SLOWPOKE GOES NORTH
Springer Mountain, Georgia, to Katahdin, Maine • Appalachian Trail 1999
The dispatches: Part 1: Georgia to Virginia | Part 2: Virginia to New Jersey | Part 3: New York to Maine
My name is Shane Nesmith and on March 13, 1999, I quit my job at a building supply store in Knoxville, Tennessee, put on a pack and started walking north on the Appalachian Trail. On September 18 I got to the end. That's more than 2,100 miles, through fourteen states, on foot. My trail name is Slowpoke, and it fits.
While I was out there, my sister Anita typed in my postcards and letters and phone calls on this page so the family and my friends from work could keep up. You can read all of them in the three dispatch pages above. Now that I'm home I've added the last part myself.
Saturday, September 18, 1999: The Summit
WRITTEN BY SHANE, AT HOME, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22
Biscuit and I came out of the 100-Mile Wilderness on Thursday afternoon and got our first good look at Katahdin across the river, big and gray and all by itself, the way I'd seen it in pictures for six months. On Friday we walked the last flat miles into Baxter State Park to the lean-tos at the campground at the foot of the mountain, and it rained all day, hard and sideways. The ranger said it was the tail end of the hurricane that flooded North Carolina, and that they'd decide in the morning whether the trail up the mountain was open. I don't think I slept two hours.
Saturday morning it was clear, cold and windy, the sky scrubbed clean. The ranger said go. We started up at about a quarter to seven. The first part is woods and a waterfall, and then the trees get shorter and shorter and then they quit, and you're climbing up a ridge of giant boulders with iron bars set in the rock where it's too steep to climb without them. It's the steepest, hardest climb of the whole trail, and they save it for last on purpose, I think. Above that the mountain flattens out into a big open plateau of rock and moss, the Tableland, and you walk across it with the wind trying to knock you over, and you can see the peak ahead of you, and then the sign.
It's a plain wooden sign on a pile of rocks, and every thru-hiker who ever finished has touched it. I had been picturing that sign since March. I thought I'd yell or cry or something. What I did was walk up to it and put both hands on it and stand there. Biscuit was crying. Then I was too. There were a couple of day hikers up there who took our picture, and somebody passed around a candy bar, and we sat behind the rocks out of the wind for an hour and looked at everything. All the lakes and woods of Maine, every direction. I thought about Springer, and the stairs at Amicalola, and Mom crying in the parking lot. I thought about everybody who didn't make it, Crayon and the others. It all seemed like one long day and like ten years at the same time.
Then we had to walk back down, which nobody tells you about. Five miles, all downhill, all boulders. My knees are still mad at me.
Two Socks finished on Tuesday the 21st. He called me at home last night to say so. He's sixty-seven years old.
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The Miles
Approximate, from my guidebook. Don't hold me to the last mile or two.
| Date | Where | Miles (about) |
| Mar 13 | Springer Mountain, GA | 0 |
| Mar 17 | Neels Gap, GA | 30 |
| Mar 23 | North Carolina line | 80 |
| Apr 2 | Fontana Dam, NC | 165 |
| Apr 5 | Clingmans Dome | 200 |
| Apr 12 | Hot Springs, NC | 270 |
| May 3 | Damascus, VA | 460 |
| Jun 3 | Daleville, VA | 700 |
| Jun 25 | Harpers Ferry, WV | 1,000 |
| Jun 30 | Pine Grove Furnace, PA (halfway!) | 1,080 |
| Jul 16 | Delaware Water Gap | 1,280 |
| Jul 24 | Bear Mountain, NY | 1,390 |
| Aug 6 | Mount Greylock, MA | 1,580 |
| Aug 17 | Hanover, NH | 1,750 |
| Aug 25 | Gorham, NH | 1,880 |
| Sep 10 | Monson, ME | 2,050 |
| Sep 18 | Katahdin, ME | more than 2,100 |
190 days. One pair of trekking poles, three pairs of boots, a lot of socks.
What I Learned
Slow is fine. People who started the same day I did and went twice as fast are mostly home now, and so am I. It isn't a race. The ones who got hurt were mostly the fast ones.
You need about half what you think you need. I mailed nine pounds home from Neels Gap and never missed one ounce of it.
People are good. I didn't know that as well as I do now. Strangers fed me, drove me, washed my clothes and let me sleep in their barns, and not one of them wanted anything back.
The hard part is in your head. Your legs get strong in about a month. Your head has to keep deciding every morning, for six months, to get up and walk.
Don't step on the wet roots. Ever.
Thank You
- Anita, for typing up every scribble and every collect call, and for putting up with me. This page is yours as much as mine.
- Mom and Dad (Dennis and Anne Nesmith), for the boxes, the socks, the fried chicken at Newfound Gap and for not saying I was crazy, at least not to my face.
- Grandma, for a card in every single mail drop.
- Paul Pyles, my old boss at the store, for saying "go on, we'll manage," and meaning it.
- Roy and Barbara Yarborough in Vermont, for the pot roast, the barn loft and the clean socks. I will pass it on.
- Richard Hering, who drove Biscuit and me from Baxter into Millinocket after the summit and wouldn't let us pay for gas.
- The lady in Pennsylvania with the garden hose and the sandwiches, whoever you are.
- Biscuit, Two Socks and Crayon, my trail family. Crayon, next year.
- The volunteers at the Appalachian Trail Conference in Harpers Ferry, and all the people who keep the trail open. Every blaze I followed was painted by somebody who wasn't getting paid. If you want to know what it takes, read Trail Maintenance Volunteers, a crew that builds water bars and clears blowdown off the trail. Now that I've walked on their work for 2,100 miles, I'm going to find a crew like that around here and sign up.
Thinking about a thru-hike? Got a question? Write me, I love talking about it:
[email protected]
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since March 1999
Last updated Saturday, September 25, 1999
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