North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail

by Scott Jurek

Remote for detachment, narrow for chosen company, winding for leisure, lonely for contemplation, it beckons not merely north and south, but upward to the body, mind and soul of man. —Harold Allen, early Appalachian Trail planner

I last saw him at a parting between two mountains, which out here in the Deep South they call a gap.

past the place where forever ended, beyond the hazy horizon where sky and earth commingled, I knew the desert kept going:

Desert hiking demands that you submit to paradoxes. You must move hastily through the sun and the heat, yet slowly enough to avoid producing too much heat of your own. You need to ration the water you haul on your back but not so much that you are burdened by its weight. Move too fast under the scorching sun and you’ll go through your water so quickly that you’ll wind up with dehydration and heatstroke. Carry too little water and you’ll shrivel up like a raisin, and the desert floor will swallow you whole. Out there, balance isn’t just a beautiful idea; it’s necessary for survival.

ultralight-hiking approach pioneered by Ray Jardine and outlined in his 1996 bible on the subject, The Pacific Crest Trail Hiker’s Handbook.

As my grandfather liked to tell me as we rambled over his back forty acres in Wisconsin, “The best way to know your land is to walk through it.”

I would run and hike an average of fifty miles or more a day for about forty-five days along one of the most rugged trails on the planet.

Because I’m so thankful for everything I have, and for just a little while I need to remember what it feels like to have none of it.

Beautiful little trail section illustration

“It’s Speedgoat,”

Karl “Speedgoat” Meltzer had called me over the years. It was hard for me to imagine him using a phone or even owning a cell phone. It meant only one possible thing: He’d found out. How had he found out? “I…better answer. Put him on speaker.”

got back in the van and made one more phone call—to Jennifer Pharr Davis. When she set the current AT speed record in 2011, I was immensely impressed. I knew she was one of the strongest thru-hikers out there and she didn’t run a single step during her attempt. I respected her record and I wanted her to know.

The AT is 2,189 miles long—the distance from Los Angeles to Atlanta. It would wind halfway around Pluto.

The Pacific Crest Trail, at 2,650 miles, is longer than the AT, and the Continental Divide Trail, at 3,100, is longer still. And while a lot of Westerners boast about the snowpacks and deserts, the granite outcroppings, the alpine meadows, and the oxygen-sucking heights, the fact is that if you’re fit, it’s a comparatively smooth ride. The western trails have their frozen passes and jagged peaks, but most miles were graded for horseback travel, and their switchbacks rarely climb at anything steeper than a 10 percent grade. As a foot-travel-only path, the AT is much sneakier and more devilish. It dives directly into ravines. It snakes into foggy river bottoms and then shoots straight up hills so dense with undergrowth that even deer have trouble climbing them. It is almost hard to describe it until you actually set foot on the AT’s potpourri of rocks and roots. The tread and grade are like tentacles that grab at you from different directions when you least expect it, making forward progress a tedious and tense battle. On top of that twisted floor are walls of woods and a ceiling of tree limbs that are challenging in their own right. The Appalachian Trail is so wooded and thick, so dense and enclosed, that it is known as the Green Tunnel.

the three of us drove to the trailhead in the dark. It was silent in the van. The winding road seemed endless in the rain and we were all tired and nervous. There were still so many unknowns.

My mind ate up the silence, as it has done my whole life. I thought about JLu. And what we were doing, and what we had been through. I thought about our friend Dean. And I thought of my mother. She had been denied so much pleasure due to her struggles with MS, it made me not want to miss any.

As I turned these familiar memories and feelings over in my mind, I felt them begin to change shape. My roots are the calculus of who I am, but they are not only who I am.

the name of Blood Mountain Wilderness came from war. Cherokee and Creek tribes loved this stretch of Georgia so much that they fought a battle for it. During the definitive encounter, Slaughter Creek ran red. The victorious Cherokee named the land Blood Mountain.

Here at my feet, an Appalachian Trail anomaly: a grassy meadow, soft as a dream. And above me: a lone oak of rustling green and yellow. Nothing around me that even remotely resembled an obligation or a routine or a phone call or an e-mail or a presentation…just the trail, and miles.

I was feeling confident so I declined to pack my headlamp for the last stretch of the day, certain I would finish my miles before dark. But by the time I had climbed and descended a notorious stretch of trail named Jacob’s Ladder, the sun had set. I ended up having to use my phone as a flashlight. But my mistake led to a small piece of grace, a hallmark of the trail, I would come to discover—the dense darkness of my final mile or so sparkled with thousands of fireflies, making me feel less like I was in North Carolina and more like I was in outer space. It reminded me of my childhood in Minnesota, when endless summer days finally phased into a darkness I ignored, and my mom, unafflicted by disease then, would continue tossing the baseball to me in the firefly light. I was overcome with a mix of joy and sadness that could only be explained by nature’s hard and soft edges.

Would he comprehend that there was joy in speed, and that speed is a relative concept in any case?

To the Cherokee, these mountains were sacred. They called the area Shaconage (pronounced “sha-kon-oh-hey”), meaning “land of the blue smoke.” Modern scientists learned that this sacred and mysterious blue smoke is actually fog created by the local plant life. The same biological processes and products that create that freshly mowed–lawn smell after you cut the grass are at work behind the smoke of the Smokies.

When pondering elevation gain and mountains along the Appalachian Trail, most people think of the high peaks of New England: the Green Mountains of Vermont, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and the Mahoosuc Range in Maine. However, the highest mountains are actually in the South. In fact, seven of the ten highest peaks on the AT are south of Virginia, and four of them are in Great Smoky Mountains National Park; three of those are over six thousand feet high.

was soaking in the spirit of the trail, though. A few miles back, I had passed the Shelton gravesite, where the Union-supporting Shelton brothers were laid to rest after they and thirteen other alleged Union sympathizers, including women and children, were ambushed and brutally killed by Confederate troops.

But on that day, as my legs were indisputably failing, as the rain picked up, as the doubts started to ring louder in my ears, I understood that despite all my conditioning, despite all my attention to diet, I’d been neglecting to work on my why. As in: Why was I even out here in the first place?

Mum

I’ve experienced my fair share of success. And I know this: You rarely ask why when you win. It’s a word you can outrun and outperform. Applause makes it hard to hear yourself. But just because you ignore it doesn’t mean it’s not there. And why doesn’t get old and tired. It catches up, and it gets louder. It churns up thoughts that are best kept down in the dark.

But I had plenty of experience with pain, and I was managing. Actually, I was more than managing. I was content. Endurance itself brought its own deep-seated warmth; I’d achieved a lot, and the rugged path of my life had shaped me into the person I was.

But more than that, I had so much to be grateful for. Most of all, my best friend and wife, JLu, and her willingness to let me entertain the why.

To try to take command of my ruminations, I started repeating my tried and true mantras: Sometimes you just do things. This is what you came for.

Got a real nice, long climb ahead. It’ll get you feelin’ better. Those eccentric contractions are the worst for that quad and knee. These downhills are naaasty!”

Same thing i was encountering

I sensed the tears welling up deep behind my eyes. Just when I felt like I couldn’t hold them back a moment longer, Horty spun around and looked straight into my soul. “Remember this, boy: This is who I am, and this is what I do.”

Before he fell asleep, Horty said with authority, “Your body will find a way to heal itself. It has a memory.” He turned off the lamp. “Your body will remember.”

I didn’t do it because Horty told me to, nor was I some self-righteous stickler for rules; it’s just that the mystique of the AT had always seemed to me to be its comprehensiveness. Not doing it all was the same as not doing it, period.

performed variations of trail magic, which was experienced by others as unexpected instances of serendipity or just moments of Whoa, I needed that.

a young group of thru-hikers who told her they were having a big “hicker” party next to Dismal Falls

The pop-culture conversations gave me a funny feeling; they brought me back to the real world while simultaneously reminding me of how very far away from it I had gotten. Perspective is always enlightening.

One of the first messages I saw was from my mom’s sister. Your mother would be so proud of you was all it said. I found my eyes welling up with tears. I was totally alone and exposed in the middle of a Virginia field, and a deep sadness gripped me in a matter of seconds. My emotional defenses must have melted down in the heat. I had begun to notice that same phenomenon in other, less dramatic moments. In the course of two and a half weeks of running, I felt like my physical senses were increasingly finely tuned; I was becoming an intuitive animal. At the same time, my emotional equilibrium was tipping way out of whack, which had happened before. When you’re pursuing hard challenges, emotions rise to the surface, and I was so much more fragile than I’d been back in Boulder. The two things seemed related; I was becoming stronger and weaker.

It was only years later, well after her passing, that I began to understand what she had been doing. Certainly as I limped in pain and doubt along the Appalachian Trail, I was giving myself a crash course in the power of a mantra, in the power of single-mindedness, of stubbornness, of codes, of real toughness. When I was a younger man, I was angry, and I’d wanted my mother to be angry too. But she wasn’t. She was reminding herself that despite the hideous disease that was stealing everything else from her, she still had her toughness. Because she said so, and because she could say so. And did. Often. Her physical strength was gone. But her toughness only got tougher; it became her essential feature. If she hadn’t been a tough old lady, she would have had to just be a bitter teenager like me. She was still teaching me things, still reminding me what toughness looked like.

I found the Speedgoat’s quirks endearing.

Loved the alternating views of the book so far, as well as this take on Scott Jurek

I thought about that Roosevelt quote printed on my 1999 Western States race guide: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles…. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly…who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

there were an average of nine bear attacks on the AT every year, most of them during the late spring and early summer, before the summer fruit had ripened.

About a month after I was scrambling up the Knife Edges in Pennsylvania, a timber rattler bit a thirty-nine-year-old camper on that stretch of trail. He received antivenin on-site and got airlifted to a hospital, and he still died.

PAIN ONLY HURTS!

Keep going. Stay in the now. Every moment contains only one thing: the potential to keep going.

I needed to be like an alchemist and turn my lead feet into golden wings.

About fifteen miles into the day, Special Forces and I finished our forty-eight-hundred-foot ascent to the granite plateau atop Mount Moosilauke, a name that came from the Algonquin word for “bald place.” For the first time in eighteen hundred miles, I was above the tree line.

Mount Katahdin is the highest point in Maine; it’s a monumental hike. This is why I wanted to finish here, for pure aesthetic reasons and ultimate thru-hike culmination. The climb symbolizes everything that the AT embodies: wildness, grandeur, and grit.

Elective suffering is such a strange thing. At its essence, pushing his limits was a way for Jurker to learn more about himself and our relationship. Like Dean Potter once said, “I willingly expose myself to death-consequence situations in order to predictably enter heightened awareness.…And [it] often leads to a feeling of connectivity with everything.”