The Appalachian National Scenic Trail is a 2168 mile footpath running from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine. The trail was conceived in 1921 by a regional planner from Massachusetts named Benton MacKaye. MacKaye designed the trail as a retreat from the stresses of urban life and also to protect the Appalachian mountain range from the encroachment of civilization. Through the combined work of volunteer clubs, the National Park Service, the Forest Service, states, and the Civilian Conservation Corps under the direction of the Appalachian Trail Conference (ATC), the trail was constructed, marked, and opened by 1951. In 1968, the National Trails System Act was passed, approving funding to purchase the lands around the trail, widening the trail corridor and making it one continuous national park. The trail is marked from Georgia to Maine with two by six inch white blazes (paint marks) on trees or rocks by the path, a symbol borrowed from the previously established Vermont Long Trail.
Recent estimates show that each year around four million people hike some part of the trail (personal communication over telephone with the ATC). Out of those millions, about two thousand attempt to follow the white blazes the entire length of the trail, and roughly one in ten finish. Most of these "thru-hikers" or end-to-enders hike the trail northbound, starting in Georgia in late March or April with the goal of finishing before Baxter State Park in Maine closes in mid October due to the hazardous weather. Many of these hikers meet and spend time with each other, and over the months a community forms among the groups and individuals, moving at different speeds along the trail, leaving messages in shelter registers, passing each other repeatedly, and sometimes hiking together for a while. For every thru-hiker, life on the trail starkly contrasts with their way of life prior to the trail, and over the five to seven months necessary to complete it, many changes occur in each hiker. Adapting to a life of continual and prolonged hiking combined with the presence of others in a similar predicament creates a socialization process out of the adaptation to life on the trail. in 1995, I was among those hikers who started in March from Georgia's Amicalola Falls State Park, where Springer Mountain marks the beginning of the trail, and traveled across the country and the seasons to Maine's Baxter State Park, where Mount Katahdin marks the trail's end.
This work is an account of that journey and of that process of socialization that my fellow hikers and I experienced and observed in others as we moved along the trail. I call this work an ethnography since it describes the culture that developed among the Appalachian Trail thru-hikers in 1995, but it doesn't take the form of a traditional ethnography. Instead, I am experimenting with post-modemist ethnographic theories. The post-modernist school of thought emphasizes that writing is central to what anthropologists do (Clifford and Marcus 1986: 2). Post-modernism suggests that since ethnographies are created and written, they parallel the arts, literature in particular, and that the art of ethnography can resemble literature in form (Clifford and Marcus 1986: 6). In the interest of contextualizing the account, the ethnography is autobiographical, embracing its own reflexivity in order to transcend it (Okley and Callaway 1992: 2). This artistic, literary style counters one of the traditional problems with ethnography, which is that they invent instead of represent culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986: 6). By using narrative, photographs, and description, I hope to achieve the goal of representation.
I have used personal narrative as a primary tool for telling this story, conveying the information that would be held in a traditional ethnography through the course of the story by allowing the reader to observe the characters and events as I did. Photographs also play a strong part in bringing the reader closer to the actual events. There are enough photographs that the reader can always see a photograph that relates to the text while reading. I encountered some problems in the process of researching this ethnography. The culture of Appalachian Trail thru-hikers is an almost unstudied group due to several factors. First, the people on the trail are different every year which must as surely affect the resulting society as it affects the composition of its members. Because of this I had to discuss the trail in terms of the hikers that thru-hiked in 1995. Second, there are no reliable statistical studies of thru-hikers. It's very difficult to accurately count and quantify a group that is always in motion, and to make matters more difficult, thru-hikers tend to appear and disappear, or to check in here and not there. Only through an emic (within the culture) study would any continuity be apparent. I had the benefit of observing that continuity, but my experience was by no means absolute. I can only report trends I observed from those who crossed my path and their actions while they were around me, but perhaps this is always the case for ethnographers. In light of these burdens which would make a traditional presentation of this material seem inadequate, I chose to present it as a personal narrative, taking into account my own perspective, and acknowledging that all of the experiences and observations within are but the slice of reality that I was present for. The observation, for instance, that just less than half of the hikers I met were smokers or trying to quit smoking is not scientifically precise, but for the purpose of understanding and illustrating the culture, it is very helpful. It may be that I saw all of the smokers on the trail and didn't see all of the non-smokers, but that is an example of how the flow of the hikers can affect the makeup of the society.
To expand the perspective of the work beyond my own observation, the photographs are almost all by Jonny Lane, another thru-hiker that I met on the trail and hiked almost the entire way with. In addition, several passages come from Jonny's notes and experiences in order to lend his perspective to events. Chapter 2 and those parts of chapters 3, 4, and 9 that I was not present for all came from Jonny. He also assisted in my writing by discussing his version of the stories involved and making his own journals from the trail available. Often my own notes would include one set of information such as what certain people said or looked like, and his would contain an alternate site of information such as when it rained and how much, or what the names of various landmarks were. In addition to his insights, I was able to add quotes from many other hikers as copied from their entries left in shelter registers along the way by me, Jonny, and other hikers (particularly Lucky Laura).
As a symbol of the socialization process that other hikers and I underwent, the story is told in the third person, starting when I received my trail name. The trail name is a name that hikers go by in place of their given name. It is used almost exclusively, even when dealing with locals (people who live and work near the trail). Since the name relates to some aspect of the hiker that is bom of the trail, using the name facilitates the socialization process. The switch from first person to third person in the first chapter is the moment when the process began for me. The third person also made the transitions between my writing and Jonny's smoother. By using the third person, I was able to emphasize that the story isn't just about me, and I could focus on our group and those hikers that moved in and out of it.
The register entries that punctuate the work are taken from shelter registers along the trail. The registers are simply notebooks left in the shelters in which hikers write the date they arrived and often their thoughts, observations, or messages for hikers behind them. The shelter at which each entry was found is given above the entry, but they are organized throughout the work according to the topic they address, not the date or location in which they appear. This disruption of chronology doesn't dilute the entries value since they have been selected to augment specific stories. The chronology wasn't terribly important while we were on the trail either, since the entries we would read on approaching a shelter were written days or months before our arrival. The register entries act as commentary and enhance the readers feel for the trail's denizens, their communication, and the changes they have undergone. The mark after the name of the hiker (GA > ME) means Georgia to Maine.
To help introduce this story, I think it would be beneficial to explain the process of preparation and review the gear that I carried with me every day, since my gear served as my home and means of survival for over six months. Preparation was a lightly discussed issue on the trail, but some understanding of it will be of great use to the reader. The reason the issue was discussed so lightly was because there seemed to be very little correlation between the amount of work a person put into preparation and their success on the trail. This discussion of my own preparation and equipment is intended as an example, not a guideline. The preparation process and the choice of equipment have a lot do to with the hiker's personality. Some hikers plan every step of the way before beginning, while a few just fill their packs with whatever is in their kitchen the day they begin.
Before preparing, I had to be exposed. In 1991 I was in a map shop in Atlanta and picked up a book called The Appalachian Trail Backpacker by Victoria and Frank Logue (1961). To this day I can't imagine why I even gave it a second look, but given all that has happened since, I'll call it fate. I hadn't ever done any backpacking before, but upon reading it, I felt like hiking the Appalachian Trail was something I had to do. Looking at my college class schedule, I decided that 1995 would be a good year for me to hike the Trail, and then held it in my mind as a top priority. Whenever anything was offered or mentioned that overlapped 1995, I would turn it down. This step was highly beneficial. Aside from growing used to the fact that I was going to spend six months hiking, it freed up the time necessary to complete the Trail, which is one of the most difficult hurdles for most people.
Until 1994, my preparation consisted of a little more reading, simply talking about the trail, and trying to find friends who wanted to accompany me. In the summer of '94 I began saving money and buying equipment. Since I had never been backpacking, I had to rely on a mixture of the few books I had read and the advice of friendly salespeople to come to conclusions about brands and variations in gear. There were several equipment lists in the appendices of books like The Appalachian Trail Backpacker (Logue 1961), or Christopher Whalen's The Appalachian Trail Workbook for Planning Thru-hikes (1993). The information in these books plus some common travel sense provided enough to get me started.
References Cited
Bruce, Dan. Thru-hiker's
Handbook. Hot Springs, North Carolina: Center for Appalachian Trail
Studies, 1995.
Chazin, Daniel, Appalachian Trail Data Book - 1994. Harpers Ferry,
West Virginia: The Appalachian Trail Conference, 1994.
Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus. Writing Culture: Poetics
and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, California: University of California
Press, 1986.
Logue, Victoria, and Frank Logue. The Appalachian Trail Backpacker.
Birmingham, Alabama: Menasha Ridge, 1961.
Okley, Judith, and Helen Callaway, ed. Anthropology and Autobiography.
New York, New York: Routledge, 1992.
Whalen, Christopher. The Appalachian Trail Workbook for Planning Thru-Hikes.
Harpers Ferry, West Virginia: The Appalachian Trail Conference, 1993.