off to filter water and fell in the creek. Even Katz agreed that this was better than TV. For
the first time since we had left New Hampshire, we felt like masters of the trail.
A few minutes later, a cheerful lone hiker arrived. His name was John Connolly, and he
was a high school teacher from upstate New York. He had been hiking the trail, evidently
only a couple of miles behind us, for four days, and had been camping alone in the open
each night, which struck me now as awfully brave. He hadn't seen any bears--indeed, he
had been section hiking the trail for years and had seen a bear only once, briefly, rump
end and fleeing, deep in the Maine woods. John was followed shortly by two men about
our age from Louisville--Jim and Chuck, both real nice fellows, self-effacing and funny. We
hadn't seen more than three or four hikers since leaving Waynesboro, and now suddenly
we were mobbed.
"What day is it?" I asked, and everyone had to stop and think.
"Friday," someone said. "Yeah, Friday." That explained it--the start of a weekend.
We all sat around the picnic table, cooking and eating. It was wonderfully convivial.
The three others had hiked a great deal and told us all about the trail ahead as far as
Maine, which still seemed as distant as the next cosmos. Then the conversation turned to
a perennial favorite among hikers--how crowded the trail had become. Connolly talked
about how he had hiked nearly half the trail in 1987, at the height of summer, and had
gone days without seeing anyone, and Jim and Chuck heartily seconded this.
This is something you hear a lot, and it is certainly true that more people are hiking
than ever before. Until the 1970s, fewer than 50 people a year thru-hiked the AT. As
recently as 1984, the number was just 100. By 1990, it had pushed past 200, and today it
is approaching 300. These are big increases, but they are also still tiny, tiny numbers. Just
before we set off, my local newspaper in New Hampshire had an interview with a trail
maintainer who noted that twenty years ago the three campsites in his section averaged
about a dozen visitors a week in July and August and that now they sometimes got as
many as a hundred in a week. The amazing thing about that, if you ask me, is that they
got so few for so long. Anyway, a hundred visitors a week for three campsites at the
height of summer hardly seems overwhelming.
Perhaps I was coming at this from the wrong direction, having hiked in crowded little
England for so long, but what never ceased to astonish me throughout our long summer
was how empty the trail was. Nobody knows how many people hike the Appalachian Trail,
but most estimates put the number at around three or four million a year. If four million is
right, and we assume that probably three-quarters of that hiking is done during the six
warmest months, that means an average of 16,500 people on the trail a day in season, or
7.5 people for each mile of trail, one person every 700 feet. In fact, few sections will
experience anything like that high a density. A very high proportion of those four million
annual hikers will be concentrated in certain popular places for a day or a weekend--the
Presidential range in New Hampshire, Baxter State Park in Maine, Mount Greylock in
Massachusetts, in the Smokies, and Shenandoah National Park. That four million will also
include a high proportion of what you might call Reebok hikers--people who park their
car, walk 400 yards, get back in their car, drive off, and never do anything as
breathtaking as that again. Believe me, no matter what anyone tells you, the Appalachian
Trail is not crowded.
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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