I had this brought home to me with a certain weep-inducing force as I stood in a
parking lot in a place called Caledonia State Park looking at a section of map that was
simply a blurred smear of whorls, like a poorly taken thumbprint. A single contour line was
interrupted by a printed number in microscopic type. The number said either "1800" or
"1200"--it wasn't possible to tell-- but it didn't actually matter because there was no scale
indicated anywhere, nothing to denote the height interval from one contour line to the
next, or whether the packed bands of lines indicated a steep climb or precipitous descent.
Not one single thing--not one single thing--within the entire park and for some miles
around was inscribed. From where I stood, I could be fifty feet or two miles from the
Appalachian Trail, in any direction. There was simply no telling.
Foolishly, I had not looked at these maps before setting off from home. I had packed in
a hurry, simply noted that I had the correct set, and stuck them in my pack. I looked
through them all now with a sense of dismay, as you might a series of compromising
pictures of a loved one. I had known all along that I was never going to walk across
Pennsylvania--I had neither the time nor the spirit for it just now--but I had thought I
might find some nice circular walks that would give me something of the challenging
flavor of the state without making me endlessly retrace my steps. It was clear now,
looking through the complete set, that not only were there no circular hikes to be had,
but it was going to be the next thing to pure luck any time I stumbled on the trail at all.
Sighing, I put the maps away and set off through the park on foot looking for the
familiar white blazes of the AT. It was a pleasant park in a wooded valley, quite empty on
this fine morning. I walked for perhaps an hour along a network of winding paths through
trees and over wooden footbridges, but I failed to find the AT, so I returned to the car
and pushed on, along a lonely highway through the dense flying leaves of Michaux State
Forest and on to Pine Grove Furnace State Park, a large recreation area built around a
nineteenth-century stone kiln, now a picturesque ruin, from which it takes its name. The
park had snack huts, picnic tables, and a lake with a swimming area, but all were shut
and there wasn't a soul about. On the edge of the picnic area was a big dumpster with a
sturdy metal lid that had been severely--arrestingly--mangled and dented and half
wrenched from its hinges, presumably by a bear trying to get at park garbage. I examined
it with the deepest respect; I hadn't realized black bears were quite that strong.
Here at least the AT blazes were prominent. They led around the lake and up through
steep woods to the summit of Piney Mountain, which wasn't indicated on the map and
isn't really a mountain since it barely rises to 1,500 feet. Still, it was challenging enough
on a hot summer's day. Just outside the park there is a board marking the traditional, but
entirely notional, midpoint of the Appalachian Trail, with 1,080.2 indicated miles of hiking
in either direction. (Since no one can say exactly how long the AT is, the real midpoint
could be anywhere within fifty miles or so; in any case, it would change from year to year
because of reroutings.) Two-thirds of thru-hikers never see it anyway, because they have
dropped out by this point. It must actually be quite a depressing moment--to have
slogged through a mountainous wilderness for ten or eleven weeks and to realize that for
all that effort you are still but halfway there.
It was also around here that one of the trail's more notorious murders took place, the
one at the heart of the book Eight Bullets, which I had bought at ATC headquarters the
day before. The story is simply told. In May 1988, two young hikers, Rebecca Wight and
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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