In the summer of 1948, Earl V. Shaffer, a young man just out of the army, became the
first person to hike the Appalachian Trail from end to end in a single summer. With no
tent, and often navigating with nothing better than road maps, he walked for 123 days,
from April to August, averaging seventeen miles a day. Coincidentally, while he was
hiking, the Appalachian Trailway News, the journal of the Appalachian Trail Conference,
ran a long article by Myron Avery and the magazine's editor, Jean Stephenson, explaining
why an end-to-end hike was probably not possible.
The trail Shaffer found was nothing like the groomed and orderly corridor that exists
today. Though it was only eleven years since the trail's completion, by 1948 it was already
subsiding into oblivion. Shaffer found that large parts of it were overgrown or erased by
wholesale logging. Shelters were few, blazes often nonexistent. He spent long periods
bushwhacking over tangled mountains or following the wrong path when the trail forked.
Occasionally he stepped onto a highway to find that he was miles from where he ought to
be. Often he discovered that local people were not aware of the trail's existence or, if they
knew of it, were amazed to be told that it ran all the way from Georgia to Maine.
Frequently he was greeted with suspicion.
On the other hand, even the dustiest little hamlets nearly always had a store or cafe,
unlike now, and generally when Shaffer left the trail he could count on flagging down a
country bus for a lift to the nearest town. Although he saw almost no other hikers in the
four months, there was other, real life along the trail. He often passed small farms and
cabins or found graziers tending herds on sunny balds. All those are long gone now.
Today the AT is a wilderness by design--actually, by fiat, since many of the properties
Shaffer passed were later compulsorily purchased and quietly returned to woodland.
There were twice as many songbirds in the eastern United States in 1948 as now. Except
for the chestnuts, the forest trees were healthy. Dogwood, elms, hemlocks, balsam firs,
and red spruces still thrived. Above all, he had 2,000 miles of trail almost entirely to
himself.
When Shaffer completed the walk in early August, four months to the day after setting
off, and reported his achievement to conference headquarters, no one there actually
believed him. He had to show officials his photographs and trail journal and undergo a
"charming but thorough cross examination," as he put it in his later account of the
journey, Walking with Spring, before his story was finally accepted.
When news of Shaffer's hike leaked out, it attracted a good deal of attention--newspapers
came to interview him, the National Geographic ran a long article--and the AT underwent
a modest revival. But hiking has always been a marginal pursuit in America, and within a
few years the AT was once more largely forgotten except among a few diehards and
eccentrics. In the early 1960s a plan was put forward to extend the Blue Ridge Parkway, a
scenic highway, south from the Smokies by building over the southern portion of the AT.
That plan failed (on grounds of cost, not because of any particular outcry), but elsewhere
the trail was nibbled away or reduced to a rutted, muddy track through zones of
commerce. In 1958, as we've seen, twenty miles were lopped off the southern end from
Mount Oglethorpe to Springer Mountain. By the mid-1960s it looked to any prudent
observer as if the AT would survive only as scattered fragments--in the Smokies and