Georgia to Maine by Foot
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Georgia to Maine By Foot An Account of an Appalachian Trail Thru-hike By Robert B. Ewing Contents Forward 3 Chapter 1 - Georgia 7 Chapter 2 - North Carolina 16 Chapter 3 - Tennessee 22 Chapter 4 - Virginia 30 Chapter 5 - West Virginia 40 Chapter 6 - Maryland 51 Chapter 7 - Pennsylvania 57 Chapter 8 - New Jersey 66 Chapter 9 - New York 69 Chapter 10 - Connecticut 75 Chapter 11 - Massachusetts 80 Chapter 12 - Vermont 83 Chapter 13 - New Hampshire 89 Chapter 14 - Maine 101 Afterward 119 Stats 122 2 Forward "In the fell clutch of circumstance I winced but did not cry aloud. Under the bludgeoning of fate My head is bloody but unbowed." - Rudyard Kipling My wife left me. My business collapsed. I lost my home. The bank repo'd my truck. My dog had died. I was living all the elements of a country and western song except for becoming a drunk. It was, I suppose, not surprising that I was somewhat depressed. In the fall of 1990 I had reached such depths. At times I wished I could go off somewhere and lie down and die. But that's hard to do when your health is good. Besides, I still could get a good laugh from the funny pages and even "The Born Loser" and "Ziggy" seemed to be coping with life. And, actually, Gladys, my dog, had died many years earlier. At the same time I realized that for the first time since high school graduation, I could go on with my life in any direction I alone chose. And in facing the future, I also realized that I had rushed every major decision I had made in my past. The only time I'm not guilty of procrastination is when I jump to conclusions. It was at this time that the story of Bill Irwin had made the network news. Bill, a blind man, with his dog "Orient" had hiked the entire Appalachian Trail in 8-1/2 months, a remarkable feat. The A.T. had fascinated me since the early seventies when I learned the Trail went right by my new sister-in-law's front porch in Damascus, Virginia. I had even day-hiked 14 miles from Damascus to Shady Valley, Tennessee in 1975. The more I heard of the over 2,140 mile path, the more I daydreamed of some day walking from Georgia to Maine - but the possibility of actually doing that had remained just a fantasy. Conceived in the early 1920's by Benton MacKaye and created by the Appalachian Trail Conference and 31 3 volunteer trail maintaining clubs under the leadership of persons like Myron Avery, the longest continuously marked hiking trail in the world was completed in 1937. In 1948, Earl V. Shaffer, a young Army veteran, became the first to hike the entire trail, going from Georgia to Maine in one season. This made him the first thru-hiker. (This is the currently accepted spelling of the term.) By 1991, the A.T. Conference had added to its archives the names of just over 2200 people who had completed the trail. Only a fraction of these had done it in one year as thru-hikers. The rest became 2000 milers by completing the A.T. in sections over a period of years. One hiker just recently finished doing segments stretched over 45 years. Designed as much as possible to follow the crest of the Appalachian range providing a wilderness greenway, the trail still included in the early years many miles of road walking. Since then, however, much of the road walking has been eliminated by relocations. The A.T. is not an easy walk in the park. There is a constant battle being fought by volunteers to keep the pathway open due to the ravages of nature such as windfall trees and water erosion. It crosses over more than 200 mountains and despite the efforts of the maintainers; the path is narrow with rocks, roots, briars, nettles, streams, bogs, and cow pies to be dealt with. When I saw that newscast about Bill Irwin it occurred to me that if a blind man could do it, I should be able to do it too. I didn't know if my 55-year-old body would survive a 2000-mile walk, but in my state of mind at the time, dropping dead climbing a mountain didn't seem so bad a resolution to my problems. And if I survived the first mountains but then had to quit somewhere along the way, what was one more failure? An additional benefit of the attempt was that it would free my mind of the past and give me time to decide -- where do I go from here in my life? 4 When I got the brainstorm to hike the Trail, I knew very little about it other than it snaked it's way somehow from Georgia to Maine. I didn't know, for example, that the first 14 miles I had walked in 1975 was the first really flat section in the first 400 miles. Also, I hadn't done any backpacking in my life except for some marches to Army bivouac some 35 years before. I hadn't slept out, prepared a meal outside, nor did I have any of the equipment needed for a long wilderness trek. I did know that I had been working on my feed all of my life and really felt I could walk anywhere, no matter how far, if I did it slow enough. My first act to learn more was to head for the public library. There, I found only one book on the A.T. and a thru- hiking couple had written it almost 23 years before. It was an account of a trip aided by many journalism friends and was more of a travelogue of the cultural attractions along the way than an actual description of the feat. Not much of the book seemed helpful except the recommendation that one should first become a member of the Appalachian Trail Conference. From the ATC, I acquired the A.T. Data Book, a ready reference listing the major features of the Trail and the mileage between them. Included were the shelters, camping areas, water sources and roads it crossed. It proved to be invaluable and I relied on it every day to plan each day's walk and where I would spend the next night. The ATC also encouraged hikers to purchase separately the Appalachian Trail Guide for each state they plan to hike. The guidebooks contain detailed descriptions of Trail sections along with sets of maps for the section described. These 14 guidebooks would have cost over $200 and were entirely beyond my means. I was to later say that if they had been printed on edible paper I might have considered carrying them. Therefore, I decided to depend on the little Data Book and the two by six rectangular white blazes painted on trees and rocks to find my way. 5 One of the mistaken impressions I got from the library book on thru hiking was that 150 days was the usual time taken to complete the trip. As a result, I figured that April 15 was a proper date to begin. I didn't realize that in 1991 the A.T. was longer and had more mountains to climb because of relocations than it did 20 years earlier. Most thru- hikers start around April 1 and many start early in March. When the fifteenth arrived, I was still heavily involved in freeing myself of my business and personal obligations. As a result, it was April 28 before two of my sons, Bob and Bill, would deliver me to the base of Springer Mountain, Georgia for the start of the journey. Bob and Bill would later tell me they secretly had a bet between them on how far I would go before I quit. 6 GEORGIA ... after the first 30 minutes of today's hike, I found a 3-inch sapling down across the trail. I was tempted to say, "Well, the trail's blocked. I might as well go home." But I stepped over and went on. "Web Breaker" A.T. Journal - 1991 My sons weren't alone in wondering how far I would be able to go. I had plenty of doubts myself. I wondered if my body would hold together. Would my very limited finances see me to the end? Would I, with such a late start, make it to Main before the snows? I knew it would be no disgrace to quit. More than 1,200 hikers start north from Springer Mt. each year and only about 200 go the whole way. Some quit on the approach trail up Springer, an 8.3-mile climb, before they have even started the real trail. A photo that Bill took of me at the base of Springer shows me fresh and clean. A photo taken later on the top of the mountain shows me sweat-soaked and with a decided wilted look, but still on my feet. I hadn't dropped dead. The last quarter mile of the climb seemed to be almost straight up, what I later would a "toes touch the shin climb". Sprawled all around the summit when I reached it was a group of detainees from a juvenile detention center near Atlanta. The teenage boys had elected to go on a 30-day wilderness adventure in order to shorten their sentences. They looked worse than I felt and I found that encouraging.