Walking with Spring: The First Thru-Hike of the Appalachian Trail by Earl V. Shaffer
154 pages
Published 1983
Read from April 18 to April 23
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
It's been a while since I read a hiking narrative; the last one I completed was apparently in March 2016. Part of the reason for that is I've already read most of the ones currently in print. While you would expect the success of Wild to have cleared the way for a spate of copycat publications, I haven't seen any new ones in a while, at least none available through my library system. Maybe the more recent "classes" of thru-hikers have been concentrating their efforts on YouTube and Instagram, rather than dead tree publication.
As overexposed and overloved as all the big trails have become, there's a bit of a culture shock in reading early accounts of the AT. Shaffer's famous (and occasionally contested) 1948 thru-hike took him along a trail essentially abandoned, whole sections of it gobbled up by timber sales or lost to the broader dislocations of the war years. The conservation ethos as a whole was a different beast back then, with officers appointed by forest districts to eliminate natural predators. I'd love to see a thoroughly researched history of the co-evolution of the AT and of conservation principles in the American consciousness.
That hypothetical book is, of course, far beyond the scope of what we have here. Shaffer writes of his journey with mechanical descriptiveness, enumerating landmarks and meals and incidents of travel with only slightly more passion than a checklist. It is interesting as a primary document of sorts, but scarcely a classic of the genre.
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