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| Author/Hiker Michelle Pugh |
The Appalachian Trail (the AT for short) stretches across 2,184 miles of mountain, meadow, and occasionally asphalt from Georgia to Maine. Some intrepid adventurers begin at one end, usually Georgia, and hike every inch of the AT in one trip, until they summit Mt. Katahdin in Maine. These people are known as thru-hikers and only 10% of the people who attempt the trail this way are successful. Other hikers, called section hikers, do the trail a piece at a time. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy says the number of thru-hikers has grown steadily from the early days. Only 5 people completed the journey during the first three years the trail was open, 1936-1939. Compare that to 2010-2013 when 2,203 hikers made the trek -- about 25% of those adventurous souls were women.
Michelle Pugh not only hiked the entire AT, she met and fell
in love with her (then) hiking partner, Souleman, and captured her story in her
memoir Love at First Hike: A Memoir About
Love & Triumph on the Appalachian Trail.
I met Michelle, an energetic and bubbly woman, following an
AT Conservancy membership drive in Washington, D.C. She was kind enough to share some of
her incredible story through a Q & A. Naturally, my first question was…
AWB: Why?
MP: I heard about the trail when I was about 12 years old.
My summer camp group was on a backpacking trip and we met a man who started
telling us about the Appalachian Trail. The more he told us about the trail,
the more I wanted to do it. I thought about it for years but didn’t start
making plans until I was a sophomore in college. My junior year I finalized my
plan and then I spent my senior year reading, researching gear, and getting
serious.
AWB: Did you go on
this grand adventure alone or with a bunch of friends?
MP: I had planned to go by myself and I went to Georgia on
my own. , But I had met other thru-hiker hopefuls on one of the Internet sites
where people talk about gear. Six of us agreed to meet in Georgia and at least
start the first day together. We had no commitments past day one. When you
start in Georgia, you register at Amicalola Falls State Park as an attempted
thru-hiker and the rangers take your picture for the record book. The seven of us
started on March 15 and we called our group The Ides of March. While we all started together, we traveled at
different paces and didn’t stay together very long. In the end, I only hiked with one other
person. He was actually from that starting group. Our relationship grew beyond
hiking partners – at least for a while – but you have to read my book to get
the full story!
AWB: Was the AT what
you expected? Did anything surprise you?
MP: I’m a very type-A person. I spent a lot of time
preparing and doing research because I didn’t want too many surprises. After
all of my preparations, I was pleased with my gear choices and didn’t encounter
the gear problems of some other hikers. Some of the hike was what I’d expected
--I had imagined summiting mountains, walking though beautiful areas, and bonding
with other hikers. But I hadn’t thought about the time spent in little towns
and that was a wonderful part of the experience. Hikers bonded in Laundromats,
eating in small restaurants, and staying in crowded hotels. I also loved meeting locals and being able to
patronize small town businesses. We went through so many charming little towns
that I might not have ever seen otherwise in my life.
AWB: Was there
anything you wish you wished for while you were on the trail?
MP: One thing I ended up adding to my supplies was duct tape. I wrapped it around my hiking poles to use
for random things. I had blisters and found it was the only thing that actually
stuck to my feet.
If anything, I got rid of stuff. My pack was much lighter at
the end of the trail than it was at the beginning. One thing that surprised me
was that I thought I would carry a book. I’m an avid reader, but I had no
interest in reading on the trail. In
retrospect, I think that’s partly because the first half of the trail I had
mono (which I didn’t know until later), and was too tired to do anything but go
to bed after hiking all day.
AWB: I can’t imagine
that! How could you hike through mono?
MP: I was exhausted but I didn’t tell anyone because I
thought everyone was that tired. After
all, I was hiking 10 to 20 miles a day up mountains while carrying 40 pounds on
my back. I just thought being exhausted was part of it. I’ve never been a great
sleeper, and I was amazed that I could barely lie down before falling asleep each
night. In the mornings it was all I could do to wake up -- and that was after
sleeping 10 or more hours. But since I
thought everyone felt this way, I just kept going.
AWB: So how did you
realize you had mono?
MP: It is a really long story. I had been hiking with
serious pain in my feet for hundreds of miles. This was pain to the point that
I could barely stand up in the mornings, and I often cried for the first couple
of miles of hiking. I went to an ER on the trail because I had a UTI and needed
antibiotics. While I was there I asked the doctor to look at my feet. He
diagnosed me with a bilateral case of severe plantar fasciitis, which affects
the thick tissue that runs along the bottom of your foot from your toes to your
heel.
Carrying extra weight and walking long distances was aggravating it. The doctor suggested I quit hiking so I could
heal. I wouldn’t accept that, so I returned to the trail. After another 100 miles, conveniently exactly at the half way point of the AT, I realized I
wasn’t enjoying myself anymore.
With many tears, I stopped hiking and returned to my
parents’ house in Massachusetts to tend to my feet. I did physical therapy,
wore night casts, and stayed off of my feet as much as possible. I was in a lot
of pain and I missed hiking. But, strangely, even without the physical strain
of hiking large mileage, I was incomprehensibly tired. I eventually went to a
doctor who did blood work. A few days later the doctor called and told me I had
mono. When I went in for my follow up
appointment, the doctor came into the exam room and said he’d heard I’d hiked
11 miles recently. I said, “no” and he said he thought that had sounded like a
lot. Then I told him I hadn’t hiked 11 miles; I’d hiked 11-hundred miles. He was
speechless for a bit. Then he told me that mono causes your spleen to be
inflamed and that I was lucky I hadn’t died with all of that physical exertion.
I was ordered to be on bed rest – which was particularly miserable when I was
used to hiking outside all day, every day.
AWB: How long did you
have to wait before you could hike again?
MP: I spent almost a year getting to the point that I could
walk normally again. During that time, my hiking partner and I got engaged,
planned a wedding, got married (on the AT), and almost exactly one year after
leaving the trail, we went back to finish the trail for our honeymoon! So
technically I completed the trail in two 1,100 mile segments. I’m sad that I
didn’t make it in one season, but I know it was out of my control. In a weird
way, having injured feet may have saved my life, since hiking with mono could
have killed me.
AWB: Were you ever
really afraid?
MP: Only once having to do with other people. We ran into a
man who gave me the feeling something wasn’t right. He was wearing denim overalls
but carrying a children’s backpack with a blanket tied to the bottom. He was
leaning on a tree watching us. He said he spent a lot of time in the woods and
asked where we were going. I gave him a very vague answer. I tried to keep
walking and he asked if I knew how to get to Angel’s Rest, a place just a mile
up the trail, even though he claimed to know the woods well. We hiked faster and faster away from him, looking
back often. We ended up hiking more than five extra miles and camping in the
middle of the trail and spent the night watching for him. We found out a few
days later that he was arrested for harassing hikers.
Other than that, I’d say some of the extremes were more
extreme than I anticipated. I had the clothes, the gear and the knowledge. But
there were times when I had to remind myself that I chose this. No one was making me do this. I was scared when we had
to walk across a bald in the middle of a lightning storm,
and then there was the time I had hypothermia in Tennessee and I had to be helped
off the trail. The other hikers got me to a hotel and warmed me up. It wasn’t
until later that I realized how serious the situation had been. I had many of
the symptoms of severe hypothermia, including confusion, clumsiness, lack of
coordination, and decreased energy. It
took me a good four days to recover my energy, but I was out of danger in a few
hours.
AWB: You clearly went
through some big challenges, what was the best part for you?
MP: The obvious answer is being in love while being on an
adventure like that—it was a non-stop endorphin high. It was the happiest I can
remember being. A shared experience is different – sometimes better, sometimes
harder, but always different.
A less obvious answer was seeing myself overcome a lot of
challenges successfully. It proved my determination and strength to me. Another
of the highlights was the ability to see so much of the natural world. People
say the wilderness is disappearing but not along the AT.
AWB: You must have met
some interesting people out there. Who was the most fascinating person you met?
MP: I met a couple in their mid 70s who were thru-hiking for
the second time. They had retired and become permanent nomads. Their whole marriage
they had saved money to go from dream to dream and now they were living their
dreams. After the AT they were going to Utah to a skydiving school and then to
Canada for ice fishing. I still get Christmas cards from them every year and I
enjoy seeing what they’ve been up to.
AWB: What was the
weirdest part of your experience?
MP: The inherent trust in strangers. Getting in a stranger’s
car, sleeping in the house of someone I just met. You just do it. I think back now and I’d probably do it again
on the trail, but I don’t live like that in real life. I work as an EMT and I
see some of the bad decisions people make and the way they lie and hurt each
other. I’m glad I had the trail experience early in my adult life, because I
think it helps me balance giving people a chance to be trusted and being weary.
AWB: Is there anything
you’d like to say to the women who are reading this interview?
MP: I want women to know that they can be feminine and tough
at the same time. They don’t have to choose. I am delicate and strong. I am equal parts
skirts and jewelry and hiking clothes. I
wear pink and play in the mud. I’d also tell women they shouldn’t put off an
outdoor ambition because someone else doesn’t understand it.
Michelle has a BA in philosophy and currently works as an
emergency medical technician (EMT). You can find her Appalachian Trail memoir, Love at First Hike, on Amazon.com.
Her next long distance hike will be the 215-mile John Muir Trail in California’s High Sierra next summer. She has a
different (and surprising) hiking partner this time. She hopes you will read
her second book (which is already in the works) to learn about that adventure!
