Trail Magic

Last spring break, I took off to the mountains of western North Carolina to spend some time on the AT. It was early April, which meant that the majority of people that had set out from Springer Mountain on about March 15 would be in the Wayah Bald/NOC area. My goal, (besides getting in a few days walking) was to do some brain-picking and get their impressions of the first 100 miles. I parked my jeep at Fontana Dam, paid $40 for a shuttle back to Wayah Bald, and intended to spend the next five days walking back to the car.

Just few hours into the trip, I was in a bad mood. I'd forgotten my hiking poles and left them in the car; now I was going to have to do without them for the rest of the way (and believe me, hiking poles make a BIG difference on steep sections of trail). I was ruminating blackly on the unforgiving nature of the trail -- make one mistake and you will suffer for days -- when I stepped into Burningtown Gap.

The trail opened up into a clearing, and there was a dirt forest service road leading off to one side. But what grabbed the attention was the absolutely enormous geodesic dome tent. When I say enormous, I mean huge. I mean colossal. I mean a thirty-foot diameter and a ceiling eleven feet high. You could park a car in this thing. I've had smaller apartments.

As I stood there wondering what twelve people had decided to camp here, the owner walked out and greeted me. It was occupied by some guy going by the name of "Apple." This guy had set up camp for a week, and was running a feeding station for every hungry hiker that passed through. Inside the tent were sodas, chips, and – mirabile dictu – a hibachi cooking up hot dogs.

I spent an hour in there, and it was wonderful. Not because of the food (when I explained that I was not doing a thru-hike, but merely a section, he gently made it clear I had a strict one-dog, one-coke limit), but just because of the wonder of seeing someone go to all this effort and expense to help out people he didn’t know from Adam.

This was one of my first exposures to Trail Magic.

Trail Magic is a term thruhikers use to describe the happy and fortuitous things that can happen in the midst of a grueling hike. It might be getting a hitch into town for resupply and having someone offer to help you run a couple errands along the way, it might be running into someone that has extra batteries just as yours run out. In many cases, it involves random people who go out of their way to seek out thruhikers and offer help of one kind or another. 99% of the cases are not so extreme as that one in Burningtown Gap; it’s often just a couple people who decide to spend a day sitting by the side of the AT passing out apples and Gatorade (and no, it isn’t THAT common either – in probably a dozen days spent hiking on the AT, I’ve experienced magic twice.). Some of these people don’t even live near the trail; I’ve heard of people who take vacation days just to drive a hundred miles and provide magic.

In that sense, there’s nothing at all “magical” about Trail Magic; it weren’t sky pixies that spent four grand on a megatent and three coolers worth of food, then drove it all up there, it was just a guy. But the magic comes from seeing the spirit of the people who do it: people willing to put themselves out of time and money, expecting nothing at all in return but a “thank you,” a new friend, and the chance to help a complete and total stranger along on their own journey. If that isn’t magic, I don’t know what the word means.

So why am I telling this story? On Sunday I was in a rotten mood for several reasons, one of them being that I was feeling swamped with all the stuff I had to get done before I left. One specific thing that I had to get done was finding someone who could keep this website updated while I was on the trail. I had known for months that my goal was to find some helpful person to whom I could mail my handwritten journals, and who would then post them on the internet, but people who know me well know that asking for favors is not something I do well (I’m the guy who gives himself a hernia because he insists he can carry that sofa upstairs by himself), and so I had put off finding a transcriber. Finally, facing the fact that I was ten days away from my departure, I put out some desperate, pathetic online feelers to the AT community. Um, anybody out there wanna invest multiple hours of your time typing up someone else’s diary?

Within 24 hours, I had a half-dozen offers to help. Every single one was from a complete stranger. You call it what you like; I’m calling it magic.

I’ve got six days left till I leave, and about eight billion things to get done, so I’ll probably only have a short post or two before leaving. Once I’m underway, I’ll be mailing my scribblings to Dee, Peter and Bob, who will be posting them here, as well as crossposting them at Trailjournals.com. I’ll be checking in as much as I’m able, but as I expect my internet time to be limited to an hour or less when I get into a town once a week or so, they’re going to be my voice.