A father and daughter push their limits on the Appalachian Trail

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. 

With her blessing, I planned a weeklong, 70-mile hike beginning at Georgia’s Springer Mountain, the trail’s southern terminus. We packed camping gear and 3-plus days of food that included instant oats and coffee for breakfast, assorted energy bars, and trail mix for snacks and lunch. At Neel Gap, about 30 miles into our hike, we could resupply at an outdoor specialty store.

Ups and downs

The popularity of thru-hiking has spiked in recent years. The coronavirus pandemic spurred thousands of Americans to hit the trail, but interest was booming even before that thanks to Bill Bryson’s side-splittingly funny 1998 account of his AT trek, A Walk in the Woods, and Cheryl Strayed’s 2012 bestseller, Wild, about her hike on the Pacific Crest Trail.

For inspiration before our hike, I reread those outdoor classics, both of which inspired movies.

Filled with comic mishaps, Bryson’s book almost works better as an anti-guide than a how-to. Yet A Walk in the Woods captures several sublime moments. “When you’re on the AT,” Bryson writes, “the forest is your universe, infinite and entire. … You are aware, of course, that somewhere over the horizon there are mighty cities, busy factories, crowded freeways, but here in this part of the country, where the woods drape the landscape for as far as the eye can see, the forest rules.”

Happily, because we hit the trail on a Monday in mid-June, we had the route mostly to ourselves. The bubble of thru-hikers working their way north from Springer Mountain had long departed, and the southbound thru-hikers coming from Maine were still making their way through New England.

According to Anne Merrill, who handles outreach for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, 3,700 thru-hikers had registered by Labor Day in 2023. This number includes “flip-floppers” who start anywhere on the trail, hike to the end, and then travel back to their starting point to trek in the opposite direction. The conservancy offers a certificate to any thru-hiker who completes the entire trail in a calendar year.

“Roughly speaking, one in four people who start a thru-hike complete it,” Merrill says. Each year, she adds, about 150 additional section-hikers—those who tackle chunks of the trail and take longer than 12 months to finish—qualify for finisher certificates.

“Ain’t three flat steps”

Four days into our hike, the miles began taking a serious toll. I still hoped to finish out the week, but Ursula began expressing quiet doubts. Sometimes snacks and a quick sip of something sweet worked to rejuvenate her, but the trail’s ups and downs prompted complaints. Both our packs were heavier than they needed to be: I carried fishing tackle that any self-respecting thru-hiker would have left at home, and Ursula was toting full tubes of skin cream.

At some point it occurred to me that while I was enjoying her hushed company, my child was beginning to crave the jovial presence of her contemporaries.

Meanwhile, long-forgotten physical ailments returned, including a quarter-size blister on my right heel that had plagued me on earlier backpacking trips. Just the same, and despite my aching lower back, my legs kept a steady cadence.

On the fifth morning, as had become another custom, I let Ursula sleep late. It was Father’s Day, and the last thing I wanted was for this father-daughter outing to become a forced march.

After breaking camp, we trekked onward, walking together, chatting about pop music (we’d recently seen Taylor Swift play in Houston) and food (Ursula missed fresh fruit). On the longer climbs, she still bolted ahead.

After Ursula had hiked on ahead of me that Father’s Day afternoon, I found her at the end of the day sitting in the Blue Mountain Shelter. We had notched another 8 miles, and she was chatting with a couple of hikers whose trail names were “Buckskin” and “Skywalker.” They were unlikely companions: Buckskin, a female college student, stood less than 5 feet tall; Skywalker, a sixtysomething man, stood 6 feet, 11 inches.

It’s a convention on the AT and other long-distance trails for thru-hikers to adopt or be bequeathed trail names. Since we were simply trying to section-hike Georgia, neither of us had adopted AT aliases.

As we got to talking, Skywalker—a Georgia native whose real name is Bill Walker—explained that he was part of the “Bryson bubble” who started hiking after reading A Walk in the Woods. “I set off in 2005 for what would be the journey of my lifetime,” he said. “I had been a commodities trader in Chicago, and I had a history of walking around in cities. But there was a complete deficiency in my camping skills, so my experience was a real battle.”

Dark clouds

That night, Ursula grew quiet and serious over our dinner of mac-and-cheese. Dark clouds blew in, mirroring her mood. I strung up the mess kit on a bear wire, designed to keep food out of reach of any critters around the shelter, and found her in the tent looking over the trail guide by the light of her headlamp.

At the rate we had been traveling, we still had 2 days of hiking to go, including some of the hardest hills on the Georgia AT. Ursula let out a heavy sigh. “I don’t think I can do this,” she admitted, close to tears.

“I really hope we can finish,” I urged. “Let’s see how you are feeling in the morning.” The truth, which Ursula knew, was that we could bail at Unicoi Gap, where the AT intersects Georgia State Highway 75. I didn’t want to force the issue, and as my daughter dozed off, I remained hopeful.

Then the rain began falling. Although the tent kept us sufficiently dry, the overnight deluge soaked our packs, which we’d left leaning against a tree instead of tucked in the nearby shelter. Late into the morning, we lay inside and listened to the drip-drip-drip of the storm’s leftovers pinging the tent.

Quitting didn’t come easy, but it was pretty evident when we hit Highway 75 that this would indeed be the end of our hike—16 miles early. The sky was still gray, and our packs were muddy. My heel was now hindering my stride, and I couldn’t hide the occasional wince as we descended the rocky trail.

We had been camping out for 6 days. Ursula was tired of the grind, tired of backpacking food, tired of sleeping on the ground. I couldn’t blame her.

Still, I gave it one last try, opening Spotify on my phone to load Swift’s “Shake It Off.” We broke into a bag of trail mix and sat by the road, but Ursula would not be moved.

“It’s okay, kiddo,” I said, finally. “We’ve covered a lot of ground. You really did great.”

“But I don’t want to disappoint you,” Ursula offered with a sad smile.

“You didn’t,” I said. “You agreed to try this, even though we knew it was going to be hard. And it was really hard.”