Overcrowding. Just too many people. It’s sometimes hard to find solitude on the AT, and many wilderness-loving hikers prefer to get off onto the less-frequented byways.’Tis a long road knows no turning.
SOPHOCLES
ONE FALL DAY on top of Maine’s great Mount Katahdin, we saw two young men stride the last few steps to the summit rock cairn, exchange a warm handshake, and then produce a bottle of champagne.
We knew right away what the occasion was: Here were two hikers just at the moment of completing a six-month, 2,000-mile-plus walk from Georgia to Maine—the Appalachian National Scenic Trail.
The world’s first long-distance footpath organized for purely recreational pursuit, the Appalachian Trail, including its 700 miles in New England, has become an immensely popular and prestigious test piece.
This famous footpath from Maine to Georgia was the inspired brainchild of one man: New Englander Benton MacKaye, who died at the advanced age of 96 in 1975.
In 1921 MacKaye, who was a forester as well as a city planner by profession, conceived the idea of the Appalachian Trail and wrote an article about it for the Journal of the American Institute of Architects.
His idea caught fire, and the first work began at Bear Mountain Park in New York the following year. MacKaye and those early trail-building pioneers tried to link already-existing trail systems to form the continuous footpath. But of all the 14 states the trail runs through, only a few, mainly in New England, had such systems in place. From there on the trail-clearers were on their own, and work was not completed until 1937—15 years and more than 2,000 miles later.
Along the way, the trail acquired many friends, including the Appalachian Trail Conference, founded in 1925, which greatly boosted construction by dividing up sections and parceling them out to local hiking organizations.
The finished product is marvelously diverse, a walker’s longitudinous paradise. For the length of the Eastern Seaboard it traverses mountains, forests, valleys, small towns, remote wildernesses, stately tall hardwoods, dense scrubby coniferous thickets, southern “balds,” subarctic tundra, mosquito-infested wetlands, and much more.
In New England the Appalachian Trail reveals the many faces of this region’s backcountry. You experience at least four different outdoor worlds as the trail passes through five of the region’s six states. (We’ll give mileage in round numbers; with many minor trail relocations in process, precise figures keep changing.)
Maine: 280 miles. The north woods. Here you get as big a sense of endless forest as anywhere on the trail. There’s more AT mileage in Maine than in any other state save Virginia. It’s not all idyllic woods-walking, as much of it is boggy and wet, and Maine’s insect army is bigger and meaner than any. But that’s all part of the true north woods scene.
New Hampshire: 150 miles. Spectacular mountain scenery. The rugged, rocky ridges of the White Mountains afford views without parallel. It’s a tough, uncompromising granite world up there.
Vermont: 135 miles. Deep green forest. This is the pure hiker’s (as distinct from the mountaineer’s) ideal state. Lush green vegetation enfolds the woodsy miles of Vermont, whose famed Long Trail (Canada to Massachusetts) coincides with the AT most of the way.
Massachusetts and Connecticut: 135 miles. Man-modified landscape. Instead of “wilderness,” the characteristic views in these states are of alternating fields and woods, with many stone walls and old cellar holes, along with entrancing views over small villages.
In the course of this 700-mile odyssey, the trail passes over or near most of New England’s outstanding scenic wonders—Maine’s mighty Katahdin, the spiny ridge of the Bigelow Range, Mount Washington (highest point in New England), the spectacular Franconia Ridge, Vermont’s celebrated ski meccas Pico and Killington, Mount Greylock in Massachusetts, and the tristate Taconic Range at the junction of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York.
Besides these big and famous attractions, many quieter vales and vistas become personal favorites of hikers who grow to know them as old friends—places like Carter Notch, tucked away in one of the White Mountains’ more impressive cols between the Carter and Wildcat ranges; Sage’s Ravine, a deep, quiet glade at the Connecticut-Massachusetts border; Deer Leap, an overlook of massive buttresses in Vermont.
Then there’s “the most difficult mile”—a wild jumble of boulders strewn through the gorge of Maine’s Mahoosuc Notch.
The trail doesn’t hit everything there is to see in New England—it misses Vermont’s best peaks, Mansfield and Camel’s Hump, and it neglects New Hampshire’s picture-book Chocorua and ever-popular Monadnock, just to cite a few examples. But it covers more than it misses.
For many years the outside world, and even many of the AT’s active supporters and maintainers in the Appalachian Trail Conference, have viewed the great trail primarily in physical terms, as a silvan corridor of precious backcountry coursing the spine of this end of the continent. Its physical properties are of course vital, and they sorely need to be defended from encroachment, maintained from erosion, and appreciated for their natural beauty.
But along that quiet corridor has grown, over the past generation, something more than the physical world of nature. A human component has been grafted on. We refer to the community of people who walk the trail, most especially that singular colony who walk it in one long, continuous walk, the so-called through-hikers.
Our dictionary defines community as “all the people living in a particular district, city, etc.,” or “a group of people living together as a smaller special unit within a larger one, and having interest, work, etc. in common,” or “(ecology) a group of animals and plant species living together and having close interactions, esp. through food relationships.”
The community of AT through-hikers is not, of course, living in one stationary place like the communities we normally think of. They are a community in constant motion, never all in the same place at once, the individuals rarely spending more than one or two nights in the same spot. But they are emphatically “a group of people living together as a smaller special unit within a larger one, and having interests, work, etc. in common,”—as long as you allow that at any one moment no more than half a dozen members of this community are physically “together.” They certainly have “close interactions, esp. through food relationships.”
The month of April has a special significance for the AT through-hiker community. In fact, when you think of it, April is one of your more interesting months. April is income tax showdown, baseball’s Opening Day, and T. S. Eliot’s cruelest month. It’s the birth month of Charlemagne (743) and Hitler (1889), the month when the Titanic sank (1912), and the time the boys fired on Fort Sumter (1861). On the brighter side it’s also the birth month of Buddha (563 B.C.), Leonardo da Vinci (1452), Shakespeare (1564), and Duke Ellington (1899).
More to the point for our outdoor perspective, it’s the month the world welcomed John Audubon (1785), John Burroughs (1837), and John Muir (1838). It’s the month Admiral Peary reached the North Pole (1909) and Mount Washington recorded the highest wind man has ever been pushed around by—231 mph (1934). It’s also when Pocahontas married John Rolfe (1614).
But to get back to our subject, April is also Appalachian Trail month. This is the time when legions of walking enthusiasts set off from Springer Mountain in Georgia with the intention of hiking continuously for the next few months. Ahead of them lies a footpath that wends its way northward through the Southern Appalachians, the Great Smokies, the Shenandoah Ridge, the Alleghenies, the Kittatinny, the Berkshires, the Green Mountains, and the White Mountains, before finally reaching lonely and aloof Katahdin way up in the northeast corner of Maine’s north woods, farther north than Montreal.
Time was when the AT was seldom attempted as a single long walk. Trail users were primarily there for a single day’s outing, or maybe a long weekend or occasionally a two-week vacation devoted to walking some small and particularly scenic stretch of it. The AT saw only two or three “end-to-enders” for its first generation of existence.
Then came the back-to-nature backpacking boom of the 1960s. By 1968 ten people a year were “doing” the whole trail. That was only the beginning. No one really knows how many people walk the AT now, but the Appalachian Trail Conference (now called the Appalachian Trail Conservancy) documented the following numbers of known through-hikers, painting a vivid picture of that boom in outdoor walking:
1910 . . . . . . . . 16
1971 . . . . . . . . 46
1972 . . . . . . . . 68
1973 . . . . . . . . 166
Today, the numbers are closer to 1,000 hikers per year.
It is still true that the overwhelming majority of trail users are there for much shorter distances—day trips, overnights, or short vacations. The end-to-enders are a small minority. Furthermore, it should be pointed out that the foregoing figures include a great many AT enthusiasts who “do” the trail in little sections at a time over a period of years. Sometimes whole families will decide to devote their vacations to hiking a different section every year. After 10 or 20 years they may fill in all the gaps. The unvarnished, one-shot, 2,000-miles-in-one-walk purists are still a minority within a minority.
But they sure are a fascinating breed. The formal statistics yield little generality about who these unique individuals are. They are both male and female: Perhaps the most famous end-to-ender yet was a woman, Grandma Gatewood, the original little old lady in tennis shoes. Many of them are young, but a surprising number are middle-aged or even in retirement years, if you call that retiring. By occupation, you could say they’re all the same: unemployed. At least for several months. But their career interests before and after their marathon jaunt show wide diversity.
Personality characteristics are probably equally inconsistent—but by definition they must all share a certain long-range vision, clinically known as nuttiness. They think in long cycles. And they are monstrously cruel to their pedal extremities.
Planning for a continuous 2,000-mile walk is half the battle—well, at least for the mind if not the feet. No one is yet known to have lugged all his or her food for 2,000 miles, for example. That means careful planning for how to reprovision along the way.
Food logistics are handled in an ingenious variety of ways. Some of the early trail walkers carefully deposited caches of food, sealed in metal containers either buried in the ground or wired high in trees. Others cajoled bemused relatives into meeting them at specified points along the way. Those with a little more ready cash took advantage of the fact that the trail never goes too many miles without swinging fairly close to little towns where mom-and-pop stores may provide passable fare, though unfortunately much of the better grub is canned or frozen and thus not too helpful to those who carry it all on the back. The most common solution these days lies with the US Postal Service. Along the 2,000-mile route, accessible post offices have been identified where end-to-enders may mail their provisions marked “hold for arrival.” The chosen postmasters are deluged every March and April with these care packages; they have taken on a stoic philosophy and extra storage space, knowing that at a certain point in the summer dirty and hairy figures, clad in indecent shorts, will tramp boots into their East Halffrog Post Office to pick up their provisions.
Besides food, the planning process requires a rigorous attention to weight and space saving. Compared with weekend or vacation backpackers, the end-to-ender quickly becomes the archetypal spartan. While packing, the word “essential” undergoes repeated and relentless redefinition. Does toothbrushing really require toothpaste? Does a toothbrush really need a handle? Do teeth really need brushing? Does freeze-dried food really require teeth? So it goes. Weight is the dread enemy, space the golden commodity.
Planning and packing completed, now comes the cruelest month, and the hitherto-unrelated community assembles at Springer Mountain. One thousand hikers each year may not sound like many, but don’t forget, that’s the number that comes out the end of the tube in Maine. Several times that number start each year in Georgia, hopes raised high, spirits eager to adopt the nomad life, boots well oiled, feet unblistered, packs well filled, real-world responsibility banished.
Reality returns with the first southern rain. They call them the Great Smokies because the perpetual misty clouds that drift around look like smoke. Those are the good-weather days. But all that moisture means something. Before long come the all-day rains, then the all-week rains. That’s when the dropout rate steps up.
End-to-enders say that if you can get through the first two weeks, your odds of doing the whole trail go way up. It’s during those first two weeks that a number of things happen:
1. You find out just how wet you can get if you can’t ever go indoors in bad weather.
2. You find out just what you smell like when you’re wet that long.
3. Your pack still feels like an imposition.
4. Two thousand miles seems like a long way to walk.
5. You ask yourself whether there is really nothing more fruitful or enjoyable or at least more comfortable to be doing for the next few months; during the first all-day rain you find yourself asking that question all day long, and during the first all-week rain you think perhaps you’ve found the answer.
Many successful trail walkers come close to quitting in those first two weeks. Good judgment, fortunately, is overcome, and they continue. A much greater number do quit. “Dear Postmaster, East Halffrog: Can you return . . .”
Those who remain settle into a serenity about bad weather; they have to. The pack ceases to be a burden and feels like just part of the clothes you put on each morning. The rhythm of the daily walk actually becomes a satisfying pleasure, almost a need. The daily tasks absorb attention; starting each dinner becomes more important to the through-hiker than it does to any of the rest of us, not because he likes to eat but because it’s something he must do to go on and there is something terribly and awesomely absorbing about things in life that absolutely must be done, a feeling that many city dwellers never get to feel.
The chances of staying with it seem greatest for those who walk alone. Those who have watched the first 200 miles of the AT in the spring—remember, 200 miles gets you only 10 percent of the way to Maine—say that the groups tend to fall apart and quit. A few pairs, usually mixed, stay with it, but most are by themselves.
On one level, they stay by themselves spiritually too, even though inevitably they may travel together for many miles and rest at the same trailside shelters for many nights in a row. One end-to-ender told us how he and six others walked together for two weeks, but each night seven different stoves came out of seven different packs, and seven different individual dinners were cooked. Never did anyone suggest combining a meal or saving stove fuel. All instinctively guarded their independence and shunned attaching themselves to anyone else for fear of the practical or emotional problems that would inevitably arise.
Yet, each traveling zealously alone, they do develop a sense of community. The experience, all 2,000-plus miles of it, is too powerful and unique not to be shared. Each summer, a social unit is formed of those walking the trail. Though most travel separately, they read each other’s names every night in trail registers, hear reports from hikers catching up or overtaken or traveling the reverse direction. They pass along news of a washed-out bridge, or a troublesome dog at a certain farmhouse that must be passed, or a cheap pizza place 0.3 miles off the trail where it crosses Route 16. They gossip about the others on the trail. They feel differently toward one another versus all other hikers or humans, just as any townsperson feels a unique bond with others from his or her hometown.
Each year’s crop of through-hikers indeed becomes a community, not of place but of experience. This community has many of the same problems faced by other communities like East Halffrog or Boston—traffic, housing, water supply, sewage disposal, and interpersonal relations—albeit in a different form.
The through-hiker community has actually taken a modest step toward formalizing its sense of cohesion. An organization known as the Appalachian Long Distance Hikers Association (ALDHA) has been formed. Each year ALDHA holds a “gathering,” with a program of speakers, panel discussions, social events, and a chance for past through-hikers to congregate and exchange stories, reminiscences, and ideas about the problems and prospects of the great trail. ALDHA has also provided a chance for through-hikers to “give something back” by working on trail maintenance teams. Because the Appalachian Trail Conference has always seemed just a bit formal and high level, maybe sometimes a little too stuffy for the scruffy set of through-hikers, ALDHA provides an alternative organizational home. It’s important, but not vital: The sense of community must be earned, not in meeting rooms, but by being one with the moving flow of hikers along the woods and ridges of the AT itself.
One of the interesting images of the annual April AT opening is the scramble for post position that takes place at the start. With everyone starting at the first good spring weather, the shelters in Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina become crowded every night. Many have taken to starting in March, still wintry at upper elevations, but now that means a crowd too. Each year the stronger hikers put on a push to get ahead of the pack. Very often these are likely to be strong prospects to finish. Their confidence and camaraderie are strengthened as they move ahead of the others together. That’s not to say that speed is directly related to likelihood of sticking it out—far from it. Many of the best AT walkers are not in any hurry.
One pleasant eccentricity of the AT through-hiker community is their passion for “trail names.” In the shelter registers, which form such a vital link of communication among them, they sign in with messages of varying length, regularly employing a specially selected nickname or alias or, as they call it, their trail name. Some of these are colorful indeed: Kaptain Wilderness, Boston Strollers, Rambling Rat, Redbeard and the Gypsy, Trail Tots, The Hobbit, The Cheshire Cat, Irish Wonder, Hog, A Pilgrim in Progress, Minnesota Two-Sticks, Connecticut Connection, Rockhopper, Droopalong Flatfoot, Bumbles, and Bag Lady.
A very low proportion of the AT hikers starts from the north end. Several excellent reasons argue for the preponderance of south-to-north migration.
1. In typical winters (forget some recent ones), the snow depth in New England’s mountains makes much of the trail very hard to walk until May.
2. It’s still cold, if not actually winter, until well into April.
3. It’s hard to get permission even to enter Baxter Park, where Katahdin is located, at that time of year; it’s much less of a problem in autumn.
4. If you started from Maine in April, you’d be in New Hampshire and Vermont in May and June for the height of the black fly season; ’nuff said?
5. Anyway, who eats dessert at the beginning of the meal? Save the best for last, right?
Thus it is that most of the survivors of April’s mad scene in the South stroll separately or in little groups into New England in the last of summer or early fall. Here they find magnificence. After high summer’s heat and all the dull, sweaty stretches of Virginia and those awful rocky stretches in Pennsylvania, the AT hiker comes to the East’s crown jewels: the lovely low ridge of the Taconics, with its classic pastoral views; outspreading Greylock, with its high spruce forest just south of Massachussetts’s highest eminence; the southern half of Vermont’s venerable Long Trail, with its long-established tread (the LT preceded the AT by almost 20 years); the incomparable Franconia Ridge, if you’ve the luck to hit it on a clear blue day or the sensitivity to appreciate its wildness on a wind-wracked, cloud-tossed howler; lordly Mount Adams, number two in height but so much grander than the building-and-crowd-dominated Mount Washington; the long wilderness experience of Maine’s north woods, culminating in the rugged scramble up the steep slopes to Katahdin’s moonscape tableland, then that last gentle rise to the true summit, there to look down the dizzying precipice to gemlike Chimney Pond 2,000 feet below, the endless vistas of Maine’s lakes and forests stretching out to Canada and the Arctic itself. Journey’s end . . . well, journey’s end for most. During the early 1980s Stephen (“Yo-Yo”) Nuckolls walked from Georgia to Maine, touched the cairn on Katahdin and turned around to walk back, then turned around again at Georgia and returned to Katahdin, surely one of the first uninterrupted walks of more than 6,000 miles and a remarkable demonstration of the magnetic power of this way of life.
Only an ostrich would paint a picture of the AT as all idyll and romance, and ostriches are notoriously clumsy painters, especially in April. The Appalachian Trail faces some muddy problems these days that dim its splendor in the eyes of many hikers. Among these are:
Overcrowding. Just too many people. It’s sometimes hard to find solitude on the AT, and many wilderness-loving hikers prefer to get off onto the less-frequented byways.
Regulations. In part resulting from the aforementioned overcrowding, Maine’s Baxter State Park is the worst offender when it comes to telling the hiker what he or she can and cannot do. They insist on knowing where everyone is in the park at all times, “close” the mountain when weather is dubious (incredible!), and otherwise play Big Brother to one and all.
Expense. One recent booklet composed by a through-hiker for the benefit of the rest of that community is entitled: “How to Get through the White Mountains without Losing Your Socks.” Use of the backcountry facilities in the Whites now carries a charge, and the fee seems steep to through-hikers who have camped for free almost all the way for the preceding 1,600 miles. AMC’s huts, at more than $50 per night, are simply out of the question for down-at-the-heels through-hikers, but even the shelters and tent platforms in the Whites have inflated to what seem like outrageous levels.
Physical damage to the trail. This is a direct result of the crowds of hikers. The alpine zones above treeline are the most fragile, as are the beautiful but delicate high-level bogs that can be found at intervals among the high ridges that the trail traverses. But there is scarcely a mile of the AT that doesn’t show some damage from overuse.
Overengineering. In an effort to protect the environment, trail tenders have been forced to “harden” the tread with log bridges through the bogs, rock steps on steeper slopes, and other devices. A lot of this work is necessary, and much of it is thoughtfully and subtly done, but some of it is overengineered, tending to impair the sense of wildness that hikers go to the mountains to find.
Uniformity. In recent years the federal government has stepped into the act and come up with guidelines for trail management. One of the charms of the AT has been the diversity of its character along the way. The Feds have now decreed, for example, that the trail should always be off-road. So gone are some of those charming strolls along country lanes and by people’s backyards. Some of the through-hikers lament this change. Comments one: “The diversity of the trail is one of its special charms. . . . Keep a few road walks.” Another: “Why is it a sin for a hiker to see a house?” Another: “Why are we working so hard to make the trail as monotonous as possible?”
Despite all these problems, the through-hikers still come. The spring still sees them converge on Springer Mountain, the fall sees them straggling upward toward Katahdin. The mountains still gleam before them, the forests are as green as ever, the brooks still sparkle cold, the chickadees still flit sociably among the spruces, the white-throated sparrow yet raises his soulful sound high in the alpine mists. The Appalachian Trail is ever there. And so is the community that represents perhaps this country’s greatest collectivity of pure walkers.