WashingtonPost.com – Travel Section – AT article
You can find this article at the WashingtonPost.com site
Hit the Trail
By Jan Stowell
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, March 29, 2009; F01
It’s more than 2,175 miles long and passes through 14 states from Georgia to Maine. It climbs mountains, plunges into river valleys and even finds its way into town from time to time. It provides ample opportunity to sprain or fracture things best left unmolested. It gets hot. It gets cold. There are bugs — all sorts of bugs, many of them sworn to evil. Ultimately, it rigorously tests, both mentally and physically, one’s sheer locomotive drive. What’s not to love? But in fact there is much to love, and you doubtless know already that I’m writing about the Appalachian National Scenic Trail, the most celebrated footpath in America. You’ve been threatening to through-hike it for years. So no more excuses.
Here is a very short primer to a very long walk.
Daydream about it. Get your imagination on the job and start by envisioning sunny mountaintops, clean air, birdsong, solitude, companionship, rushing streams, campfires and astonishing, Olympian good health. Imagine freedom. Spend less time picturing rain, pain, mosquitoes, rain, ticks, hunger, rain, bears and hydrophobic, homicidal bears of which, as far as I know, there aren’t any. Do this every day, as it will fortify you against the merciless punishment to be suffered until your blisters have healed to callus and your muscles have ceased to ache even in your sleep.
Take the time. The economy being what it is, this may be your best opportunity to find six otherwise unproductive months to call your own. And you should count on six months. Many hikers — perhaps most, even — do an A.T. through-hike in less time, but not often in much less. Besides, you’re going to clock-watch on the trail? Doubtful.
Go north. In 1997, I hiked the A.T. from Maine to Georgia, and it was perfectly wonderful. Not only that but, as it turns out, I’m a compulsive liar. Yes, hiking south was wonderful, but not perfectly so. For one thing, the trail in snowy Maine typically doesn’t open until June. The summer solstice, then, will pass quite early in your hike and you will spend the majority of your months on the A.T. walking into diminishing, rather than increasing, daylight.
Depending on how fast you hike (itself dependent on how quickly you harden into trail shape, over which you have some measure of control, but also on how long your legs are, over which you don’t), you will probably pass the last of the northbounders long before you arrive at Harpers Ferry, W.Va., the symbolic midpoint of the trail. After that, you may find yourself more alone than you’d bargained for. I did.
Also, if you begin your hike in Maine, you are not only still flabby, you are still flabby in Maine. It is an extraordinarily beautiful state. It is also the most demanding piece of the entire A.T. and, possibly, the sole repository of every spare boulder that the Almighty failed to use on Day 2. There is a place called the Mahoosic Notch, which . . . let’s just not even talk about it.
Flip-flop. An alternative to traveling strictly north or south is, in through-hiker parlance, to flip-flop the trail. Begin, say, in Georgia, and hike north to Harpers Ferry. Find a ride to Maine and then hike south to Harpers Ferry. It’s a good strategy for late starters, as Baxter State Park (where Mount Katahdin, the northern terminus of the trail, is) closes in mid-October. An added bonus is that a flip-flop largely guarantees a warm-weather hike over the entire A.T. Except for when you get snowed on in the southern mountains during spring. I’d been meaning to mention that.
Pack light. Weight is your unappeasable enemy. It never comes to the negotiating table and can be defeated only by your getting strong and getting light. If you take nothing else from this primer, take that. Short of injury or illness, there is no surer way to drive yourself off the trail than to be burdened, day after painful day, beneath a pack that you fear has an anvil in it somewhere.
Just 30 miles north of Springer Mountain, the southern terminus of the A.T., is Neels Gap. It’s a busy layover, with a road, a railway and a river passing through it. It’s also where an estimated 10 percent of intended through-hikers bolt for home, most of them simply because they got worn down before they ever got built up. Felicity Keddie of the Walasi-Yi Center there recently told me that, on behalf of exhausted hikers, the center annually ships home seven to nine tons of unwanted gear. Speaking of which . . .
Gear. Whatever. Go to your local outfitter and buy the best and lightest that you can afford. Beyond that, I’ll mention only this: hiking poles, one for each hand. Buy them. Use them. Love them. They stabilize you on descents, provide purchase on ascents and, where the ground is flat, put your otherwise-freeloading arms aerobically into the hike. I’d as soon do the A.T. on a pogo stick as go without poles.
Food. One of the daily joys of long-distance hiking is eating. In fact, you may never again enjoy food as much as you will on the A.T. This is principally because you will be hungry every minute.
One day during a resupply mission at a small grocery in Pennsylvania, I was in line at the checkout behind newlyweds on a hiking honeymoon. She noticed that he’d grabbed a package of low-fat Fig Newtons, doubtless inadvertently, although she was evidently in no mood to entertain that probability. “Low fat?” she said in apparent disbelief. “Low fat? Have you, like, completely lost it? You take those back and find anything that says ‘Made with real lard.’ ” I can even now envision them finishing off the Newtons and then eating the package and maybe the sales slip, too.
So here’s some wonderful news for you: A hiker’s daily calorie burn on the A.T. is so extreme (commonly estimated at 4,000 to 6,000) that gluttony assumes the mantle of virtue. Bon appetit.
Sleeping. There are about 250 shelters — typically three-sided lean-tos — scattered along the length of the trail. Normally situated in a pretty place near a source of water, they vary in age, size and cleanliness. You’ll meet many of your fellow through-hikers at the shelters and will doubtless make new friends. When it rains, however, the shelters can become very crowded and arrestingly aromatic. You’ll be wise to carry a light tent. Most people do, and it’s sensible, although packing and lugging a wet tent in the morning is a unique misery.
Getting lost. You won’t. Honestly, you’ll need to put some effort into losing your way. The A.T. is marked end-to-end by white rectangular blazes on trees, poles, rocks and even sidewalks when it passes through a town. I carried a compass that I almost never used and jettisoned my few maps early on (largely because on the flip side of the map of Maine is a profile — a sideways view of the trail — that looks distressingly like an electrocardiogram). Lest I be considered cavalier with your safety, I’m not suggesting that maps are superfluous; to the contrary, A.T. maps are detailed and informative. I’m saying only that I rarely used them. Either way, you’ll likely want to carry the especially handy Appalachian Trail Data Book (or the Thru-Hiker’s Companion; see box at right), a slender and arid volume that notes milestones along the trail and also indicates where, among many other useful things to know, to find water. Along with hiking poles, it’s another item I wouldn’t go without.
Getting clean. Grooming isn’t an especially exciting topic, is it? Then it’s a good thing you won’t be doing much of it. Ha, ha. But there are certain facts of life, and one of them is that if you through-hike the Appalachian Trail, you will spend a lot of time being dirty and in dirty clothes. Doesn’t mean you can’t brush your teeth, though.
Staying safe. A compendium of things to remember: Serious crime on the A.T. is not unheard of, but it’s rare. Most long-distance hikers are, like most people everywhere, friendly. The prevailing bonhomie notwithstanding, keep your wits about you, and, if you’ve got one to enlist, hike with a companion. This is 2009, after all, so take along your cellphone. Charge it when you can, but be smart and leave it turned off until you need to use it. Stay in touch with folks at home, and let them know where you are and where you’re headed next.
Do not ask your friend to take a picture of you riding a moose, or of you arm in arm with a bear. Right-thinking bears object to this. Just leave the animals alone. Carry a light first-aid kit and manual, and familiarize yourself with them before you need them. Drink lots of water. Avoid seeing enlarged images of ticks; ticks are persuasive evidence that not every single element of nature is a gift to be cherished. Should one of the loathsome creatures actually burrow its indescribably disgusting head into, say, your leg, feel free to have the screaming meemies. When you’re done, refer to the first-aid manual buried somewhere in your pack.
Do not attempt steep descents in the pouring rain. Trust me on this.
Be optimistic. Remember that hiking takes no great, or even peculiar, athletic skill. It’s not pole-vaulting, and it lacks (mercifully) the mysterious difficulty of golf. It’s just walking. So take my advice and do this: Put one foot in front of the other; repeat as necessary. And while you’re doing that, month after month, be sure to enjoy the rich rewards of through-hiking the Appalachian Trail. You will be in a beautiful place every day. You will be free, perhaps as never before. You will be healthier than everyone you know. You will toughen into — forgive me, but the expression is heard up and down the trail, and it applies — a lean, mean, hikin’ machine. To wit:
One morning in Virginia, I faced a climb of nearly 3,000 feet over a distance of four miles. I’m 5-foot-10 and had begun the A.T. in early July at 176 pounds of untoned indolence. On that day in October, I weighed no more than 155. I had no earthly reason to dread the climb, but I did. And so, to give myself as long a day as possible, I set out shortly after dawn. A good deep breath and up I went.
Tick, tick, tick went the poles. Left, right, left went the feet, on a forced march following one switchback after another after another. And I never tired. It seemed as though I couldn’t tire. Unaccountably, I’d forgotten that after some 1,400 miles of hiking I was beyond merely strong. I was pneumatic.
The climb took 2 hours 5 minutes. At the summit, the northern end of a long ridge, I took a short side trail to an overlook. Standing on an escarpment with the world beneath me attired in the bright finery of autumn, I threw my arms out and my head back and let out a stupendous (or stupendously idiotic) Tarzanesque bellow. After all, there are days when it is very good to be alive.
Jan Stowell lives in Washington and periodically hikes sections of the Appalachian Trail but through-hiked only once, in 1997.
You can find this article at the WashingtonPost.com site
– This was reprinted without any permission what-so-ever… mainly because I don’t have time to email back and forth w/ the Post.
