I don't know much about the history of the Appalachian Trail. I could inform myself, but having been on it for four days, I am now an expert and further research is unnecessary. I can say, without hesitation or equivocation, that the Trail was designed by crazy men (no women would ever be this insane) and walked almost entirely by crazy people. The people who spend their lives on the Trail, they are not crazy. They have bent their lives to the shape of the trail. This means that they have retained their sanity vis a vis real life; it shows perspective.
The first thing that you learn about the Trail is that you do not walk the trail for the view. In Shenandoah National Park, you will find a concrete pillar and a white rectangle (called a blaze) on a tree. It is a narrow entrance to the otherwise uniform randomness of the wall of woods facing you from the road, a tiny arbor. When you enter the arbor in mid-summer, you are entirely surrounded in forest and various shades of brown and green. It is often thickly carpeted with ground cover. The various informative posters around the park remind you that these are invasive species of plants and this is not what a normal deciduous forest looks like, a thought that you will have had many times over, particularly during the hottest and muggiest parts of the day: this doesn't feel like North American forest at all, it feels like the rainforest. It will be several hours from the time that you enter the canopy before there is even a side trail that offers anything like a view from the mountain ridge.
When you are hiking like a normal middle class person with disposable income (both in terms of time and money), side trails are the main focus of a hike. The main trail is a spine that leads you from possible view to possible view and you have a series of views and side trails in mind when you set out on the hike, which might be planned for as long as six hours. In a long day, you might hike six miles and tackle one or two peaks. When you are moving from place to place on the trail, side trails cease to be of any interest at all. If you have to do ten miles that day (which is the minimum you have to do in order to move forward fast enough to get anywhere), you don't want three of those miles on side trails that don't get you further toward your destination. The view can wait. You can take the opportunities that the trail gives you, when it runs along a ridgeline for example, rather than when it hits the top of the peak.
Learning to hike in the Rocky Mountains is poor training for hiking in the Appalachians. Words like "peak" have a different meaning. A peak in the foothills of Colorado has a height of six thousand feet or more. It is well above the scrub line and is flirting with the tree line altogether. You are not ensconced in leafy greenness at the heart of the trail; the view is an inescapable part of the trail and side trails are unnecessary. A peak in the heart of the mountains means you better bring your rock-climbing gear and, in some cases, you snow gear. I crested many peaks in the Appalachians, the tallest topped out at 3700 feet. At the height, there are still plenty of trees around. There is no obvious sign that you have reached the top of the "mountain" except that the trail starts to go downward after a few hundred yards. There is no mistaking a peak in the Rockies.
I think this is the sneaky attraction of the Appalachian Trail; none of the mountains are that high, it should be easy to hike this. It is easy to hike one mountain. But the Appalachian Trail laughs at you, it dares you to take one more peak, to go just two more miles. It's so easy. In Shenandoah, it isn't one or two or ten more miles. It's one thousand miles more of tall hills gussied up as mountains that you learn to hate because the trail never quite seems to be done going up. It tumbles down, zig-zagging back to the ridge, and the climbs forever, suddenly accelerates up, and then slows again, relentlessly up, until you feel like you are always climbing and your calves never knew such pain. If you are momentarily aware that you are going down, your calves still screaming and still working hard, this time to keep you from falling, it only fills you with dread because the inevitable slow death of the upward slope is coming, waiting, laughing.
It is then that you come to dread the word "gap." You cross many of these passes in the mountains. They don't deserve the name pass because the mountains don't tower over them, just a few hundred feet. Cameron Pass in Colorado, for example, is 2,000 feet below the peaks of the mountains on either side of it. But those few hundred feet add up. Every three or four miles is a new gap, a couple hundred feet on either side. A thousand feet here, a thousand feet there, and suddenly you've got a mile. You walk the trail for long enough and the vertical distance traveled starts to hurt, far more than the horizontal distance. Twenty miles in New York City sounds like a lot, but it's a cakewalk - all one surface, basically level ground. Twenty miles in Shenandoah National Park? That's six peaks, over a mile of vertical distance, dirt, rocks, stones, roots, steep downs, stairs up, slopes, ridges and hollows. You can walk 20 miles in NYC without too much effort in six and a half hours. 20 miles in the SNP takes about eleven hours and only if you can muscle through because you have to get your miles in or it will be September in Maine before you know it. Shenandoah National Park is the easiest part of the Appalachian Trail.
When you start the more arduous than necessary climb from 2800 feet to 3500 feet for the twelfth time in two days and you stop cursing because this should be easier than it is, you realize just how insane the Appalachian Trail truly is. Think about the Oregon Trail. It begins in Missouri and seeks to cross the tallest mountains the continent can throw at it. The passes are high up and hard work to find, but you would rather go through a saddle at 10,000 than cross over a 14,000 foot mountain. A pass is an excuse to get away from the peaks, you follow the base of the mountain rather than go over the ridge. You make your life easier, mileage is cheap, elevation is expensive. But the Appalachian Trail was blazed by people who think differently. If you really wanted to walk from Georgia to Maine, the easiest way is to follow the coast. If you need the mountains, then you twist and turn at edges. The last thing on earth that you do is blaze a trail that takes you over as many mountains as possible in the range for the next two thousand miles. But that is exactly what the AT does.
If that doesn't sound like it's for you, I can understand. I spent four days in the mountains and I went sixty miles. 16 miles the first day, 9, the next, 20 the next, and 14 on the final day (in 7 hours, I might add). I hated it. The last day was all about anger and escape. But I had violated the fundamental rule of the mountains, as I discovered, hips waggling into the friendly hostel a ridge runner had built in his home at the entrance to Shenandoah, just for fools such as myself. I listened to the hostelier and his friends banter about how far they were going to get into the trail over the next few days. Their concept of time was fluid, permanently vacation like. In the end, they couldn't settle on where they would be when, so they postponed the decision until a later date. They would phone him(!). Then he turned to me and asked me how far I had come. "I did the park from Swift Run Gap in four days." He let that sink in. "How come you did it so quickly?" My brain was finally able to process now that all of the glucose wasn't going to my legs and I pulled the correct answer out of thin air. I didn't know what I was going to say when I opened my mouth. "I didn't know any better." My generous host, a sage of the mountains, nodded, "That is the correct answer."
I had resolved never to set foot on another mile of the AT on purpose for the rest of my life when the arbor opened the other way onto this rural corner of Virginia (with it's 4G cell service and direct route to Washington, DC). In that moment, I began to change my mind. His friends left at four thirty, hitting the trail for an easy couple of miles before setting up camp for the night. We watched the Tour de France. I had set out on trail with a goal, a finish line, and a deadline. I needed to get somewhere and the trail was a means, though I thought I would enjoy the process. I had met some of the trail who had a goal, too. They need to hit that mountain in Maine, months from now. I drafted in his wake, pushing myself to match his pace, needing to get that twenty mile day in to meet my deadline. Everything was sacrificed to the great god Distance. But the men and women who live by the trail, they have no deadline, no finish line. The point is to be on the trail. Oh there are many who walk the trail, who punish themselves, who make their mileage goals every damn day. They are on the trail, they don't live by it. The ones who live by it, they just are. One day, they look up and they find themselves in Maine and think "Oh. How did I get here?"
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