The Appalachian Trail

The Appalachian Trail

The Appalachian Trail was also the product of a daydream atop Stratton Mountain, the brainchild of Benton MacKaye. MacKaye was an off-and-on federal employee, educated as a forester and self-trained as a planner, who proposed it as the connecting thread of "a project in regional planning." His proposal, drawing on years of talk of a "master trail" within New England hiking circles, was written at the urging of concerned friends in the months after his suffragette-leader wife killed herself. It appeared in the October 1921 edition of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, at the time a major organ the regional-planning movement. MacKaye envisioned a trail along the ridge-crests of the Appalachian Mountain chain from New England to the Deep South, connecting farms, work camps, and study camps that would be populated by eastern urbanites needing a break from the tensions of industrialization.

Today the Appalachian National Scenic Trail is a 2,158-mile (3,480.6 km) footpath along the ridge crests and across the major valleys of the Appalachian Mountains from Katahdin in Baxter State park, the central Maine wilderness, to Springer Mountain in a designated wilderness area in north Georgia. The trail traverses Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia. Primary use is by weekend or short-term hikers. "Thru-hikers" generally start from the South in early spring and hike the entire length in 5 to 6 months. The Trail is managed by volunteers in 32 local clubs under Appalachian Trail Conference auspices through a cooperative agreement with the National Park Service. The Trail...

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...d rivers in Maine must be forded. Spring runoff from snowmelt will wash away any primitive bridge. Some of these fords can be dangerous and difficult, and potentially life-threatening in high water. On the Kennebec River, a free ferry is the official and historical route and is provided at designated hours from late May through mid-October.

The best time to hike this section is from July to August. September is peak foliage but late September can be wintry, especially at higher elevations. In May and sometimes June snow still lingers; in June black flies torment hikers and waterlogged trails are muddy and easily damaged. This has also become an area of heavy use. This stretch was once known as "the 100-mile wilderness," a term that is a misnomer especially in light of the phenomenal increase in use since the early 1990s and the recent advent of re-supply points.