Julie G’s Reviews > Appalachian Odyssey: Walking the Trail from Georgia to Maine > Status Update

The day was perfect, the lesson familiar: a delight of long-distance hiking was that the days picked you instead of the reverse. The nights, too.

We were befriended by a junco or two. These birds have to be the hardiest mountaineers in the world. They are found at elevations of six thousand feet in weather conditions intolerable to man. They hop along the ground, plucking a seed from a crowberry here, eating a kernel of mountain sedge there. . .their bodies might be said to resemble the yin-yang circle, their white breasts looping around the slate gray body.

At the top of Lafayette the clouds suddenly cleared and the break filled with age-old crumbling mountains, stately and grand. The vision was unearthly. We were literally the only inhabitants of our earth.

The isolation of many parts of the Trail set a grim stage for broken arms, sprained ankles, concussions. All that was needed to trigger the danger was a misplaced step, a loose rock, the eating or drinking of contaminated water. The risks of being remote from expert medical help were none too slight.

Vermont represents freedom from congestion, a forested peace.

In the woods all you have to do is pick a spot and watch the world perform.

To connect means to join, and so Connecticut linked the Central and New England States. This linchpin of the Eastern Seaboard re-introduced us to the plentiful paper birch, the white courier of the northeast that stands in starched excellence.

We met several other loners on the Trail. One of them was an older man, tanned and trim. . . We discovered the reason he took solace in the woods. He had recently lost his wife and hiking companion to cancer. Now every Sunday afternoon he walked the AT through Harriman State Park. The woods gave him comfort, a time to be with himself. . . He was not a happy man, but the Trail helped him not to be a defeated one.

We did enjoy sections of the Harriman State Park in New York. One night the fireflies gave us a royal fireworks display before we went to bed. . . That night the twinkling in the glade offered us Christmas in July.

New Jersey conjures images of exhaust fumes, noisome oil fields, and littered highways.
We were mistaken. As we walked up into the Kittatinny Mountains of upper New Jersey, we realized this was a different song, and not a protest tune at all.