A large animal crashed through the woods. We didn’t see it, but my daughter and I heard it—a bear, a big deer, or possibly Bigfoot rustling leaves and breaking branches as it retreated over a nearby ridge. We were nearing the end of our first day on the Appalachian Trail, ready to get off our feet and tuck into dinner.
Late-afternoon sunlight cast long shadows across the dappled mountain forests of Georgia, which would be our home for the next week. We fell quiet, heads cocked to the wind.
“What do you think that was?!” asked Ursula, with a mixture of awe and trepidation.
“I wish I knew,” I answered honestly, wanting to reassure her it was nothing that might hurt us.
I’ve been backpacking most of my adult life, but spending a week on the Appalachian Trail (AT) was new territory for us both. Cutting across 14 states, the AT is widely considered the granddaddy of American long-distance recreational trails.
I’d hatched the idea to attempt the AT years earlier, during a short hike with Ursula in Virginia. There, in Shenandoah National Park, we met a shaggy-haired hiker who was walking the entire route. He was what’s known in long-distance hiking circles as a thru-hiker, and he explained that he aimed to hike the AT from end to end. Ursula was rapt.
So last June, as she completed her sophomore year of high school, I plotted our own AT adventure, but couldn’t imagine conquering the entire route in one fell swoop. According to the nonprofit Appalachian Trail Conservancy, hikers typically take 5 to 7 months to complete the journey. As I thought about our summer plans, it made the most sense to hike the Georgia segment.
Between work and school constraints, a longer stint would have been tough to justify. Competing priorities included club soccer, varsity lacrosse, and, much to my chagrin, boys. Still, Ursula loves camping, and she had been a super companion on several long hikes, including a multiday hut-to-hut trek in the Italian Dolomites when she was 9.