One of them snored like a 40-ton truck trying to reverse up a steep hill on a cold and frosty morning. And of course there was a lot spoken about bears, the big uniting factor among all hikers but with the nocturnal noises of the Hillbilly Bobs, there was no way any beast was coming near. Talk was of Squeaky, a 40-mile-a-day thru-hiker who got his name because he didn't bother to stop walking even in darkness, so the only way other hikers knew of his passing was by hearing his boots squeak by in the night.
Two tough ladies doing 20-milers, and a couple of portly Hillbilly Bobs, over-equipped and full of talk. At the Mount Collins shelter, our fellow hikers were equally worthy of Brysonesque bit-parts. Shelters are places to meet other hikers, like Nick and Elk at Ice Water Springs. Because of the bears, rucksacks containing food have to be taken away from the shelter, wrapped in bin bags against the rain, and hauled up high on steel cables, which look unnervingly ghoulish in the half-light. To avoid the need to carry a tent, the Appalachian is dotted with shelters at regular intervals – simple three-walled structures with a roof and a sleeping platform for hikers to unroll their sleeping bags on. By contrast, a day later an outcrop called Charlies Bunion was considerably lower but delivered a far more magnificent view, and because you have to walk to it, there was no one else there. We learnt about map reading, edible plants, "wound management", and the sex lives of salamanders.Īlong the way we got to Clingman's Dome, the highest point on the Trail at 6,643ft, to find a brutalist conning tower at the end of a ramp, reachable by car, as most other visitors seemed to have done. We had a session on how to relieve ourselves in the woods. We stopped to talk about the etiquette upon meeting a bear. But Eric paced it well, starting us slowly, giving us some exercises to prevent injury, and then building in extra rest stops disguised as briefings. The path itself is rocky and rooty, so our progress was not fast.
It was conceived to connect farms and wilderness study camps for city-dwellers and passes through no fewer than 14 states on its journey tracking the Appalachain range from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine. When it opened, back in 1937, it was the longest footpath in the world, and unique in that it was an artificial construct, where most of the world's footpaths are former pilgrimage routes, drovers' tracks, towpaths and so on. Like many things in the United States, the Appalachian Trail is a place of superlatives.
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