A Tale of Two Trails Sarahmaslin

1 A Tale of Two Trails SAGE Magazine 2013 Environmental Writing Contest issue, September 2013 BY SARAH MASLIN Wednesday, September 4, 2013 Hiking the Appalachian Trail has traditionally been viewed as an escape from modern society and a return to nature’s basics. But with a new generation of A.T. thru-hikers bringing technology and partying into the woods, trail culture is rapidly changing. Do these changes reflect a more social and accessible trail, or do they threaten the age-old benefits of experiencing the outdoors? Right before the Appalachian Trail crosses the Massachusetts-Connecticut border, it makes a sharp left turn. Then it climbs Bear Mountain, the highest peak in Connecticut, and zigzags in a southwest descent until it hits the town of Salisbury. I know this because I’m looking down at it. Actually, I’m looking down at Google Maps’ representation of it — on an iPhone, on the side of the trail, where I’m sitting atop Bear Mountain. The iPhone belongs to Olivia Gomes, an athletic 37-year-old with a big backpack, hiking poles, pigtails, sunglasses and a bandana. She’s walking the entire 2,000-some miles of the trail with her boyfriend, Nicholas Olsen, 32 — dressed the same, no pigtails, a beard — and their dog, Bailey. Gomes and Olsen (trail names: “Hermit” and “Grizz”) are part of a new generation of Appalachian Trail thru-hikers for whom spending six months on the trail no longer means shedding all the comforts of modern civilization. Last summer, the Appalachian Trail experienced a spike in the number of hikers heading north from Georgia — 2,500 as of November 2012, compared to 1,700 in 2011. The northbound hiker count in 2012 was 65% higher than it was five years ago, causing considerable concern for the trail’s fate if the trend should continue. But statistics on thru-hikers vary unpredictably from year to year, and even back in the 1980s some complained that the trail was too crowded. Given that the A.T. spans over 2,000 miles along the East Coast, it’s hard to imagine several hundred more people changing the hiking experience. But what if they have iPods and cell phones? In recent years, technology use on the trail has exploded. By now, nearly every thru-hiker carries a mobile phone, and iPads and Kindles make regular appearances in shelters. Gadgets are used for everything from watching Seinfeld to trading stocks, and their sudden ubiquity is causing some longtime lovers of the Appalachian Trail — a 75-year-old “wilderness footpath” traditionally seen as an escape from modern society — to question the value of today’s hiking experience. A hiker myself, I’m initially surprised to see iPhones in the woods. I assumed that people thru- hiked the Appalachian Trail to get away from technology and crowds. That’s what appeals to me about hiking, and when I hit the trail, I turn off my phone. I figured today’s A.T. thru-hikers would share this mindset. But maybe I was wrong. * Gomes and Olsen mainly use their smart-phone to read its maps and to stay in touch with family (Gomes’ daughter is back home in Key West). They also check weather on it, pay bills, and order 2 hiking gear online, which they pick up a few days later at a post office in town. Sometimes at the top of a mountain they’ll pull the phone out to make calls — it’s the only place with service. Recently, they’ve been using Google Images to identify trailside plants to find out if they’re edible. So far, so good — in the three months they’ve been on the trail, neither hiker has been poisoned. The phone isn’t the only gadget they brought along for their “Walk in the Woods.” They also have Spot, a fist-sized black and orange tracking device that can alert emergency services with the push of a small red button. It’s linked to Gomes’ blog and to her Facebook page, displaying their location every night, and it automatically sends a text-message to her daughter and mother with their daily GPS coordinates. It’s a nice day on Bear Mountain — sunny and clear enough to see far off into the distance, where patches of orange and red hint that Connecticut’s leaves are just beginning to change. Looking out over the tree line, I can see the woods and pastures that the Appalachian Trail will weave through for 63 miles before heading into New York. On Google Maps, the trail is just a squiggly grey line that stretches down the East Coast some 2,000 miles — from Katahdin, Maine to Springer Mountain, Georgia. * The Appalachian Trail was dreamed up in the 1920s by outdoors enthusiast Benton MacKaye. Mackaye envisioned a single trail running down the whole East Coast, dotted with shelters along the way. In Mackaye’s mind, the trail would serve as an “escape from civilization,” and it was important to him that users “preserve... a certain environment” of solitude and reverence to nature. Without such an environment, Mackaye insisted, the trail’s “whole point is lost.” In order to keep the trail as wild as possible, it was to be built and maintained entirely by volunteers. The 2,000-plus-mile “wilderness footpath” was completed on August 14, 1937, in large part due to the determination of Connecticut judge Arthur Perkins and Washington lawyer Myron H. Avery — along with the labor of 200 or so volunteers, who spent thousands of hours bushwhacking and blazing the trail. In 1937, nobody thought it could be hiked from start to finish. But in 1948, a stubborn army vet named Earl Shaffer walked from the southernmost trailhead in Georgia to the northernmost trailhead in Maine. It took him just 124 days, and it signaled the start of a trend that has grown increasingly popular ever since. While fewer than fifty thru-hikes were recorded before 1970, more than seven hundred finished the trek in 2011 alone. Four times as many tried, but for one reason or another, had to drop out along the way. * When Jim Liptack hiked the trail in 1980, he didn’t have a cell phone. He relied on letters and the occasional pay phone in town to let his mother know he was okay (he was twenty; she was worried sick). He also didn’t have an iPod — a common accessory on the trail today. This new trend elicits a “What-Can-Ya-Do” shrug from Liptack, 52. “They’re missing out,” he says to me as we hack away at overgrown branches that threaten to strangle the narrow trail. As Overseer of Trails for the Connecticut Chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) — the volunteer organization responsible for sections of the trail in 3 Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania — Liptack takes his job seriously, even though he doesn’t get paid. In the thirty years since he completed his thru-hike, most of his weekends from March to November have been spent moving rocks to build staircases, shoveling dirt to create water-bars, clearing brush, and directing work crews. Our goal today, he tells me after I’ve been outfitted with a pair of heavy metal loppers, is to clean up this section of the A.T. (“Ten Mile Trail”) so that a hiker could walk on it tightrope style, both arms extended, without smacking into anything. Or, as Benton Mackaye once said, our goal is to create a strip of trail with just enough “space for a fat man to get through.” It’s a warm Wednesday in late September, and in the afternoon we run into a southbound couple at Ten Mile Shelter. Ear-buds dangle from the guy’s shoulder straps — he tells us he’s been listening to an audio book: “The Maze Runner.” Hiking ten to twelve hours a day can be mentally draining, he explains, and the iPod keeps him from getting bored. When we leave the shelter, Liptack admits that he would never bring an iPod into the woods. “I like to listen to the sounds of the wind, the birds, the trees,” he says, snatching a dead branch from above his head and hurling it off to the side of the trail. Liptack did a lot of listening that dry summer in 1980. He recalls hearing a faint, constant, rain- like noise, even on sunny days. He eventually discovered that it was the sound of gypsy moth caterpillars munching on leaves. “That plugged-in hiker wouldn’t have heard any of it,” Liptack says. In fact, in Liptack’s day, a hiker with an iPod probably would have been “shunned,” like the two or three brave souls on the trail in 1980 who dared to carry radios. Liptack, seeking “total detachment from the world,” often hiked alone. The solitude, the wilderness, and the hiking gave him a profound sense of accomplishment, and an appreciation for the outdoors that has stuck with him for more than thirty years. “The Appalachian Trail is a big part of my life,” he says, and judging by his AMC hat, his “Trail Volunteer” shirt, and the six or seven colorful patches on his green canvas backpack, each proudly displaying a wilderness achievement, I don’t doubt him one bit. * “Yeah, you’ll meet some idiots pretending to be Thoreau,” says a 48-year-old Californian who calls himself “Pesky,” “but most of us are constantly going in and out of town.” It’s early September, and I’ve just driven from New Haven to Salisbury — a sleepy Connecticut town nestled between Route 41 and Route 44, less than a mile from the Appalachian Trail.

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