Appalachian Trail Trek
by Lorine Parks
Impressions: two thousand miles of granite peaks, rain and flooding, dripping boots, rocks, rocks, rocks, bears, wild horses, water everywhere. Low hanging mists in the Smokies, pink arbutus criss-crossing the Skyline Drive in Virginia. Fields, meadows, pastures and stiles, miles and miles of rock, beautiful vistas but expect heavy clouds and haze. The Alleghenies, the Catskills, the Housatonic River, seeing longhorn cows, and being sopping wet.
From Georgia to Maine, from Mt. Oglethorpe to Mount Katadin, Tore Knos “thru-hiked,” that is, completed the Appalachian Trail, and with his wonderful slides he took us with him. From March to August, for five months, Tore went north with the spring and made a record of his achievement. He walked through history, with the revolutionary Green Mountain Boys in Vermont, at On the Edge Hostel; and Shay’s Rebellion of 1787 near Springfield Massachusetts; and Civil War monuments in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. As he walked through the natural beauty he also walked through challenges to his stamina and his will to achieve.
For the benefit of native Californians, the Appalachians are a system of mountains in eastern North America, among the oldest mountains on Earth. First formed roughly 480 million years ago they once reached elevations similar to those of the Alps and the Rocky Mountains before they were eroded.
The Appalachian chain is a barrier to east-west travel, as it forms a series of alternating ridgelines and valleys. The long blue wall of the Appalachians thrust up a barrier to colonial expansion. Exploration and settlement was further discouraged by the size and complexity of the lateral mountain ranges, the rugged courses of many of the streams and rivers, and the dense forest. This is Daniel Boone Country, and it is over the peaks and valleys of this Wilderness that the planners of The Appalachian Trail set their footpath.
Every year about 5500 people make this hike, about 85% of them male. They range from seniors celebrating the end of high school, to college grads, to returning vets who want to get back to nature, and senior citizens who need one last outing. The current movie, A Walk in the Woods with Robert Redford and Nick Nolte dramatizes this last group. Interestingly, when originally conceived in 1921, the Appalachian Trail was to be a grand path that would connect a series of farms and wilderness work/study camps for city-dwellers.
Opened in 1937, at 2,178 miles, this is the longest maintained trail in the world. Heavily forested, it offers hostel shelters like Blueberry in Georgia, Bear Den in Virginia near Harpers’s Ferry on the Shenandoah in West Virginia, and Quarry Gap near Gettysburgh, Pennsylvania. The hiker does not have to backpack a tent and sleeping bag unless he/she wishes to. Plus, the trail crosses civilization many times, and motels are available and Laundromats and markets.
But do not think this hike is for sissies. The trail passes over the highest point in Massachusetts at Mount Greylock, with an elevation of 3491 feet. And the trail ascends Mt. Washington, where the fastest wind gust ever recorded on the surface of the Earth, 231 miles per hour, was recorded April 12, 1934. Although the John Muir Trail in the California Sierras maintains a higher elevation, and the entire Pacific Crest Trail, of which it forms a part, at 2,600 miles is longer, the Appalachian Trail has more variety in ascents and descents (The PCT was not dedicated until 1993).
Hazards include rains and flooding, but at Lemon Squeeze, New York the rangers maintain a boardwalk over the swamps. In Upper Goose Pond, Massachusetts, a bear box is provided, to cache food and keep the bears out.
Moose can be sighted up to their antlers in streams. By the time the hiker reaches the White Mountains in New Hampshire the trail goes over “jagged rocks, straight up and down,” as Tore put it.
Near trail’s end at the Kennebec River in Maine, canoes are available, to ford the river at Thoreau Springs. “If I were the CEO of a business, I’d send the Human Resources person to the end of the trail on top of Mt. Katadin, and whoever completed the walk, I’d want to hire them,” Tore told this reporter.
Tore is a fellow Rotarian with the Playa Venice Club. He hikes for his own pleasure, but he also has made some of these long “walks” to earn donations for Disaster Aid, an organization that responds by bringing clean water systems, tools, mosquito netting, first aid stations and shelter when cataclysmic events occur.