GOURMET TRAVELLER 141Appalachian Trail on a road trip that balances
wilderness with comfort, without resorting to tents,
two-minute noodles or long-service leave.CONNECTICUT
My trip begins in New York City, just the sort of place
President Johnson would have considered detrimental
to my soul. On a fine summer morning in Brooklyn,
we toss suitcases – rather than hiking packs – into the
boot of our car and head north on Interstate 684.
Our destination is the town of Kent, Connecticut,
all jaunty American flags and flowerboxes bursting
with petunias and echinacea.
At Annie Bananie, an ice-cream parlour in the
town’s general store, we meet Ray Bracone for hot
dogs and iced tea. Bracone operated heavy equipment
at Ground Zero after 9/11, and has formed a volunteer
task force that maintains the Connecticut stretch
of the Appalachian Trail and encourages visitors to
minimise their environmental impact. “The outdoors
are a wonderful way to find peace,” he says, as he
drives us to one of the region’s famous covered
bridges, Bull’s Bridge. It’s the trailhead of a sedate
seven-kilometre round-trip hike to Ten Mile Hill. This
is my first footfall on the Appalachian Trail, confirmed
when I see a white blaze, an identifying daub of paint
on a cottonwood tree. There’s romance in imagining
we could follow these marks for 1,174 kilometres north
to Mount Katahdin, in Maine, or for 2,349 kilometres
in the other direction before staggering to the southern
terminus, Springer Mountain, in Georgia. On the way
we’d see some of the most beautiful woodland in the
world, filled with maples and black cherry, trout and
deer. “The mountains are calling and I must go,” wrote
the 19th-century American naturalist John Muir, and
it’s hard to ignore the urge to keep walking just to see
where the next blaze leads.
Instead we detour to the Ten Mile River Lean-To,
one of about 250 shelters that dot the trail. It’s well
named, no more than a raised wooden platform and
roof. Nearby is a blue plastic container draped with
chains and marked “bear box”, a safe place to store
provisions overnight. It’s an insight into the regimen
of a “thru-hiker”, the thousand-odd hardy individuals
who walk the entire trail each year, taking five to seven
months at a steady clip. They walk. They sleep. They
try to avoid being eaten by bears. Repeat.
Our daytrip takes us to a pretty lookout, known in
these parts as an “overlook”, with broad views across
New York state and the Connecticut countryside. Here
we meet a couple of rangy thru-hikers who started their
trek in Georgia four months ago. They’re mechanically
consuming squashed granola bars, glassy-eyed with
exhaustion. With my daypack beside their labrador-sized
packs, I feel both fraudulent and secretly relieved that
I’m about to turn around and trot back to my car. Clockwise
from top left: the
track near Bull’s
Bridge; beware
of moose, on the
road from New
Hampshire to
Maine; hot dogs
and popcorn at
Annie Bananie,
Kent; Ray
Bracone (right)
with fellow Bull’s
Bridge Task Force
volunteers; Kent,
Connecticut.