Skywalker--Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Walker Read Free Book Online

both Harvard men; without MacKaye the trail might never have been envisioned, while without Avery the trail might never have been built. So presumably they got on swimmingly, right? In fact they got along like a dog and a cat.
    For starters MacKaye took the community planning features (food farms, community camps, etc.) of his proposal with the utmost seriousness. He looked upon it as a higher human evolution, while others considered them socialist and utopian. For Avery a trail was simply a trail. He spent his every day strenuously trying to find a way to overcome the numerous obstacles to a continuous footpath throughout the Appalachian mountain range.

     
    In 1948 a World War II veteran from Pennsylvania named Earl Shaffer became the first person to thru-hike the AT. During the war Shaffer had spent four years in gruesome conditions in the Pacific, building landing strips and radar stations. A loner by nature, Shaffer’s only true friend had been gunned down on the beach at Iwo Jima. Depressed, he set off alone on the AT in the spring of 1948. “Much of it was very rough,” he reported, “with thousands of downed logs across it, and some areas so overgrown that finding the trail was practically impossible. Marking often was faint or even totally lacking.”
    Nonetheless, Shaffer completed the trail in fewer than five months to become the first thru-hiker. One reason is that the trail was not as difficult then. The AT Shaffer hiked had many logging roads and livestock pastures. Volunteers have since relocated stretches to more scenic, rugged mountain stretches. The irony is that during Shaffer’s initial thru-hike the ATC in its annual meeting had discussed the seeming impossibility of a thru-hike. Gene Espy of Macon, Georgia, became the second thru-hiker in 1951. “Earl was glad I did it,” Espy recalled. “Some people had questioned whether he really had done the whole thing.”
    The first and oldest woman ever to hike the trail was the renowned Grandma Gatewood. Emma Gatewood was a sixty-six-year-old great grandmother from Gallipolis, Ohio, when she set off from Mount Katahdin in 1954 for a southbound thru-hike. She had read about Earl Shaffer in National Geographic “… and immediately knew this was something I wanted to do. I got lost right off the bat,” she recounted.
    For three days and two nights she searched for the trail in the 100 Mile Wilderness, even setting signal flares to alert search planes. Finally, four rangers found her just as she was running out of food. “Go home,” they told her, and she did.
    But the next year she headed south to Georgia to hike northbound, carrying only eighteen pounds of essential items in a duffel bag. Her bare-bones luggage included a light blanket, a shower curtain, a lumberman’s jacket, and a Swiss Army knife. She ate almost all cold food.
    “I’m not afraid of anything in the mountains,” she had stoutly asserted at the outset. “And as long as I can still chop wood I’m not too old to hike.” As she entered the home stretch in Maine, Sports Illustrated started covering her trip. Maine’s rangers also picked up on her trip and rowed her across Maine’s streams. On a cold, windy September day in 1955 she summited Mount Katahdin and sang “America the Beautiful.” She had lost twenty-nine pounds, and her foot size had swollen two sizes. During the trip she wore out four pairs of shoes, and four raincoats.
    And she had some strong words about the trail: “This is not a trail. This is a nightmare. For some fool reason they always lead you right up over the biggest rock to the top of the biggest mountain they can find. I would never have started the trip if I had known how tough it was, but I couldn’t and I wouldn’t quit.”
    But, amazingly, she came back two years later and did the whole trail again.
    There have been other notorious female hikers as well. The Barefoot Sisters of Maine set off sans shoes (sandals for the very rockiest areas) from