Lately I’ve been giving some thought to the long trails. Not those cool day-hike paths where fellow weekend warriors fill up our tanks and head for a few hours to the nearby park or wilderness area. I mean the long hiking byways few and far between: rare backpack-able routes spanning hundreds, if not thousands of miles: the PCT, NCT, and AT, to name a few. To the well-acquainted, these routes may now seem American re-inventions. I say “re” because in biblical times that’s really all there were – long roads for foot travel – with plenty of through-ways for hardy walkers to journey from town to town, region to region, and truly cross-country…typically for commerce or survival. Perhaps the largely symbolic “Road to Damascus” or the mysteriously extinct Native American Chaco Road System come to mind…

For U.S. hikers, the most famous of these “new” cross-country trails is the one named Appalachian. Spanning some rough 2,200 miles of mountainous and hilly terrain, from Georgia to Maine, the Appalachian Trail has drawn thousands of backpackers to attempt its entirety in a single time frame. Some have traversed the AT in as little as 52 days, though most aim for about six months. Those who start, begin their journey on Springer Mountain. Those who finish, find their way to Mt. Katahdin. The official Appalachian Trail Conservancy website states that one in four who attempt the entire trail at once (called a “thru-hike”) will finish, but most other sources I’ve read paint a much bleaker completion rate. According to one enthusiast’s (dated) web source, by 1999, though tens of thousands have started the AT, only 5,246 had finished by that year. Ever. Which is impressive, as the AT has been officially in existence since 1948, and completing it – the stuff of legend.

I have also been reading my share of books on the thru-hikes. One 1999 NYT Best Seller by Bill Bryson, along with a couple others by David Miller and a guy by the name of George “Old Smokey Lonesome” Sandul. There’s even an older best-seller about a similar thru-hike that its author, Peter Jenkins calls A Walk Across America (1979). Recently I lent a few chapters of Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods to some friends in hopes that we all might someday discuss over drinks some of the spiritual truths buried within its pages.

What’s the opposite of the “thru-hike”? The “section hike,” of course. Those are the hikes when less ambitious backpackers (or folks with less free time) pick a smaller section of an epic trail, and complete it piece by piece – snapshots, you might say, taken instead of a full-length motion picture. But each walking style tells a different story, and whether one requires more narrative is up for grabs.

This leads me to the nearest trailhead, where I leave you with this question: what thru-way are you traversing? Is it doable in one fell swoop, or do you prefer to hike it in sections?

“The mantra about hiking the (AT) is, ‘You don’t do it just to say that you did it.’ You have got to be kidding!” (David Miller, The Road to Damascus…and Beyond: A Reawakening of the Spirit by Thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail)

See you on the second stretch.