Appalachian Trail's first thru-hiker takes golden steps 50 years later

By Jennifer Brown, Associated Press writer

ON THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL -- Earl Shaffer stopped to catch his breath. He adjusted the canvas straps on his 25-pound Army-issue backpack and looked up at the canopy of pines shading the footpath he has followed the past 82 days.

Two long heartbeats, then he continued.

Last month, in Pine Grove Furnace, Pa., Shaffer again reached the halfway point of the Appalachian Trail he knows so well. Last weekend, he reached New York State. Only 817 miles to go.

"I'm amazed I've made it this far," says the 79-year-old hiker, the first to forge the trail uninterrupted from Georgia to Maine, a half-century ago.

Shaffer hopes to cross into Connecticut by the end of this week and planned to clear Massachusetts by the end of August.

Now, 50 years after he introduced thru-hiking, Shaffer is challenged. Inclines seem steeper and more frequent, and he rests often on uphills.

But, he says, the woods are more lush and the trail is better marked than in 1948 when he first traveled the 2,160-mile national scenic trail.

Benton MacKaye, the trail's founder, proposed the idea of the nation's first continuous walking path in a 1921 journal, and it was opened in 1937. But no one envisioned hiking the entire route.

The trail was almost a decade old when Shaffer first set out, finishing in four months, four hours. Even then, it wasn't easy.

War and the Great Depression left stretches abandoned and overgrown, forcing Shaffer to walk along roads parallel to the path. But his hike and "Walking With Spring," a book of poems written along the way, drew attention to the neglected trail.

Unlike younger hikers in lightweight gear, Shaffer still wears long trousers, a flannel shirt and an old pith helmet with a mosquito net. He carries a palm-sized notepad in the back pocket of his Dickies to jot more odes to the trail.

At the halfway point, Shaffer drew a circle of admiring thru-hikers -- slang for those who hike the trail end to end.

Thru-hiker Christopher Boyer of Round Hill, Va., quizzed two hikers who joined Shaffer that day. "So how does it feel to go with Neil Armstrong to the Moon?"

Such fuss bemuses Shaffer, who lives just five miles from the trail in York Springs, Pa. "Some people say I'm a legend. I don't know," he says. "I just keep going."

Then he downed cherry jubilee ice cream, honoring the thru-hiker tradition of polishing off a half-gallon at the halfway point. It was the most he would eat all day -- a cup of oatmeal for breakfast, a package of crackers for lunch, bagels and cheese at night.

Shaffer has stayed in shelters much of the time, but he's just as comfortable laying a mat down along the trail. If it rains, he pulls a tarp over himself and his pack.

The trail now winds through mostly public land in 14 states. Each year, about 1,500 hikers attempt to match Shaffer's pace, beginning in late spring in Springer Mountain, Ga., and ending at Mount Katahdin, Maine. About one in five make it, according to the Appalachian Trail Conference, a group of hikers and hiking clubs headquartered in Harpers Ferry, Va., that maintains the foot trail.

Shaffer undertook his first hike to shake off the demons from World War II, which he spent fighting in the Pacific. His best friend from childhood was killed on the beach at Iwo Jima.

"After the war, I couldn't settle down to do anything. So I started walking," Shaffer says. "People didn't believe I could do the whole thing. No one ever had, so they thought it couldn't be done."

During that hike, he sent a postcard to buddies at the Appalachian Trail Conference, but officials threw it away, calling it impossible. That, of course, earned Shaffer his trail name: Crazy One. Few others have matched his feat, not even an average of one a year through the mid-1960s.

Years ago, as Shaffer remembers, the trail covered easier terrain. It sometimes passed through towns and villages or ran along country roads. Now it has morphed to cross mountains and ridges, with more challenging and rocky ground. "This was intended as a scenic trail," he says. "It's like an obstacle course."

Shaffer thru-hiked again in 1965, walking south from Maine, and completed the trail in 99 days. That southbound hike begins on the hardest part of trail, where the path is steepest and resupply stops are farthest apart. Fewer than 300 hikers have ever succeeded.

The highlights of a half-century of hiking roll off Shaffer's tongue on a good day: watching a trio of eagles soar above Bald Mountain, N.C.; hearing whippoorwills 40 nights in a row; standing atop beautiful Mount Katahdin in Maine.

"You can look at it from so many different ways," he says, "and it looks different every time."

This thru-hike is Shaffer's last. The most he'll do again is a day hike.

His left shoulder often aches -- a pain that has bothered him on each thru-hike. He has fallen twice during this trek, first-evers for him. The second tumble left him with a black eye.

"This is it," he says. "I've been torturing myself sometimes on this one."

Shaffer is worried about reaching Mount Katahdin before the first snow or Oct. 15, when the state park closes.

He has averaged about 20 miles a day through Pennsylvania and New Jersey, but he expects the more rugged terrain of New Hampshire's White Mountains to slow him to less than 15 miles per day.

"People ask me what it is to make me go off and do something like this," Shaffer says. "It's the beauty."

Photos by The Associated Press
Top: Earl Shaffer, 79, leans against a tree in Boiling Springs, Pa., during a break from hiking the Appalachian Trail. Middle: Earl Shaffer, right, chats with friends Don Cockley, left, and Stanley Fisher while taking a breather in Boiling Springs, Pa., on his hike of the Appalachian Trail. Bottom: Schaffer is retracing his steps 50 years after becoming the first person to hike the trail from Georgia to Maine in one uninterrupted trip. He hopes to finish the 2,160-mile hike by early October.