Earl Shaffer was both the first
person to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail and to write about it. He completed
his south-to-north (NOBO or North Bound in Appalachian Trail lingo) trip in 124
days, averaging over sixteen miles a day, backpacking every day and never
taking a day off for rest. As he himself noted, “Three years were to go by
before Gene Espy duplicated [his] south-to-north trip, and Chester
Dziengielewski and Martin Papendick completed the trip north-to-south (SOBO of
South Bound in AT ling) the same year. That year was 1951, years before “NOBO”,
“SOBO”, and “thru-hiker” became part of the AT nomenclature.
Shaffer completed his second
thru-hike, SOBO, in ninety-days in 1965. “The story that inspired thousands of
Appalachian Trail thru-hikers,” about his 1948 thru-hike but with the hindsight
of 1965 thru-hike, was privately printed in 1981. He entitled it Walking With Spring because “he had come
to the woods to walk with spring” and followed spring’s arrival in the
Appalachians as he hiked NOBO from Georgia to Maine.
The first AT thru-hiker hoped to
average twenty miles a day but was willing to settle for fifteen. While
backpacking, he calculated that it took him about two thousand steps to cover a
mile, or a stride of a little over two and a half feet. He once backpacked four
miles in fifty-five minutes, an incredible pace I would be challenged to
emulate as my best pace is a mere three miles an hour and I average far less
even without a full pack.
Shaffer was ahead of his time. Just
as The National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) was pioneering and perfecting
minimum impact camping, which later morphed into Leave No Trace (LNT)
principles and practices, Shaffer reflected on his 1948 thru-hike by writing,
“When I left, the signs of my presence were so slight that the next rain would
remove them. Like the Indians, I say ‘Where I go I leave no sign.’ P. 130.” It
would be decades before others would consciously adopt such practices and
principles.
The author was also somewhat
prescient, opining in 1981 about development along the AT and writing, “The
encroachment that once seemed overwhelming must be stopped if the Appalachian
Trail is to survive. P. 110” Here we are, nearly seventy years after Shaffer’s
first thru-hike and more than thirty-five years after he published Walking With Spring, and we are still
struggling to stop encroachments such as the Mountain Valley Pipeline.
Reading the 2004 fourth printing of
a facsimile reprint of the 1981 edition of Walking
With Spring, published by the Appalachian Trail Conference in 1983, was a
humbling experience. Shaffer hiked with a heavy and bulky Mountain Troop
rucksack weighing an average of forty pounds fully packed, increasing to sixty
pounds for the final stretch through the Maine wilderness. Yet decades before “ultralight backpacking”
became a modern mantra, Shaffer’s motto was, “Carry as little as possible but
choose that little with care. p. 9.” He later opined, “a long distance hiker
must choose between traveling light and not traveling at all. p. 27.” I doubt
forty, and certainly not sixty pounds would qualify “as little as possible” by
today’s ultralight standards. Yet Shaffer persevered. I doubt I would have
fared as well.
Along the C & O Canal Towpath that also serves as a stretch of the AT through Maryland |
At Old Rag many years ago |
My original review was originally published
on The Trek and was edited before I posted it here on my own blog.
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