Shenandoah National Park, from Vermont across to Maine, as forlorn relic strands in the
odd state park, but otherwise buried under shopping malls and housing developments.
Much of the trail crossed private lands, and new owners often revoked informal rights-of-
way agreements, forcing confused and hasty relocations onto busy highways or other
public roads--hardly the tranquil wildnerness experience envisioned by Benton MacKaye.
Once again, the AT looked doomed.
Then, in a timely piece of fortuitousness, America got a secretary of the interior,
Stewart Udall, who actually liked hiking. Under his direction, a National Trails System Act
was passed in 1968. The law was ambitious and far-reaching--and largely never realized.
It envisioned 25,000 miles of new hiking trails across America, most of which were never
built. However, it did produce the Pacific Crest Trail and secured the future of the AT by
making it a de facto national park. It also provided funds--$170 million since 1978--for the
purchase of private lands to provide a wilderness buffer alongside it. Now nearly all the
trail passes through protected wilderness. Just twenty-one miles of it--less than 1 percent
of the total--are on public roads, mostly on bridges and where it passes through towns.
In the half century since Shaffer's hike, about 4,000 others have repeated the feat.
There are two kinds of end-to-end hikers--those who do it in a single season, known as
"thru-hikers," and those who do it in chunks, known as "section hikers." The record for
the longest section hike is forty-six years. The Appalachian Trail Conference doesn't
recognize speed records, on the grounds that that isn't in the spirit of the enterprise, but
that doesn't stop people from trying. In the 1980s a man named Ward Leonard, carrying
a full pack and with no support crew, hiked the trail in sixty days--an incredible feat when
you consider that it would take you about five days to drive an equivalent distance. In
May 1991, an "ultra-runner" named David Horton and an endurance hiker named Scott
Grierson set off within two days of each other. Horton had a network of support crews
waiting at road crossings and other strategic points and so needed to carry nothing but a
bottle of water. Each evening he was taken by car to a motel or private home. He
averaged 38.3 miles a day, with ten or eleven hours of running. Grierson, meanwhile,
merely walked, but he did so for as much as eighteen hours a day. Horton finally overtook
Grierson in New Hampshire on the thirty-ninth day, reaching his goal in fifty-two days,
nine hours. Grierson came in a couple of days later.
All kinds of people have completed thru-hikes. One man hiked it in his eighties. Another
did it on crutches. A blind man named Bill Irwin hiked the trail with a seeing-eye dog,
falling down an estimated 5,000 times in the process. Probably the most famous, certainly
the most written about, of all thru-hikers was Emma "Grandma" Gatewood, who
successfully hiked the trail twice in her late sixties despite being eccentric, poorly
equipped, and a danger to herself. (She was forever getting lost.) My own favorite,
however, is a guy named Woodrow Murphy from Pepperell, Massachusetts, who did a
thru-hike in the summer of 1995. I would have liked him anyway, just for being called
Woodrow, but I especially admired him when I read that he weighed 350 pounds and was
doing the hike to lose weight. In his first week on the trail, he managed just five miles a
day, but he persevered, and by August, when he reached his home state, he was up to a
dozen miles a day. He had lost fifty-three pounds (a trifle, all things considered) and at
last report was considering doing it all over again the following year.
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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