4/6/2023 0 Comments Quicksand on the trail![]() Define the Challenge The view of the French Broad River and Hot Springs, North Carolina, from the trail (Bart Smith)Īccording to Laurie Potteiger, information specialist at the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, the ATC defines thru-hikers as people who walk every one of the trail’s 2,193 miles within one calendar year. To help others experience it, here’s my key advice on how to get started and give yourself the best shot at success. Its combination of wilderness, history, community, and legend have given it an iconic status and have inspired the creation of long-distance trails in places as far away as Israel and Australia. The Appalachian Trail has done that and more. ![]() Conservationist Benton MacKaye proposed a trail that would link the peaks of the Appalachians and serve as an antidote to the unceasing pace and stresses of the industrialized East Coast. For the Appalachian Trail, my touchstone is its seminal idea-or ideal-which was first published 100 years ago in an article that appeared in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects. What I can tell you is what is unique about each one. In the course of trekking some 18,000 miles on long-distance trails in numerous countries and writing 14 books about hiking, including Great Hiking Trails of the World, I have frequently been asked which is my favorite, which is like asking a mother to pick her favorite child. Over the past 30 years, I’ve thru-hiked all three of the triple-crown trails-the AT, the Pacific Crest Trail, and the Continental Divide Trail-some sections of them multiple times. Just like that I became what in AT lingo is called a dreamer-a thru-hiker in waiting. I imagined them continuing, heading down the other side of the peak, up the next one, up and down again and again. As if on cue, a pair of hikers carrying backpacks emerged through the mist. Our guide pointed to the white blazes painted on the cairns: if we followed them, he said, we could walk all the way to Georgia on the 2,193-mile Appalachian Trail. Today that list has more than doubled.īut what really captured my imagination was outside the summit hut, where enormous cairns stood like sentinels, some topped with bright white quartz rocks that made them more visible to hikers struggling through the fog. I also took note of the fatalities: inside the summit building, a list named all of the people who had died in the Presidential Range, mostly from hypothermia and falls back in 1968, there were over 60. The tour guide recited the weather stats: Washington boasted the highest (at the time) land wind speed ever recorded-231 miles per hour, set in 1934-and its summit is buffeted by hurricane-speed gusts 110 days a year. We started hiking in the deciduous hardwood forests at the base, then climbed through the conifers and the krummholz to finally arrive at the fog-shrouded, wind-battered, arctic-alpine zone of the summit. My family and I took the Cog Railway up 6,288-foot Mount Washington, in the Presidential Range. I first felt the AT’s pull at the age of nine while on a vacation in New Hampshire. The AT exerts an almost magnetic attraction on the hearts of outdoorspeople from around the globe. But in terms of influence and inspiration, it is the grandfather of them all. The Appalachian Trail is neither the longest nor the most scenic of the world’s great hiking trails.
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