Skywalker--Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail (7 page)

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 River 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

O
ne 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.