who had grown up in Maine and done his formative hiking there, was most insistent on
this.) Essentially, it went where access could be gained, mostly high up on the hills, over
lonely ridges and forgotten hollows that no one had ever used or coveted, or sometimes
even named. It fell short of the actual southern end of the Appalachian Mountain chain by
150 miles and of the northern end by nearer 700. The work camps and chalets, the
schools and study centers, were never built.
Still, quite a lot of the original impulse behind MacKaye's vision survives. All 2,100 miles
of the trail, as well as side trails, footbridges, signs, blazes, and shelters, are maintained
by volunteers-- indeed, the AT is said to be the largest volunteer-run undertaking on the
planet. It remains gloriously free of commercialism. The Appalachian Trail Conference
didn't hire its first paid employee until 1968, and it retains the air of a friendly, accessible,
dedicated outfit. The AT is no longer the longest hiking trail--the Pacific Crest and
Continental Divide trails, both out West, are slightly longer--but it will always be the first
and greatest. It has a lot of friends. It deserves them.
Almost from the day of its opening, the trail has had to be moved around. First, 118
miles in Virginia were rerouted to accommodate the construction of Skyline Drive through
Shenandoah National Park. Then, in 1958, overdevelopment on and around Mount
Oglethorpe in Georgia necessitated lopping twenty miles off the trail's southern end and
moving the start to Springer Mountain, in the protected wilderness of the Chattahoochee
National Forest. Ten years later, the Maine Appalachian Trail Club rerouted 263 miles of
trail--half its total length across the state--removing the trail from logging roads and
putting it back in the wilds. Even now the trail is never quite the same from one year to
the next.
Perhaps the hardest part about hiking the Appalachian Trail is getting on to it, nowhere
more than at its ends. Springer Mountain, the launching-off point in the south, is seven
miles from the nearest highway, at a place called Amicalola Falls State Park, which in turn
is a good way from anywhere. From Atlanta, the nearest outlet to the wider world, you
have a choice of one train or two buses a day to Gainesville, and then you're still forty
miles short of being seven miles short of the start of the trail, as it were. (To and from
Katahdin in Maine is even more problematic.)
Fortunately, there are people who will pick you up in Atlanta and take you to Amicalola
for a fee. Thus it was that Katz and I delivered ourselves into the hands of a large,
friendly guy in a baseball cap named Wes Wisson, who had agreed to take us from the
airport in Atlanta to Amicalola Falls Lodge, our setting-off point for Springer, for $60.
Every year between early March and late April, about 2,000 hikers set off from Springer,
most of them intending to go all the way to Katahdin. No more than 10 percent actually
make it. Half don't make it past central Virginia, less than a third of the way. A quarter get
no farther than North Carolina, the next state. As many as 20 percent drop out the first
week. Wisson has seen it all.
"Last year, I dropped a guy off at the trailhead," he told us as we tooled north through
darkening pine forests towards the rugged hills of north Georgia. "Three days later he
calls me from the pay phone at Woody Gap--that's the first pay phone you come to. Says
he wants to go home, that the trail wasn't what he expected it to be. So I drive him back
to the airport. Two days after that he's back in Atlanta. Says his wife made him come
back because he'd spent all this money on equipment and she wasn't going to let him quit
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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