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Hidden History: The First Appalachian Trail Thru-Hiker [1]
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Date: 2025-03-11
The first backpacker to thru-hike the entire 2100-mile Appalachian Trail in one trip was a troubled WW2 veteran who did it as a kind of therapy.
"Hidden History" is a diary series that explores forgotten and little-known areas of history.
My tarp-and-hammock campsite on the trail in Pennsylvania
For most of human history, people got around from one place to another by walking. Although Rome pioneered an extensive network of paved roads, and these were used through the medieval period into modern times, most people never left their home village during their lifetime, and those who did (often for religious pilgrimages) walked.
In the late 1700s, though, hiking and backpacking as a recreational pastime became popular. Adventurers in Europe and the Americas often took long treks through the remaining wilderness and wrote of their travels. In 1879, writer Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Travels With a Donkey, recording his wanderings in rural France, and in 1916 naturalist John Muir’s posthumous A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf was published. Travelers like this, along with the burgeoning conservation movement, helped spark a “back to nature” fashion in Europe and the US, and it became a pleasurable activity for people, especially the well-to-do, to take backpacking and hiking trips. It was viewed as a healthy way to get away from the hustle and bustle of the dirty crowded hectic cities.
In 1921 a former government forester and newspaper editor named Benton MacKaye published an article in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, titled “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning”, which first introduced the idea of a super-trail in the Appalachian Mountain range. MacKaye advocated for the creation of a series of campsites along the crest of the Appalachians from the highest mountain in the north (Mt Washington in New Hampshire) to the highest mountain in the south (North Carolina’s Mt Mitchell), with a continuous network of trails connecting them all. His proposal gained legs when New York newspaper columnist Raymond Torrey took it up and helped to organize a volunteer hiking club that cleared and marked the first section of walking path specifically dedicated to the proposed super-trail, running from Connecticut through Bear Mountain State Park in New York and on to Pennsylvania.
In 1925, the Appalachian Trail Conference (today known as the Appalachian Trail Conservancy) was formed. A privately-funded volunteer group, ATC served as the coordinator for the proposed trail, helping to form local hiking clubs and associations which found routes for local sections of the trail, negotiated access with owners public and private, and recruited volunteers to mark and maintain the pathways.
As support grew, the plan became more ambitious—the proposed Trail was once planned to run from Mt Katahdin in Maine all the way down to Birmingham, Alabama. In the end though the completed Trail, finished in August 1937, ran from Katahdin in the north to Mt Oglethorpe, Georgia, in the south (this was later relocated to Mt Springer). The total length was roughly 2100 miles.
Just a few years after the Appalachian Trail was established, however, the Second World War broke out. With everybody out fighting the war, the Trail fell into neglect and disrepair, and large sections became unpassable.
One of the veterans who returned to the post-war US in 1945 was Earl Shaffer, who had grown up on a rural farm near York PA where he spent a lot of time camping in the woods as a youngster. He enlisted in the Army in 1940, and during the war he had served in the Signal Corps, working as a radioman on radar installations on various Pacific island airfields. Returning to Pennsylvania after the Japanese surrender, Ed was haunted by the loss of his friend who had been killed at Iwo Jima, and fell into a state of despondency.
Then in 1947 he happened to see an article in Outdoor Life about the Appalachian Trail, which casually mentioned in passing that nobody had ever hiked the entire Trail all at once. It planted the idea, and Shaffer began planning an end-to-end hike from Georgia to Maine, hoping it would enable him to, as he later put it, “walk the Army out of my system”. He set out in April 1948.
Today, most of the Trail runs near small towns, and there is an extensive infrastructure which supports and supplies long-distance hikers. Back then, however, there was only sparse support and many stretches were nearly empty. Shaffer had to carefully plan ahead and try to move from one small town to another, sometimes some distance from the actual Trail. Many times he had to resupply food and water at single isolated farmsteads. But he made the trip in 124 days, averaging almost 17 miles a day and never taking a single rest day. Living mostly on oatmeal and flour (which he baked into bread over a campfire, since he had no stove), he did not even carry a tent, but used his rain poncho as a shelter each night.
When Ed contacted the ATC and told them of his trek, they did not believe him. Although it was expected that some people would be able to hike the entire Trail one piece at a time over the years (known today as a “section hike”), none of the Trail’s creators had ever thought that anyone would be able to — or even want to — hike the whole thing all the way through in one go. But Ed had extensive notes and photographs of his trip, and there was no doubt that he had thru-hiked the entire length. In 1981, after three decades of work, Ed self-published his narrative of the hike, based on his notes, which he titled Walking With Spring.
After his trek, though, Ed was still haunted by his war memories, and he became a virtual recluse at his Pennsylvania farm. He would go on to thru-hike the entire Trail again, twice. In 1965 he reversed his original course and hiked from Mt Katahdin all the way down to Georgia—the first to thru-hike the Trail from north to south. He made it in 99 days. And in 1998, on the 50th anniversary of his initial trek, he thru-hiked the Trail again, at age 79, still carrying his World War II rucksack. This time it took him 173 days.
Ed died in 2002 at age 83.
Today, roughly 3,000 people attempt a thru-hike of the entire Appalachian Trail each year, and there are regular log books for long-distance hikers to sign to mark their progress.
Of these 3,000, only around 750 or so manage to finish the entire trip.
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