Monday, July 18, 2011

The People Who Hike the Trail

Thru-hiking the entire Appalachian Trail attracts a couple specific types of people, and most will turn into a couple specific types by the time they're finished.

First off there are the "conquerors" (my own term). They are trying to, ahem, conqueror the trail. They're usually trying to do the trail as efficiently as possible, and are usually obsessed with their average miles a day and the logistics and resupplying. The food they're carrying will be marked with, for example, "Thursday Dinner" and their small-talk with other hikers consists of analysis of differences in gear and where the best resupply points are.

Second are "wanderers" (also my term). They're more likely to go to a town, not just for the logical reason of resupplying, but also to hit up a tourist attraction or find some sort of underground music scene or something. They can be your typical transient hippie, or maybe someone mulling something over, like a recent divorce or election to a political seat in South Carolina. These people literally and figuratively stop and smell the flowers. The easiest way to distinguish between a conqueror and wanderer is if they wear a watch. Some love to go the whole hike without ever having to wake up to an alarm, some are happy to say it only took them __ days, as opposed to __+1 days. To each his own. "Hike your own hike" is a common saying.

There's a lot of other sayings and inside-baseball vocab words. "Thru" hiker means you're doing the entire trail, as opposed to a "section" hike. If someone spends 5 months and hikes from Georgia to Conneticut is a section hiker. Someone who spends 4 months and hikes the entire trail is a thru hiker. Most hike Northbound (from Georgia to Maine), and they're known as "Nobos" or "GAMEs". As someone hiking southbound, I'm known as a "Sobo" or "Mega". (MEGA = Me->Ga Maine to Georgia. GAMErs follow the same logic).

There's 10,000 other terms for the ways people classify other hikers and terrain and other aspects of the hike. But that's one of the (arguable) problems, that people create labels for one another. Almost every thru-hiker becomes at least somewhat arrogant, and tend to look down on day/weekend/section hikers, or even people thru-hiking Vermont's Long Trail (which takes a couple weeks and a little more than 100 miles of it overlap the AT). Thru-hikers also inevitably become control freaks, due in no small part to the reality that they do control almost everything (as I mentioned in my last post, only I am forcing myself to keep going). But I've met some really great people. I've been selflessly given food more in the last month than any other part of my life. After the established work-for-stay structure in the Whites, it's been fun to unofficially work for stay. I just randomly met a sweet "young" lady, who put me up in her house and cooked me breakfast, and all I did was help her change a lightbulb and switch the batteries in her smoke detectors (she had chores for a tall person). Food, bed and a shower was all I needed, and if you've ever had dying smoke detectors, you know that she felt like she won out on the deal. So it was win-win between us. Yesterday I helped paint a porch, and I did some vacuuming carpet-cleaning today. It's nice to day-labor my way along, despite having a Graduate degree. The whole point is to slow down and enjoy the little things.

1 comment:

  1. Good stuff Cameron Reed: fascinating to learn of the sub-strata of the AT users. If you're wandering from fix-er-upper to fix her uppers are you less of a Sobo and more of a Hobo?

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