The Appalachian Trail

An avenue of solitude through wilderness and rural countryside.

Every year some 100 hikers travel the whole length, taking from 4-6 months, but
countless short-term users also extol the trails camaraderie, personal challenge, and
intimacy with nature.
Days, even weeks of backpacking are required before the body adjusts to a burden that
pulls at the shoulder, strains the back and teaches the legs the true meaning of gravity.
Many start out on the trial as cynics.
It’s the devils golf course, where boots go to die.

Amid shadows and a great deal of substance, hikers drink in a powerful landscape.
At dawn the light show repeated itself with the sun and moon in reverse position as we
scrambled our way up to the summit. By midmorning we were skiing down the trail, our
uphill effort now rewarded by a long glide from barren heights through a mystical
timberline forest of foxtail pines.

“I have discovered that I also live in “creation’s dawn”. The morning stars still sing
together and the world, not yet half made, becomes more beautiful every day” – JOHN
MUIR
The route winds through woods that are spacious and sculptured with boulders, where
deer accustomed to passerby play Bambi to your Hansel or Gretel.
Medievil it seemed when the electricity of the hut failed and I scribbled notes by
candlelight.
In their search for a retreat, hikers and monastics have more in common than they realize.
On the trail, hikers revert to lives of simplicity, denying themselves modern comfort,
seeking purification in an uncorrupted world.

Vermont is a mix of woodland walks and pastoral scenes. The route skirts meadows,
meaders past weathered barns, and once cuts directly through a farmyard. In the woods,
beech and maple are joined by gleaming white birches, leaning languorously like fashion
models among milkmaids.

High vantage points on the trail frequently draw crowds. Everyone, it seems, wants to
take in the world at a visual gulp. The trail is a wine better sipped. Godlike views are far
apart and interest can wane if distance is the only goal.
Most hikers anticipate too much – the top of a mountain, arriving at a shelter – a waste of
energy and a detraction from the minute-to-minute enjoyment of the trail.
We paused to note the play of mettled sun on an island of ferns. We lunched like eagles at
perches with a view. I bellied down to watch an orange newt alligator its way past
mountainous pebbles on valleys of moss. With a magnifying glass I spied on a striped
snail grazing on fungus. An amazingly clear and seemingly comprehending eye stared
back at me from the end of a long stalk, then rolled in on itself in a see-no-evil retreat.
I began to relax at sleeping alone in the woods and then actually grew to enjoy it. The
trail, already a classroom, began to be a home – the kind you can miss later after too
much time on the sidewalks.

Leapfrogging sections of the trail. We stopped for lunch on a flat boulder and during the
afternoon sprawled twice more for rest, backs against trees and feet uphill.
By late afternoon, our packs now a punishment and with wind-stirred leaves muttering
rumors of rain, the 3-sided shelter looked like a 4-star hotel. We unrolled our sleeping
bags to claim space. Walking downstream, we found a deep pool that we entered gasping
to splash away the days grime.
Trail talk mingled with the hiss of propane stoves. One by one the stoves went quiet and
night herded us into sleeping bags. Talk became whispers, then faded.

Most are people at some transitional point in their lives – divorse, job change or just self-
discoveries. It’s a pilgrimage not unlike those made in the Middle ages. Thru-hikers
emphacize self-reliance and simplicity. No quitters make a walk like this.

The war against a hiker’s resolve is waged in guerilla style. It is fought on terrain steeper
than you imagined and lonelier than you dreamed. You are harassed by a pack too heavy
and a determination too light.
Domesticated, we sleep behind 4 walls and locked doors. Thrust into the outdoors, we
find the enemy prowls in the dark to mount sneak attacks on the imagination.
There’s either too much water or not enough. Hiking dehydrated to a dried-up spring is a
significant taste of despair. Pulling on wet socks after 5 days of rain and inserting them
into damp boots is all one need know of loathing.
Suddenly beyond the often thin corridor of wilderness lies even more wilderness.

The rocks at the river bottom are rounded and greased with algae and the powerful
current sucks at your knees and battles your balance.
The toughest part of the trail is a narrow valley littered with slabs of granite that peeled
from cliffs on either side. Jumbled with these 50-ton dominoes, overgrow with moss and
gnarled scrub trees, it creates a landscape more suitable to fables and gnomes. Fog
swirled and occasional chill breezes from subterranean springs blew on me like dragons
breathe.
You lever up chimneys and duck through dark tunnels. After 2 hours of gymnastics I
wistfully climbed out of the notch.
The mountain becomes a bittersweet goal to hikers who have accepted the trail as home.

After a steep woodland trek the trail rises above the timberline and becomes a difficult
but seldom dangerous rock climb. About a mile from the peak, the mountain flattens, a
chance for contemplation before the final slope up to the hikers holy grail.

The trails end marks a new beginning.

The John Muir Trail
Along the high, wild Sierra 212 miles, through 3 national wilderness areas, snakes the
John Muir trail.

On the first day we camped 1000 feet short of Mt Whitney, on a ridge so narrow that the
edges of our tent overhung cliffs that dropped away on either side. The payoff came at
sunset. A rose – purple glow slowly filled the eastern sky, and the full moon appeared
over an empty landscape.
Begun a year after Muirs death in 1914, the trail ascends from Yosemite Valley, hugs the
Sierra crest and ends on 14494-foot Mt Whitney. En route nearly a dozen peaks axceed
14000 feet.

John Muir wrote, 1873 after his fifth Yosemite season, ‘The last days of this glacial
winter are not yet past, so young is our world. I used to envy the father of our race,
dwelling as he did… with the new-made fields and plants of Eden; but I do so no more,
because I have discovered that I also live in ‘creation’s dawn.’ The morning stars still
sing together, and the world, not yet half made, becomes more beautiful every day.’

‘I am well again, I came to life in the cool winds and crystal waters, ‘ Muir wrote,
invigorated by the Sierra treasures of cascading streams.

John Muir – born in Scotland, 1838, after schooling, walked from Ohio River a 1000
miles to the Gulf of Mexico, sighing his journal, ‘John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe.’

I thought I was in heaven when the narrow trail beneath my feet delivered me into a
primeval sharply etched peaks of rock and snow.

100 miles south from Yosemite, where another explorer Solomons encountered a raw part
of high peaks above what is now called Evolution valley. Before turning around a short
distance later and giving up his quest, he named the mountains Darwin, Huxley, Wallace,
Fiske, Spencer and Hacckel because the grand setting reminded him of ‘the great
evolutionists, so at one in their dedication to the sublime in Nature.’

Like a geologic soccer ball, volcanic columns as high a 60 feet intrugue a hiker at Devils
Postpile National monument. Nearly 100,000 years ago basalt poured from a vent in this
valley and colled to form polygonal columns Glaciers later sheared off the tops and
polished the surface.