Category: Thru-Hiker

The Ring

I had only been on the Appalachian Trail for 28 days, attempting to hike from Georgia to Maine, when I decided to go home and see a doctor.  

I thought I had a hernia.  Turns out, I was right.

Dr. Christopher Kenney, a surgeon, told me I had two choices: undergo an operation the following week and delay my hike a total of seven weeks or put on a girdle and go to Maine.  I put on a girdle, a six-inch wide elastic band around my gut, and returned to the trail on March 21, 2015, seven days behind.

That's me with the Hiking Vikings on June 11, 2019
That’s me with the Hiking Vikings on June 11, 2015, near New Hanover, N.H.

Friends I had been hiking with, including the Hiking Vikings, were long gone, more than 100 miles ahead of me.  But Viking got shin splints and he and his hiking partner, Sharon McCray, had to slow down. From entries they made in trail journals at various shelters I could see that I was reeling them in — I gained four days in the first two weeks.

And then Nate got well and I was barely able to keep up.  I was still two and a half days behind when I got a text from Sharon, on April 12, asking for a favor. Nate had left it hanging on a nail at Pickle Branch Shelter. She asked me to check when I passed by and get the ring if it was still there.  I said I would and, much to my surprise, it was.

Meantime, Nate had asked Sharon to marry him, and she had said Yes! They sent me a video of that moment, made at McAfee Knob, the most iconic overlook on entire A.T.

I texted Sharon and asked if the ring I had found was “a ring” or “the ring.” She replied that it was “a ring” but, she said, it had a story.

I was still two days behind when the trail entered the Shenandoah National Park, in northern Virginia.  The Shenandoah is easy trail compared to the rest of the A.T. so I laid my ears back and went all out to catch them. In four days I hiked 106 miles and, after dark on a cold, rainy, Saturday night,  April 25, five weeks after I returned to the trail, I caught them at Tom Floyd Shelter.

I returned the ring, and Nate told me the story.

He said he believed in asking a woman’s father for his blessing before asking his daughter for her hand in marriage. But Sharon’s father was dead. So, Nate said, he talked to Sharon’s father in his thoughts, and asked for his blessing.

The Vikings were married on a hill top 10 days after they completed their hike.
The Hiking Vikings were married  10 days after they completed their hike.

That’s when he found the ring, almost completely covered in dirt, barely visible. It was, to him, her father’s answer: “Yes.”

Postscript: Nate and Sharon completed their hike of the A.T. on July 12, 2015, and were married 10 days later.  The Ring is Nate’s wedding band.   They now have three boys.

I completed my hike on July 14, 2015, and underwent surgery on Aug. 10.

Coming Monday: The Unlucky Forger

Hikers Worry More About Ticks Than Crime

NOTE: I wrote this opinion piece for WRAL.Com, the web site of WRAL-TV in Raleigh.  WRAL.Com posted it yesterday.

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An Appalachian Trail hiker was murdered earlier this month and a second hiker escaped death by playing dead after they were attacked in the middle of the night by a mentally disturbed man with a knife.

That murder was a tragedy but it was also a rarity, only the 11th murder on the A.T. in the last 45 years, according to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, which manages and conserves the trail. During that period, beginning in 1974, tens of millions of people have hiked part of the trail and thousands have hiked all of it, from Springer Mountain, Georgia, to Mount Katahdin, Maine.

Thetrek.co, a hiker-oriented blog, has posted an interesting analysis comparing the murder rate for the United States as a whole to the murder rate on the trail and concluded that the U.S. murder rate is more than 800 times higher.

This season about 3,000 hikers are trying to walk all 2,192 miles of the A.T., through 14 states, and they have worries. But what they worry about may surprise you. Backpackers are a lot more concerned about ticks and the diseases they carry, including Lyme disease, than they are about being assaulted or killed. Or mauled by a bear or bitten by a rattlesnake.

Their concern is well founded.

“The greatest risk to your health and safety while hiking the Appalachian Trail is contracting a tick-borne disease,” the Conservancy says.

Lucky at Mt. Katahdin in Maine, July 14, 2015
Lucky at Mt. Katahdin in Maine, July 14, 2015

I thru-hiked the A.T. in 2015 and the main concerns of hikers I met, after ticks, were:

—Injury. There are so many ways to trip and fall – you encounter a lot of ice, snow, mud, roots, rocks– and, just like that, your hike could be over.

—Illness. Nausea, vomiting and diarrhea from drinking bad water or from failing to wash or sanitize your hands. Hikers almost always filter the water they drink and they don’t shake hands, they bump fists because no one wants the other person’s germs.

—Failure. Three fourths of the thru-hikers don’t finish, according to the Conservancy. On average it takes almost six months and, every day, hikers are tired or wet or cold or hungry or hurt and on really, really bad days, they’re all five things at the same time.

The hiking community is not like the communities where you and I live, it’s more like family. I just returned last week from a three and a half day, 60-mile section hike of the A.T. in Virginia. I was hiking south so my friends and I encountered scores of hikers headed for Maine and almost all of them, strangers, greeted us. Some wanted to stop and talk.

Temper
Temper

Hikers introduce themselves when they arrive at a shelter, three-sided huts, usually with a privy and a spring nearby. Most have trail names and that are easy to remember: “Iceman” carried ice to an injured girl and she named him; “Temper” had worked in a candy factory where she tempered chocolate; “Between” was 17 years old, between high school and college. My trail name is “Lucky” because I was fortunate to have the health to attempt a thru-hike and a wife who said Yes.

Most thru-hikers I met, including women, began their hikes alone. But after the first day or two, they are not alone – they are part of the hiker community that looks out for one another. They also take precautions:

– A few hikers regularly “stealth camp” in the woods. Almost everyone is forced to occasionally but, mostly, hikers stay together at night in or near one of about 250 shelters along the trail. A lot of them won’t stay at a shelter or camp close to a road – they’re concerned about town people who might park at the trail head and come looking for trouble.

–When they sense danger –another hiker who is acting strangely – they will pack up and move on. I’ve done that twice.

–Some carry pepper spray for bears. Or men.

–They warn other hikers they meet on the trail, or they leave warnings in shelter log books, about bears near a shelter or, maybe, a snake in the shelter. Or another hiker who has set off their alarm bell.

–Women usually adopt a gender-neutral trail name, like Eddy or Red Feather, so when they sign a shelter log book their sex is not obvious.

I don’t carry a pistol nor have I ever seen or heard about another hiker who was armed. I think they would be ostracized. Other hikers would fear them and, literally, walk away. And there’s another good reason for leaving your pistol at home – a loaded Glock pistol weighs almost 30 ounces.  And, in case you don’t know, the three most important things about backpacking are pack weight, pack weight, and pack weight.

Coming Friday: The Whale

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