A Walk In The Woods
Bill Bryson, in his book A Walk In The Woods, describes it well,
It was hell. First days on hiking trips always are. I was hopelessly out of shape–hopelessly. The pack weighed too much. Way too much. I had never encountered anything so hard, for which I was so ill prepared. Every step was a struggle.
The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill. The thing about being on a hill, as opposed to standing back from it, is that you can almost never see exactly what’s to come….The elusive summit continually retreats by whatever distance you press forward, so that each time the canopy parts enough to give you a view you are dismayed to see that the topmost trees are as remote, as unattainable, as before. Still you stagger on. What else can you do?
It has been five years since my friend David and I began our quest to walk all 2,175 miles of the Appalachian Trail. When we first began, there were days when I felt just like Bill Bryson. Thoughts of how many more miles of hill there could possibly be, why I had decided to carry that extra equipment or what kind of person decides to walk four days in the rain seemed to haunt my mind as we continued to amble northward. These days, I look forward to every step of every trip. I find that the hiking demons that once clouded my thoughts rarely surface and it only takes a few miles for my spirit to quiet itself when I am in the woods with a backpack.
David and I had planned a trip today to Amicalola Falls State Park in Georgia to hike the approach trail to the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail on Springer Mountain. We skipped it when we began our long journey to Maine, but now we want to go back to give it a try. Unfortunately I was ill yesterday and so we have postponed the hike to next Friday. I can’t wait to make my way up the side of some familiar Georgia hills!
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