Memories of hiking the Appalachian Trail

One of the first towns you get to after Springer is Fontana Dam--typically around day 8 if you're making any time. We hit the National Square Dancing Championship in that town, and spent a night with hundreds of couples in hooped skirts...weird first stop. It's also a place for a logical first mail drop, if you're doing that, so after the first stint on the trail it has the effect of bringing you back to reality.

Then, you've got the long graded uphill going into the Smokies (Federal Park land is always easier hiking because they try to comply with some version of ADA rules, meaning that trails can't be more than a certain grade)...beautiful, though. The trails are hugely rutted in the Park...overhiked and a lot of erosion. We hiked one day in running water up to our thighs.

This is also one of the places where leantos are more or less required, as a way to keep the bears and hikers separated. Generally, though, leantos on the AT suck. Stay out of the leantos when you can...I had mouse holes in that backpack I kept for years! But, frankly, the mice are nothing compared to some of the strange folks you meet, particularly near the beginning of the AT as the weird people get filtered out. We met a lot of people in southern North Carolina who were thruhiking NOT because they liked nature, but because they hated being with people. Many of those were having equipment problems, or were on painkillers for blisters. They disappeared by Kingman's Dome.

We hit snow farther north--around Chattanooga--and since we weren't really equipped for cold weather, it would have been not much fun--and that's not why we were there. We stayed in a cheap hotel that night--people walking around town in tennis shorts and we were covered with mud...

I still remember the last entry I made the night before we climbed Katahdin, three months later:
"We regret to inform you that, due to new geological information, we've discovered that the Appalachians actually extend to Moncton, New Brunswick, 550 miles north of here. We hope you'll understand and enjoy the remaining month of the trip."

The AT itself never disappointed, day after day...the ritual and the beauty and the fact that you'd walked from GA to Pennsylvania (only half way!!!) or wherever always blew me away. To this day, every time I cross the trail--and you cross it a lot since it spans the east coast, I have huge huge pride, even though almost no one in my adult life knows I did the whole thing.

And...the rhododendron blossoms that start at Springer? If your timing is right, hikers follow those all the way north...the last ones are at Delaware Water Gap in New Jersey.

My hiking partner and I had two rules: we ran up every set of uphill stairs on the trail (there's a 1 mile set of stairs right after the trail crosses route 9 in southern Vermont that nearly killed me--the longest on the whole trail). And, we tried to hitchhike any section that was on a highway--we argued that the true trail experience was to use each section as it was intended...hiking on dirt, hitchiking on pavement. Oh, and never pass up a chairlift when offered!