers should keep that in mind.—Skywalker

  We were passing by the Pennsylvania 501 shelter the next day as the weather looked threatening. Again, entropy set in with Whitewater and me, while Nurse Ratchet roused us out of our lethargy. “I’m going on,” she said. “You two wimps can do whatever you want.” Soon we were trailing after her.

  Hiking to dusk we made it to a point in our data book that showed a spring two-tenths mile off the AT. We walked expectantly down only to find the spring empty. Finally, after walking several hundred more yards, we ran across a very small pool of barely moving, bug-infested water. We had no alternative but to get out our filters and pump laboriously.

  After pitching our tents in a small, clear area Whitewater said, “Skywalker, I’m tired of watching you eat cold food. We’ve got an extra dinner in our pack, and I’m gonna’ cook it for you.” I accepted and enjoyed it heartily.

  They were great company, and certainly had more to offer me in a hiking sense than I did to them. That night was fabulous. Just as we finished eating and Whitewater hung the food, a magnificent electrical storm began. It thundered and rained all night as we were safely tucked in our tents. The streams would be flowing again the next day.

  After a ten-mile hike, the trail ran right through the streets of Port Clinton. The other towns in which the trail had passed straight through the streets—Damascus and Hot Springs—were hiker favorites so we had high hopes. The only restaurant in town was at the Port Clinton Hotel. We tried to walk into the restaurant, but the manager rushed up with an alarmed look on his face to say, “Excuse me. You can’t come in here. Hikers eat at the bar.” I was well aware of our fetid odor, but segregating us so formally was nonetheless galling.

  Hikers milled around in the bar, where the service was erratic. While eating, I turned around to talk to Paparazzi, whereupon the waitress, who apparently considered herself Pamela Anderson’s twin sister, cleared away my plate—including my half-eaten burger. Paparazzi again captured the situation, saying, “Remember how Damascus bills itself as the friendliest town on the trail. Well, Port Clinton is the least friendly.”

  A Nor’Easter tropical rain storm was forecast for the next two days, and the hotel was full. Nurse Ratchet and Whitewater were planning to hike out, while everybody else stayed put. I decided at the last minute to stay under the pavilion shed in the center of Port Clinton, which earned me no admiration from Nurse Ratchet and Whitewater. I wondered if I would ever see them again.

  At the Pavilion I ran into the notorious Troll family for the first time. Troll was a thirty-seven-year-old from Washington state who was attempting to lead his wife, Anchor, and ten-year-old son, Oblivious, the entire length of the trail. Anchor was career Navy and always hiked behind her husband and son, thus occasioning her trail name. Oblivious was your typical happy-go-lucky ten-year-old boy who was blissfully oblivious to all problems. Their signature characteristic was the dark Scottish kilts they wore.

  “Kilts are lighter, more durable, and cause fewer rashes,” Troll said. “It was a no-brainer.” Because of their outfits and having a ten-year-old kid bidding to thru-hike, they were among the most well-known hiking groups on the AT.

  A sixty-seven-year-old psychiatrist named Chronic Fatigue Syndrome also was on hand in the pavilion. “This is my third thru-hike on the AT,” he said, “and my wife calls me a repeat offender.”

  After a night in the pavilion I resolved to hike out with this eclectic cast, regardless of the rain. The biggest surprises in hiking ability were Chronic Fatigue Syndrome at age sixty-seven and Oblivious at age ten.

  Chronic Fatigue Syndrome had picked up his name because of his constant state of exhaustion from maintaining a whirlwind pace all day. He indeed had the face of a sixty-seven-year-old, but with his erect posture and confident gait could be mistaken for an NFL running back from a distance. But then none of this should have come as a surprise when I found out what state he was from: New Hampshire. He also added a touch of class to the trail with his considerable erudition. He could discourse at length on Freud and other worldly topics, which represented a significant elevation from the normal level of trail gossip.

  Oblivious had an unusually confident and erect stride for a ten-year-old. He was always ahead of his mother, who anchored the group, and he never complained. At the end of the day he was the one who had enough energy left to dutifully go, often down steep hills, to find water. He weighed seventy-five pounds and was carrying a fifteen-pound backpack, which put his pack/body weight ratio at 20 percent; around the trail norm. The family slept in one big tent that Troll carried, and cooked dinner in one big pot that they ate out of with separate spoons. Before going to bed Troll searched their bodies closely with his headlamp for ticks.

  They had started March 15, and I reckon any early observer of them back in Georgia would have been very dubious about their chances of making it this far. But they got up and out early every day and hiked long hours to make up for their relative lack of speed. It was an impressive effort to watch.

  One night at the Allentown Hiking Club Shelter we sat in our sleeping bags and the discussion turned to bears. “Hopefully, everybody here is quite aware just which body part a bear eats first,” I said.

  “Your stomach,” Troll said flatly.

  “Bears don’t eat you,” Anchor said, sounding surprised.

  “Troll,” I stated in as serious tone as I could muster, “you’ve taken your family on an epic journey and haven’t even investigated the most imminent threat to them.”

  “Okay, I’ve got it,” Oblivious said. “Bears eat your legs so you can’t run away.”

  “No, they eat your head,” I lectured them. “They like dessert first.”

  Chronic Fatigue Syndrome was listening in on this morbid discussion and said, “Let’s see Skywalker. The word in Latin for bear is ‘ursu.’ You have ursuphobia.” With this formal diagnosis by a clinical psychologist, the adjective “ursuphobia” attached to my identity, second only to tall.

  Chronic Fatigue Syndrome then said, “Just ponder this over all night, Skywalker. On a still, windless day—when you see a clump of bushes moving—you’ve got company.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “That sounds like the Viet Cong.”

  Oblivious warmed to the subject and it was clear that he was different from so many modern-day kids. In this age of cell phones and iPod’s, when so many kids tune adults out, he actually enjoyed talking to adults. Finally, his father said, “Shut up, Oblivious. I’m not carrying you in my backpack tomorrow.”

  From there on out, whenever I would clear a hill and see the Troll family down below I would begin screaming at the top of my lungs, “Bear, bear, bear.”

  Oblivious would then yell back, “Everybody, cover your head.”

  More than once, a concerned-looking stranger would approach, to say in a hushed voice, “Excuse me, did I hear there is a bear nearby?”

  “No worries,” Troll would assure the frightened individual. “He just has ursophobia.”

  Chapter 15

  “This is hell in its full glory, coming up,” Chronic Fatigue Syndrome said.

  We were now in eastern Pennsylvania in the worst of the rocks. Some were giant boulders that often necessitated using both hands to advance. These were usually in exposed areas, where the heat was worst in the middle of the summer. It was said that you could hear rattlesnakes under these boulders, but I never stuck around to listen. However, I once saw a big rattlesnake sunning on the boulder next to the one I was traversing. Another time I put my h
and on a boulder to heave myself up and when my eyes cleared the surface of the boulder I saw my hands were less than a foot from a snake of undetermined type.

  In the searing sun it was often difficult to see the white blazes on rocks. The downhills were especially dreadful. Once I ended up on the side of a hill in a huge series of boulders, with no blaze in sight. All I could do was laboriously and angrily retrace my steps, until I finally found the trail again.

  But mostly this section was small, flat, sharp-edged stumble-stones for miles on end. The brand-new hiking shoes I had picked up thirteen days before at my sister’s house were already severely mangled by the constant banging against sharp rocks. Because it wasn’t terribly hilly it was especially frustrating. Everybody thought they should be going fast, but couldn’t. Plus, my feet were hurting like hell. Up to this point I had often nursed sore feet at night, but never anything as anguishing as this.

  Troll had a propensity to fly off the handle easily. One afternoon after a thunderstorm he arrived at a campsite in an extremely agitated state. “This Appalachian Trail is the worst designed bleeping trail I’ve ever been on,” he ranted, his face turning crimson-red. “They constantly route it over PUD’s and through rock fields.”

  I asked Anchor, “What’s a PUD?”

  “A purposeless up and down,” she replied. It was said of the AT that it never left a hill unpassed and that the trail was constantly re-routed to incorporate pointless ups and downs. The AT is like some old-time religion,” wrote one frustrated hiker. “It heads for the top of every mountain.” However, the ATC staunchly rebutted this charge, saying that every hill the trail covered fit into a grander purpose.

  As for Troll’s charge that the AT was needlessly routed through rock fields, all I could see anywhere, both on and to the side of the trail, were rocks everywhere. I had never, ever had any idea that the wilderness could be so rocky. It was daunting, almost overwhelming.

  In Pennsylvania’s rocky section hikers also hit the driest forty-mile stretch on the AT. On a Sunday afternoon everybody was trying to hike all the way to Palmerton, where hikers are allowed to stay for free in the old county jail. This, of course, spurred many jokes, but the lack of water was no laughing matter. After ten miles that afternoon, with no water in sight, several of us arrived expectantly at the aptly named Bake Oven Knob Shelter. The data book listed a water source here, but the spring was a steep two hundred yards down from the shelter. “I’ll go check it,” Ug said. Fifteen minutes later he came back with a grim look on his face. There wasn’t much anybody could do but quickly hoist our backpacks and start the forced march to Palmerton.

  Nobody said anything for the next seven miles. There was no need to. We were all thinking about only one thing: water. At least it got everybody’s mind off the rocks. Nobody was ever happier to enter the Palmerton jail than our hiking group of six. I don’t know about prisoner standards, but by hiker standards it was actually quite lavish. There was a basketball court, showers, and bunk beds. Hikers began referring to it as the Palmerton Hilton.

  And it was nice that it was so hospitable, because the hike out of Lehigh Gap outside of Palmerton is the most difficult quarter mile south of the White Mountains. It is also one of the most dangerous places on the AT. In places the trail ascends straight up the face of some steep and treacherous rocks at about a fifty- or sixty-degree angle. This rock scale had not been part of the AT when Earl Shaffer did the first thru-hike in 1948. “It really shouldn’t be part of the AT,” Shaffer wrote in his notoriously laconic style when he hiked it again in 1998 on the fiftieth anniversary of the first thru-hike.

  For a few anxious moments when I couldn’t figure out how and where to heave myself over a particular boulder, I would have agreed. Princess, a mountain climber from Colorado, scaled up with me and said, “I had no idea the AT had any climbs like that.”

  At the top of Blue Mountain the trail is flat as a tabletop for several miles, with one great peculiarity. The vegetation on the mountain is completely devastated from eighty-two years of zinc smelting in Palmerton. The EPA finally shut down the plant in 1980. “This is eerie,” Anchor said.

  “Yeah, it looks like the day after a nuclear attack,” Troll agreed.

  “And they told me back at the jailhouse to not even consider drinking any water around here,” I said.

  “You haven’t got to worry about that,” Troll said noting the rocky, dry conditions.

  Indeed, I had brought three liters (more than six pounds) of water onto the trail this day, but was carefully conserving it.

  When we descended into Wind Gap, hoping to find some water, we saw some cartons lying on the side of the trail, placed by trail angels. Our hopes soared as we approached with anticipation. But it wasn’t to be, as they were all empty. Troll and Oblivious walked twenty more yards, when Troll gasped, “It’s a bear. Look.”

  I looked all right, and in the open area, under the power lines, was the biggest bruin I have ever seen. We stood there as the bear concentrated on its line of scent. Then it seemed to perk up at the notice of us and galloped up the grassy hill and into the woods.

  Troll was screaming back to Anchor, “Hurry, hurry, honey, get a picture,” but she was too late.

  Unlike the two standoffs I had in Shenandoah National Park, this happened so fast there was no time to panic. And, for the record, tenyear-old, 4’10,” seventy-five-pound Oblivious stood directly between the bear and me.

  “Was that bear looking at your head, Oblivious?” I asked.

  “No, Skywalker,” he replied, “he was looking at your stomach.”

  We walked fifty more yards down to the road, where the veteran trail angels—twenty years of doing trail magic— Gordon and Sue were waiting with their van and cold Gatorades. “This stuff is the nectar of the gods,” I said savoring a cold, sixteen-ounce bottle. “I’m putting you in my will, Gordon.”

  “You better have a will,” Troll said, “the way that bear was looking at your head.”

  “Ha, after your bravura attitude toward them the other night in the shelter,” I responded, “I was disappointed you didn’t run up and try to pet it.”

  “Not that bear,” he replied. “That sucker weighed almost five hundred pounds (By the time we were in our sleeping bags that night we had that same bear weighing ‘easily six hundred pounds!’).”

  “It was probably a male,” Gordon said. “They’re much larger and have ho-hum attitudes. I saw a smaller cub cross this road about a half hour ago.”

  The bugs were hellish. I had left the body of my tent at my sister’s house to save two pounds. But without netting to protect me, I even had to fight them at night, and sleep became very difficult. And the rocks had me spooked and in excruciating pain. I began anxiously inquiring from every southbounder or experienced northbounder for details of the rocks that lay ahead.

  Leroy Smith Shelter—mile 1,259

  5-5-05: Pennsylvania rocks.—Paparazzi 5-5-05: I’d rather live on the dark side of the moon than in Pennsylvania.—Hamburger

  5-5-05: First place: one trip to Pennsylvania. Second place: three trips to Pennsylvania.—Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

  I decided at this campsite that I would do my best to make it 20.4 miles to Delaware Water Gap the following day, just to finish off Pennsylvania. The trail ran through Wind Gap for the seven-mile stretch that reputedly had the worst rocks in all of Pennsylvania. At one point in a particularly vicious section called “Wolf Rocks,” I became so tired and agitated that I lay down flat on my back in a rare island of rock-free dirt in the middle of the trail.

  Finally, the green, soft valley of the Delaware River came into view way down below.

  The Delaware Water Gap, where the Delaware River has cut through rock formations of the Appalachian Mountains, has geological significance as one of the best examples of a water gap in the United States. For AT hikers, it is your reward for having gutted it out through Pennsylvania. It lifted my spirits, although my screaming feet recoiled at the prospec
t of a steep descent. But soon we were at the Presbyterian Church Hostel in the little village of Delaware Water Gap, which marks the northern terminus of the AT in Pennsylvania.

  Whitewater and Nurse Ratchet were there and all seemed forgotten after the snafu back in Port Clinton. The hostel was abuzz with hiker gossip. “Did you hear the news about the ‘hiker feed’ in Duncannon?” Nurse Ratchet asked.

  “No.”

  “A hiker got hit by a train and was killed.”

  “Good God,” I exclaimed, “what are the odds of that happening.”

  “Supposedly, he was drunk and had been kicked out of the Doyle Hotel,” she said.

  “What was his trail name?” I asked.

  “Packstock.”

  “Packstock, huh,” I tried to think. “Haven’t heard that name.”

  “And get this Skywalker,” Whitewater drawled. “A hiker in New Jersey was attacked in his sleeping bag by a bear a few days ago.”

  “Get outta’ here,” I protested.

  “The bear went into a packed shelter and drug him out, but it ran away when everybody started screaming and throwing things,” Whitewater reported.

  Baltimore Jack, the eight-time thru-hiker (“a serial hiker”), arrived at the hostel the next morning. He was returning from the hiker-feed in Duncannon, shuttled by the trail angel Mary. He immediately revealed himself as a man of outsized reputation with an outsized ego. It was said that he often had a coterie of fifteen or twenty other hikers tagging along with him on the trail listening in rapt attention to his many tales at evening campsites, as he swigged Jack Daniels bourbon. But unlike some of the other big-name hikers, nobody had ever questioned that he had done all the miles attributed to him.