There is a point where you are so deep in the woods, with trees looming large and their leaves stitched across the skyline, that you feel the vastness of the landscape and can’t shake the sense that you are out of your element. Tree frogs yammer back and forth while birds chirp wildly. Something scurries past the dry leaves under your feet. You suddenly realize that you are four or five miles from the nearest road and you’ve forgotten which direction you came from.
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From Charlottesville, the Greenstone Trail, along the Blue Ridge Parkway, is one of the best ways to experience the AT.
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A new corridor of trail up ahead looks like a long dried-up river bend, now just jagged rocks on an uphill slope. You amble softy through the rough terrain, trying not to slip and crack your head wide open, and then, around the bend, a lone figure appears. He’s holding two titanium walking sticks and shouldering a large backpack. He sports a Boston Red Sox baseball cap and a full blonde beard, stopping to introduce himself by his trail name: Frijole.
Why is he called Frijole? “It kind of evolved,” he says. “You don’t give yourself a trail name, someone gives it to you.” In this case, the etymology comes from the fact that he hails from Boston, which is famous for its beans. “Frijole” is Spanish for “bean,” so there you have it.
Frijole looks like a cross between an American nomad who travels west by foot and by freight train, and a modern hippie, whose earthen zeal is only outweighed by Burning Man desires for bonding and revelry. He’s already walked five miles on the Appalachian Trail (or simply “The AT”) today, and he plans to walk 10 more before reaching the shelter where he’ll camp tonight.
Yet, according to a new assessment released at the end of March by the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) and the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC), the AT is in trouble. Challenges such as adjacent development on privately owned land, air pollution and funding shortfalls continue to affect the ability of trail managers to preserve the trail’s natural beauty. “The goal of protecting those lands,” said David Startzell, ATC’s executive director, “and the adjacent landscapes surrounding them remains a never-ending challenge—one that requires ongoing public and private support.”
The AT extends from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine, the majority of the trail being in vast wilderness (although some portions traverse towns and roads). It has emerged as something of a modern rite of passage for oblivion-chasers, loners, hiking mavens and even average souls who are disoriented by the rhythm of asphalt and looking to make sense of their North American narrative.
Frijole continues. His sojourn into the hills alone has become somewhat compulsory: He hiked the AT for three months last year and he’s doing a month this year. Of all the places that people like Frijole could go, the AT seems as good a place as any to reconnect with our own sense of wonder.
Appalachian Trail FAQs
Where does the AT start? Springer Mountain in the Chattahoochee National Forest in Fannin County, Georgia, is the southernmost point of the Appalachian Trail.
Where does the AT end? Mount Katahdin, the highest point in Maine, is the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, located on a stretch known as the Hundred-Mile Wilderness.
Where do Central Virginians pick up the trail? The parking lot at Greenstone Trail/Humpback Rocks on the Blue Ridge Parkway (near Route 250) is an ideal place to pick up the AT. Hike a mile in from the lot and take the AT north or south.
When was the AT started? The trail was conceived by Benton MacKaye in 1921. On October 7, 1923, the first section of the trail, at Bear Mountain (near Rockland, New York) was opened. The completion of the AT came in 1936.
Who maintains the trail today? More than 4,000 volunteers contribute over 175,000 hours annually in an effort to preserve the Appalachian Trail’s natural habitat. The ATC organizes many of these volunteer efforts, though individual states maintain sections of the trail and upkeep of shelters through local volunteers, as well.
How long is the entire trail? The AT is approximately 2,178 miles (3,505 km) long. The length has changed over the years, as periodic changes and maintenance alters the trail’s length, making an exact figure difficult to ascertain.
How many hikers travel on the AT each year? The ATC estimates that more than 1 million hikers use the AT each year, though the number who actually thru-hike the entire trail is extremely low. On average, around 200 hikers complete the AT in a single six- to seven-month period.
What songs reference the AT? Composer Rick Sowash created Music for the Appalachian Trail, a pastoral song cycle that features music representing each of the regions through which the trail passes. Bruce Springsteen’s “Outlaw Pete Song” begins with lyrics about the young buck’s origins near the AT. Jim Stoltz’s “The Appalachian Trail” is a heartfelt ode to the trail’s transformative effect on hikers, while Mark Sanford’s word-of-mouth YouTube hit by the same name utilizes the AT moniker as a saucy metaphor.
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Virginia hosts 550 miles of the AT, more than any of the other 14 states along the trail. Some consider this state to be the most challenging section of the AT for northbound hikers because of its wet spring thaw, where on average it rains 20 out of 30 days during the vernal equinox. Substantial portions of the trail closely parallel Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway in Shenandoah National Park. Virginia’s southern end of the AT travels westerly through the George Washington and Jefferson National forests from Roanoke County to Giles County. According to the ATC, this portion of the trail is the most remote and least traveled.
For a day hike here in Central Virginia, the Greenstone Trail, along the Blue Ridge Parkway, offers one of the best ways to experience the AT. This is where my girlfriend and I set off with our black Labrador mix for what we assumed would be a walk in the park, as the saying goes. We entered the forest from the Greenstone Trail parking lot at Humpback Rocks, three miles south on the Blue Ridge Parkway from Route 250. From the parking lot we hike a mile into the forest before picking up the AT heading north. After walking five additional miles in, and exhausting all of our food and all but a drop of water, we encounter a man named Dave Marshall. His trail name is “Red,” because he sports short red hair underneath his ski cap.
“I haven’t seen another person on the trail for two days now,” says Red. “Most days you only see maybe one person every 24 hours.” Red is a retired schoolteacher from Iowa. He had planned to hike the AT for years, but never found the time to get away from his responsibilities until last year, when he planned to hike the entire trail. Two months in, Red tripped and sprained his ankle. He left the trail a few days later. This year he’ll hike for about six weeks. Red is what’s known as a “section-hiker.” He says it’s a bit early to be seeing “thru-hikers,” yet he’s seen a few who have gotten an early start this year. “A fella named ‘Nature Boy’ is on the trail just north of here,” says Red. “This is his third thru-hike of the AT.”
When serious section-hikers speak of thru-hikers, there is always a hint of reverence for someone who attempts to hike the entire 2,178 mile trail in a single season. The AT is more frequently hiked south to north. Thru-hikers typically begin in March and finish sometime around September or October.
“Most of the thru-hikers you meet out here are either college age or retired like me,” says Red. “Those in-between years, most people have a family to raise, a mortgage and a full-time job, so it’s hard to pull off a long-term hike.” Just another 2.5 miles ahead is a lake with a shelter, where Red plans to set down for the night. The trail has more than 250 of these shelters (sometimes called lean-tos or huts), which are generally three-walled structures with a wooden floor, usually spaced a day’s hike or less apart, most often near a water source. Local volunteers maintain the shelters, which, during the summer months, can be crammed with hikers who sleep like a pack of canned sardines.
The AT was conceived in 1921 by a forester named Benton MacKaye, whose idea was to establish a grand trail connecting a series of farms and wilderness work/study camps for city-dwellers. It wasn’t without its share of early controversy. With MacKaye publicly describing the trail with phrases like “self-owning,” “cooperative” and “a retreat from profit,” some saw the concept, as one biographer wrote, as “smacking of Bolshevism.”
In the fall of 1923, the first section of the trail opened near Bear Mountain in Rockland, New York. Two years later, MacKaye established the Appalachian Trail Conservancy in Washington, D.C. By the early 1930s, a lawyer named Myron Avery took up the cause, quickly abandoning MacKaye’s idea of the AT as a series of connected work/study camps, adopting instead a more practical goal of building a simple hiking trail. Avery soon found himself clashing with MacKaye over many issues regarding the AT, and while MacKaye remains the figurehead most recognized with creating the trail, he in fact left the organization in 1932, while Avery continued as Chairman of the ATC until his death in 1952.
Earl Shaffer of York, Pennsylvania, wrote the first real memoir about the AT in 1948. He also became the first documented thru-hiker to complete the entire trail. Shaffer’s account was followed by AT books too numerous to mention here, each bringing their own unique sensibility to time spent on the trail. What binds these tales of American odyssey is the innate sense that both scientist and thrill-seeker alike walked into the woods as one kind of person and exited radically changed by the experience.
No book on the AT has sold as well as Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, which gives a humorous view of the trail from a less-than-fit person’s perspective. Through a bizarre collection of characters and anecdotes, Bryson managed to put the AT back on the map for many Americans. Seeing the trail through his dandified writing style, it became all the more compelling when the AT’s fragile beauty crept into Bryson’s rather neatnik soul. Published in 1998, A Walk in the Woods also offered high-minded consciousness to the many social issues surrounding the AT.
Running primarily along the Appalachian highlands, trail lands protect headwater streams for major East Coast watersheds. Thirty-two areas of significance to the AT and its corridor have been identified as high-priority sites for protection, largely under threat from encroaching development. Additionally, in all 14 states along the trail, increasing development of lands that buffer the AT are being converted from pastoral, agricultural and forested uses to residential or commercial uses at an alarming pace. With rising land prices, it is becoming harder to protect these remaining landscapes.
As for problems of pollution, 40 years ago one could still see the Washington Monument some 75 miles away on a clear day. These days, pollution is so pervasive that in the summer months visibility through the dirty haze caused by vehicles along Skyline Drive is reduced to an average of five miles or less. The park’s conservation association is advocating for stronger regulations on nearby coal-fired power plants and other sources of pollution, in an effort to protect the thousands of species of plants and animals that call the Appalachian Trail home. But in far too many instances, it is too late.
The AT serves as a living laboratory that could help warn 120 million people along the Eastern Seaboard of looming environmental problems. The most distressing feature of the trail’s vegetation is the number of fallen trees that line its slopes and peaks in every direction. The immediate cause of this is the Balsam Woolly Adelgid, an insect that relies on acid rain to weaken the conifers’ immune system, whereby it can swoop in and imbue the trees with an untreatable fungal disease. Ninety percent of the park’s trees have been damaged, with indigenous American icons like the dogwood threatened with extinction.
What’s more, stories abound of the American black bear aggressively chasing hikers who have encountered this mammoth omnivore off the trail. In truth, bear sightings on the AT are uncommon, and confrontations rarer still, as black bears typically avoid humans and are usually frightened away by loud noises.
Violent crime, however, has occurred on the trail in a few instances. Since 1974, nine homicides have been documented on the AT, including four in Central Virginia. Randall Lee Smith, who murdered two social workers visiting from Maine in 1981, re-appeared on the trail in 2008, where he shot two fishermen near Giles County. The fishermen survived, but Smith died in jail four days later from injuries sustained after crashing his getaway pickup truck.
Yet despite these rare, tragic occurrences, everyday life on the trail seems peaceful and unthreatening. “The people out here are harmless,” suggests Frijole. “Sure, there are some eccentric people, especially the thru-hikers. But by and large, everyone out here has a good heart.”
Another popular Virginia hike near Roanoke is the Big Rocky Row loop at Fuller Rocks. Just off of Route 81, this portion of the AT heading north goes through a series of ascending switchbacks and ends with a peak view of the James River, before descending back down to the valley below.
Bethany and Doug are firefighters from Washington D.C., who travel Central Virginia for long weekends, hiking the trails around Lynchburg and Staunton as well as off Skyline Drive. Today they are crossing Mill’s Creek, which, along the AT sees a slow moving creek bed burst into a beautiful series of river pools, ending in a majestic waterfall about two miles south of where we encountered Red. Like a lot of day-hikers, Bethany and Doug had no idea what to expect along this portion of the AT. “We try to get out here as much as we can,” says Bethany. “It’s hard to explain, but when we get back to the city all we can think about is where we’re going to go next on the trail. It gets in your blood.”
Throughout the next several weeks, the bulk of the south-to-north thru-hikers will be coming through the Central Virginia portion of the AT. By the middle of the month, they will congregate at the Trail Days Festival in Damascus, Virginia. Known as “Trail Town U.S.A.,” Damascus (population 981) is a convergence of four scenic trails, including the U.S. Bicycle Route 76, the Virginia Creeper Trail, the Iron Mountain Trail, and the AT. Each year, the Trail Days Festival draws in excess of 20,000 tourists, making it the largest single gathering of Appalachian Trail hikers anywhere.
“Trail Days is wild,” says Red. “Too wild for someone my age. But it’s a good place for some hikers to stop and go home, and others just to blow off steam.”
Dusk is creeping in, as my girlfriend and I emerge from the forest after our second long day on the AT. Our feet ache. We load the dog into the car, take off a few layers of smelly, sweaty clothes and chug a big bottle of water from the back seat. As we drive away from the trail, we talk a lot about the conveniences that we can’t wait to get back to. Yet as we get closer to town, a sudden feeling comes over us. Bombarded with neon words bursting from commercial business signs inviting us to chow down on double cheeseburgers for $1.99, or buy a new car at no money down, things seem unbearably constricted by comparison. I fall silent in that moment, breathing in deeply and exhaling a great sigh. She turns to me and says the only thing that seems logical in that moment: “We should go again next week.”
