AWOL on the Appalachian Trail
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28 Hopeful was rejuvenated after a few days off and got a ride back to the point where he left the trail. He would go on to complete the trail in its entirety.
29 Lion King’s excellent documentary is available through www.walkingwithfreedom.com.
30 We got a ride from avid hiker Bluejay Lafey. Bluejay had been reading my Internet journal, and we exchanged e-mails. In planning my visit, I asked Bluejay about the region, and he not only offered us a ride, he bought us breakfast, too. He says doing trail magic is his way of banking karma for when he does his hiking.
31 I suspect that IT band friction syndrome is a common, but undiagnosed, overuse ailment among hikers. Anyone planning to backpack should learn about this injury and how to prevent and alleviate the problem by gradually increasing the number of miles walked, and by using stretching exercises that target the tendon.
32 Elizabeth Gilbert, The Last American Man (New York: Penguin Publishing, 2002). Eustace has lived all of his adult life in the woods, without modern conveniences. He hiked the Appalachian Trail and made a transcontinental horseback ride from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He lectures about the merits of living off the land.
33 Calling my bearing on the trail “north” has always been a generalization, and the generalization is less accurate the further I travel up the East Coast. My direction is nearly northeast. Even my compass gets confused this far up the coast. Magnetic declination: In North America, the earth’s magnetic field pulls a compass to a point more near the top center of Canada than the North Pole. On Springer, a compass points four degrees too far west; on Katahdin it is off by more than seventeen degrees.
34 Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (New York: Penguin Books, 1978).
35 A “cairn” in the Whites is a conical stack of stone, usually as tall as a man. In the absence of trees, this is the most effective way to mark the trail. White blazes are hard to spot on the rocks here since there is frequent fog, rain, and snow.
36 Gene Daniell and Steven D. Smith, White Mountain Guide (Boston, MA: Appalachian Mountain Club Books, 2003). Mount Washington is 6,288 feet high, second only to Clingmans Dome on the AT. The term “small” is relative to the world’s highest peaks. Mount Denali (aka McKinley, 20,320 feet) is the highest peak on the North American continent. There have been roughly the same number of deaths on Denali and Washington.
37 Ibid., 4.
38 The 100-Mile Wilderness is the most remote stretch of the AT, spanning from Monson, Maine, to the southern boundary of Baxter State Park.
39 On January 9, 2005, in Florida, well over a year after completing my hike, I drove across the southern part of the state, just above Lake Okeechobee. There was little traffic on two-lane Highway 98, miles from any town. I stopped in the middle of the road to talk to a hiker walking alongside it. In a lifetime of living in Florida, I had never seen a backpacker while driving. I asked if he was on the Florida Trail. He said yes and added that the Florida Trail is part of the Eastern Continental Trail, which he had started in Canada two years ago. Finally, recognition kicked in for both of us. It was Crash Test Dummy.
40 Isabel made landfall in North Carolina on September 18. None of my concerns materialized. “When I look back on all the worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which never happened.”—Winston Churchill
41 Bob “Now or Never” would go on to thru-hike himself in 2004.