There's something to be said for reducing the worries in one's life to a simple matter of putting one foot in front of the other – to think of days in terms of miles covered, shelters reached, or time to the next maildrop. There's a stark simplicity to long-distance hiking, but it belies the complex spirituality that can go on in the head of a person who's shouldered the burden of carrying all they own.
Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight the fire's lit in front of a lean-to shelter somewhere in America's eastern woodlands. The path we'll trod leads through many of the myriad challenges faced by the modern environmental movement – infrastructure, funding, troglodyte resistance – but beyond them, at the Canadian border, or on Mount Katahdin, or amongst the spires of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, lies a goal so tantalizing that we already know what reaching it means: that the end of one journey is simply the beginning of another.
The reasons people take to long-distance hiking trails are probably more numerous than the number of actual hikers, but one overriding theme tends to be a life in transition. Thru-hiking (doing a long trail in one fell swoop, as opposed to multiple trips covering shorter sections) involves a considerable commitment of time – 6 months or so, for the average Appalachian Trail trekker – so it stands to reason that a lot of folks on the trail have (among a zillion other reasons) just graduated, wound up between jobs, gotten out of the military, or maybe just decided to chuck it all and put into practice that long-time promise to live the simple life. They're young, and they're old, male, and female, alone, and in partners and small groups – really, a cross-section of world and national communities, joined by common goal and shared, survival-level concerns.
Though it wasn't always the case, today's pack-hauling ascetic has a lot of paths diverging in the woods, not to mention roads less traveled by, upon which to spend some time with one's self. There are literally thousands of miles of linked and continuous trails (the American Discovery Trail alone accounts for 6800) running in all directions across the United States, Europe, and dozens of other nations – far too many to try to list and describe here. Instead, I'll focus on three trails that I've actually walked at least portions of myself, and leave the commenting on such fascinating, challenging, issue-impacted footpaths as the Pacific Crest Trail and the Colorado Trail to those who've hiked them (or otherwise know them better than I).
A Footpath in the Wilderness
Vermont's Long Trail is the oldest long-distance trail in the United States, following the spine of the Green Mountains for 272 miles between the borders of Massachusetts and Canada. It was first conceived by James P. Taylor (1872-1949), a school administrator, who cajoled 23 of his friends to show up at the inaugural meeting of the Green Mountain Club in March, 1910. Inspired, perhaps, by Teddy "the Vigorous Life" Roosevelt, a general turn-of-the-century health craze, and the burgeoning Scouting movement, the Club had, by the end of its first decade, constructed 209 miles of trail. By the time the GMC turned 21, in 1930, it had completed border-to-border construction, and celebrated itself by lighting flares from mountaintop to mountaintop.
The Depression wasn't all flares and parties in Vermont, however, and later in the decade, the federal government proposed the creation of a Green Mountain Parkway similar to the one it was then building in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. The GMC and Long Trail aficionados were among the leaders of statewide opposition to the plan, which was later voted down in a referendum. These forces reassembled in the late 1950s to successfully oppose an Air Force plan to erect a missile monitoring and communications station near the top of Mount Mansfield, Vermont's highest peak, and throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, implemented many new programs dedicated to the preservation of the Long Trail system - "carry-in, carry-out" became the norm for garbage, caretakers were assigned to the most popular shelters, and naturalists were employed on Vermont's two highest summits to raise awareness among hikers of the rare and fragile tundra ecosystems located above the tree line.
In 1986, the Green Mountain Club launched the ambitious Long Trail Protection Program, which sought to acquire privately-owned land and create easements so as to avoid the prospect of portions of the Trail being sold or closed at the whim of landowners. Since its inception, the program has conserved over 25,000 acres of Long Trail lands, with the vast bulk being added to adjacent state-administered territory – in 1997, a string of parcels between the towns of Johnson and Jay were created as the Long Trail State Forest – and for the past 17 years, has been coordinated by an ambitious Stewardship Program.
There are places where the Long Trail's age, as well as an earlier ethos of trail construction, shows – in remote sections, the Trail ascends in a direct route up to mountain summits, and doesn't include the switchbacks which are a standard feature of later trails. Those switchbacks aren't there to simply increase the number of steps a hiker has to take to get to the next shelter; rather, they're erosion control devices meant to preclude exactly what's happened on some of the oldest sections of the Long Trail – runoff from decades of snowmelt and summer storms have turned straight-ascent footpaths into deep channels. GMC, through its Management & Maintenance programs, has been hard at work relocating eroded stretches of trail, as well as installing waterbars and trenches to funnel water off the trail – and they're always looking for volunteers willing to come out and swing a mattock or move some rocks for their frequent maintenance runs.
The Long Trail is a fairly tough one, especially the northernmost third. It takes about three weeks to hike it from border to border, and along the way, you'll summit all of the highest mountains in the state after bottoming out in the valleys in between them. The southern section, which for about 100 miles is congruent with the Appalachian Trail, sticks to the ridgeline a bit more, and there isn't quite as much elevation gain and loss as, say, the section between Mt. Mansfield (highest point in the state at 4393') and Camel's Hump (third-highest mountain in Vermont, at 4083'). At nearly any high clearing along the way, you'll look down upon rural scenes so quaint and beautiful that your head may explode, but outside of this, the dangers and cautions to keep in mind are pretty standard – like hikers since the sport's inception, you'll be relying almost exclusively upon yourself to get from one destination to the next, with all the self-reliance and survival knowledge that that entails.
Turtles with Ballistic Nylon Shells
Despite the groans one hears in shelters and around campfires at night, modern backpackers have things pretty good. Those early hikers mentioned above, for example, did not have the benefit of modern, lightweight camping and cooking gear, and the suggested food larder would have a modern trekker reaching for the pain meds before even shouldering the load. GMC's website has some fascinating excerpts from the 1921 Long Trail Guide, among which is this shoulder-slumping item:
Food List For Two Men For Two Weeks
Flour, 10 lbs.
Baking Powder, 1-2 lbs.
Bacon, 5 lbs.
Dried Apricots, 2 lbs.
Cinnamon, 1 oz.
Dried milk, 2 lbs.
Cocoa, instant, 1 can
Succotash, 2 cans
Corn meal, 4 lbs.
Butter, 4 lbs.
Pepper, 1-2 oz.
Rice, 2 lbs.
Bread, 1 loaf
Oatmeal, 3 lbs.
Sugar, 9 lbs.
Salt 1 1-2 lbs.
Raisins, 1 lbs.
Tea, 1-2 lbs or more
Chocolate, 2 lbs.
Salmon, 2 cans
Cheese, 1-2 lbs
Candles, 6
Thankfully, huge advances have been made in food preservation – freeze-drying means we no longer haul our succotash around in cans, and retort packaging technology (pdf) allows us to enjoy fresh meals without the hassle of carrying 4 pounds of rice, 5 of bacon, and 9 of sugar.
As just a little aside: Nine pounds of sugar! I know people who cut the handles off toothbrushes to save another quarter-ounce of weight – and those old-timers took to the woods with four pounds each of butter and cornmeal!
Food isn't all that's changed for hikers over the past few decades. With the rise in interest in the environment in the 1960s and 70s, manufacturers of gear related specifically to non-military outdoor pursuits sprang up, and began exploring ways of lightening hiker's loads. Not coincidentally, their developments often had a benevolent impact on the environment as a whole – by the time lightweight backpacking stoves had come into common use, the Long Trail Guide was no longer including advice like,
No person should attempt to tramp The Trail without a light axe, and a good compass. Even women should take at least a belt-hatchet; fuel must be replaced as used with good fuel and not easily-obtained rotten wood or none at all.
from the 1921 edition
...and advice about cutting pine boughs for bedding is today relegated more to survival manuals than to the "making a comfortable camp" section of a wilderness guide.
Peaceful exploration of America's backcountry has been aided tangentially by advances in military and space technology. In the same way that a sub's sonar can be used to track whales, developments in nylon packs and tents, Velcro fasteners, and, more recently, Global Positioning System technology, have seen civilian application as they have been added to the hiker's repertoire – replacing earlier (and much, much heavier) canvas, steel, and leather gear, not to mention making backcountry navigation a whole lot easier. The process has even begun to work in reverse, as soldiers adopt high-end equipment initially developed for the civilian market, such as better pack- and sleeping bag designs.
Advances in technology continue to lighten loads and minimize the impact of the hiker's passage. Gone are the massive, red-laced "waffle-stomper" boots of the 1970s, of course, but perhaps even more important has been the development of an ethos for wilderness travel that has been, in part, promoted by interest in the use and preservation of long-distance trails. While federal-level decision-making regarding trails over the past 30 years may have been erratic (and, at times, insufferably bureaucratic), at the ground level, backpackers have (for the most part) themselves moved steadily towards a goal of taking nothing but pictures, and leaving nothing but footprints.
The White Blazes
Nowhere have the birth pangs of this new ethos been more profoundly felt than along the 2175-mile route of the Appalachian National Scenic Trail. The idea for the AT, which now stretches from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Maine's Mount Katadin (and maybe even further), is usually traced back to an October, 1921 article in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects. Author Benton MacKaye's introduction captures well the spirit of the age – not to mention a concern about societal conditions that people like Jill Richardson are still trying to raise awareness about today:
Something has been going on these past few strenuous years which, in the din of war and general upheaval, has been somewhat lost from the public mind. It is the slow quiet development of the recreational camp. It is something neither urban nor rural. It escapes the hecticness of the one, and the loneliness of the other. And it escapes also the common curse of both - the high powered tension of the economic scramble. All communities face an "economic" problem, but in different ways. The camp faces it through cooperation and mutual helpfulness, the others through competition and mutual fleecing.
We civilized ones also, whether urban or rural, are potentially helpless as canaries in a cage. The ability to cope with nature directly - unshielded by the weakening wall of civilization - is one of the admitted needs of modern times. It is the goal of the "scouting" movement. Not that we want to return to the plights of our Paleolithic ancestors. We want the strength of progress without its puniness. We want its conveniences without its fopperies. The ability to sleep and cook in the open is a good step forward. But "scouting" should not stop there. This is but a feint step from our canary bird existence. It should strike far deeper than this. We should seek the ability not only to cook food but to raise food with less aid - and less hindrance -from the complexities of commerce. And this is becoming daily of increasing practical importance. Scouting, then, has its vital connection with the problem of living.
An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning
The following year, Major William A. Welch, director of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, convinced the publisher of the New York Evening Post to run a banner headline proclaiming, "A Great Trail from Maine to Georgia!" The first section of the trail opened in 1923, joining Bear Mountain and Arden, New York, a short distance north of New York City. The Appalachian Trail Conference (now known as the Appalachian Trail Conservancy) was founded in Washington, D.C., two years later, but interest in actually getting something done seemed to slack off during the Age of Coolidge and Harding.
It fell to a judge, his associate, and a farmer from Connecticut to take the initiative. While Ned Anderson (the farmer) blazed the Connecticut leg of the trail, Arthur Perkins and Myron Avery organized things at the state- and interstate levels.
Avery went on to take the reigns at ATC, and held the director's job from 1932 until the year of his death in 1952. His tenure wasn't without the sort of infighting common to this sort of organiztion – Benton MacKaye left over a disagreement with Avery as to how ATC should respond to a commercial development along the trail – but he did get things done. In 1936, Avery became the first person to have walked the trail from end-to-end (though not as a thru-hiker), and the following year saw the declaration of the trail as complete to Sugarloaf Mountain in Maine.
Not many folks were hiking long-distance trails for fun in the early 1940s, but after the war, interest started picking up again. In 1948, the AT saw its first documented thru-hiker – the legendary (among backpackers, anyway) Earl Schaffer – who later went on to become the first person to thru-hike the route from north to south, as well. Fifty years after that, in 1998, at the age of 80, Earl Schaffer became the oldest person to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail – and for all these reasons and more, his name is still spoken with great reverence by moleskin-and-bandaid set.
The 1960s were kind to the Appalachian Trail, as politicians communistically sought to preserve small slivers of the country for future generations. The National Trails System Act of 1968 established National Scenic Trails within the National Park and National Forest systems, and allowed for the Park Service to acquire lands and conserve the natural environment along the AT's route. This application of tax dollars in the name of the common good has not been controversy-free, however: in areas where The Federals aren't generally trusted, locals often refer to the AT as the "gov'mint trail," and they can be a tad resentful about what they perceive as hippies making their way silently through the woods outside of town.
Actual "incidents" between hikers and locals are extremely rare, as even the most bitter clingers usually recognize that the smelly folks in the earthtone Gore-Tex jackets tend to spend money during their visits to town – indeed, places like Erwin, Tennessee, Damascus, Virginia, and Monson, Maine derive a significant chunk of their economic vitality from hikers stopping to re-provision, pick up mail drops, spend the night in a bed for a change, or gobble up a 24" pizza at a single sitting. That said, the most enjoyable shelters on the trail tend to be those located far distant from trailheads, towns, and road crossings – the ones that are close enough for teens and "young adults" to carry coolers from their cars are often the ones with the nastiest firepits and the grossest privies.
Trail Magic
Every year, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000 people thru-hike the AT, with hundreds of thousands (or, according to the Michelle Malkin crowd-counting technique: a gazillion!) more enjoying the trail as either section- or day-hikers. It's a large enough community, with enough shared complaints and necessities, that a culture, complete with its own unique lingo, has developed along the trail. Backpackers speak of "trail magic" (random acts of kindness, usually performed by locals on behalf of hikers) and "Vitamin I" (ibuprofen) with a level of familiarity that indicates a vibrant and internally-respected set of cultural norms – in its way, not all that different from blog-speak or the set of shared site values regarding the treatment of trolls.
Shared adversity is a powerful unifying force, as is the experience of unrolling one's sleeping bag in very close proximity to a person one met only a few moments before. Though they can be much more elaborate, most of the more than 200 shelters along the AT are open-front lean-tos, capable of sleeping around a dozen hikers on a wooden floor or platform. They'll have a fire ring, a privy, a "mouse trapeze" to hang food above the height that bears can reach, and usually a few tenting sites, but all in all, "rustic" is pretty much the order of the day. There is no electricity (aside from those portable electronic devices that non-purists insist on plugging into their ears), and not usually much in the way of cell phone reception, so a favorite pastime is keeping up with what other hikers are doing via the shelter's log book. These can be among the most fascinating things a person can encounter on the trail – some heavy wisdom, not to mention some hilarious jokes, are the product of thinking all day about what one is going to write a few hours down the road.
A "typical" day for an "average" thru-hiker is around 20 miles long, and begins at or near dawn. Rising from the wooden sleeping platform (usually padded with a Therm-a-Rest or some similar kind of pad), the hiker will visit the privy, cook up some oatmeal and a hot beverage, and set about the morning ritual of re-packing everything one owns into a 3000-cubic inch nylon bag. Lacing boots over feet no doubt swollen, calloused, and/or blistered, the hiker then sets off at a pace of around 2-3 miles per hour. If he or she has followed the recommendations of most guide books, the pack the hiker shoulders will be about one-quarter to one-third of the hiker's body weight, though some folks carry considerably more, and a handful of others much less.
Shelters are generally spaced around 10 miles apart, but that's not a hard-and-fast rule – there are segments with much longer stretches between lean-tos, and others where there will be several within a few miles of one another. Regardless of whether or not it's taken at a shelter, the hiker usually looks forward to the mid-day stop for lunch. Generally, one doesn't bust out the stove and cooking gear for the noon meal, preferring instead to take a nice, long, gorp-munching break. The afternoon's hike will end, preferably well before dark, at another shelter, where the evening's ritual will include washing the day's laundry, cooking dinner, purifying some water, reading and commenting on the log book, and chatting with other hikers between dropping off to sleep shortly after the sun goes down.
At intervals along the trail, the thru-hiker will depart the woods to avail him/herself of the amenities that civilization has to offer. Carrying enough food for more than a couple of weeks is best left to those who learned to hike in 1921, so grocery-store visits and mail drops (packages sent "General Delivery" to Post Offices along the route) become the main means of resupply. Towns also provide a taste of somebody else's cooking, as well as needed diversions like book exchanges and the opportunity to splurge/reward oneself with things like comfy hotel rooms (that have showers and flush toilets and everything!).
Splitting the difference between primitive shelters and expensive, glowing motels are the hostels that have sprung up near trail towns. The accommodations tend toward the basic – we're still talking dorm-style bunks – but they do often provide lifts into town, machines in which to do laundry, hot showers, and a communal kitchen. They're cheap, bare-bones, and provide settings for some of the most memorable incidents of trail magic one will encounter during the trail experience.
Historiorant
Well, I once again seem to have bit off more than I could chew when I committed earlier to talking about the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain – looks like the story of how I earned my seashell will have to wait for a future diary.
Might as well give fair warning that that may be a while: as long-time Cave-dwellers may have noticed, I haven't been as active on the toobz as I once was. The reasons are varied (though most of them are actually verifiable and decent excuses), and while I won't be officially GBCWing anytime soon, I'm afraid I've got a lot on my plate that's keeping me from writing a weekly 10-page article on some historical something-or-other, so...it may be a little while before I can return to the grind. Exciting side note, though: one of the projects that's starting to busify my life is a collaboration with my father, who owns/is a slave to one of those hostels along the AT, and has a great collection of stories that really needs to be told.
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