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Walking the Appalachian Trail
Springer Mountain: The Beginnning
by Larry Luxenberg
The days pass, and never rerun, and the South still waits for you.
Take the adventure, heed the call, now ere the irrevocable moment
passes! 'Tis hut a banging of the door behind you, a blithesome step
forward, and you are out of the old life and into the new!
The Adventurer to the Water Rat, Wind in the Willows
by Kenneth Grahame
No one ever began an Appalachian Trail thru-hike with more panache than Robie Hensley. In the hiking community has only one name:"Jumpstart." After retiring as postmaster of Chuckey, Tennessee, Robie began a search for new challenges. On his second flight on a hazy, blustery day, Robie parachuted out of a small plane piloted by son Steve. He landed eight thousand feet below among the rocks and dense tree cover at the very top of Springer Mountain, Georgia, not far from the plaque marking the southern end of the 2,147-mile long Appalachian Trail (A.T.).
Henley's story is only one of countless fascinating journeys. Each year as many as two thousand people start out to hike the whole A.T. Nearly two hundred report to the Appalachian Trail Conference (ATC) that they have done so. It's anyone's guess how many others hike the trail and never report it.
Most backpackers who set out to hike the entire trail in one year begin at the small visitor's center at the base of Amicalola Falls ("Tumbling Waters" in Cherokee). In a few strides, they will enter some pretty woods and begin climbing the steep, rugged eight-mile approach trail to Springer Mountain. The first mile parallels the falls, which drops 729 feet in seven cascades, making it the highest waterfall east of the Rocky Mountains. When the early hikers passed through Amicalola Falls State Park, it was a park in name only, with one narrow road. Today, although the park continues to be developed, it is still surprisingly remote and wild.
Usually hikers begin by signing their first trail register at Amicalola. These huge notebooks in which people share their thoughts are the heart of the trail's efficient grapevine. They reveal hikers who are nervous but enthusiastic. Reality has yet to sink in. Not until the Katahdin Stream ranger station register, more than two thousand miles away in Maine, will such widespread high spirits be evident again. In the meantime, there will be complaints and miseries, joys and sorrows, blisters, cold, hunger and thirst, panoramic views, and an abundance of good fellowship.
Sometimes the A.T. does not meet hikers' expectations. Within days, the hardships lead many to abandon the trail. Among them are some who dreamed of the A.T. for a decade or more. Bad weather, steep climbs, hard ground, and aching bones all take a toll.
"The first time on Springer, I had a daunting feeling," said Leonard "Habitual Hiker" Adkins. "What am I doing here? Maine's a ways up there I was excited and full of self-doubts. I was questioning why I was there. On the approach trail, I thought, 'If this is what it's like the whole way, I'm in trouble."'
"It felt strange," said Bill "Stats Godric" Gunderson, a 1989 thru-hiker. "I didn't know anybody. It's like going off to college. Suddenly you're tossed into a new world."
Mitch "Breeze" Keiler arrived at Springer with his mother, brother, and a grandfather who had built some of the A.T. in the 1930s. "I felt a minor panic attack when they left," Mitch said. "I walked two hundred yards down the trail and sat down and had a snack. I felt like I was the biggest fool on earth one minute, like I was going to do it the next. Soon I picked myself up, and by the end of the day I'd met a lot of lifelong buddies."
"Your first week you think, 'I'm way down in Georgia and I'm already exhausted,"' said Henry Phillips. "No wonder so many people drop out the first week. Then the second week, blisters set in. In Georgia, it's straight up and straight down. Six miles is a big deal. You think, 'How am I ever going to get to Katahdin?' But then you start wondering just what's around the next bend. You know if you stay in one place, nothing exciting is going to happen."
Pieter "the Cheshire Cat" Van Why, who came to the A.T. as a novice backpacker, found everything so new and wonderful that the initial stretch was magical.
Since 1958, Springer has been the southern end of the A.T. The previous terminus, Mount Oglethorpe, is a more dramatic mountain, but construction of a gravel logging road on Oglethorpe led to vandalism; pungent chicken farms along the route also helped persuade the Georgia Appalachian Trail Club (GATC) to find a different trailhead.
In many ways Springer is a more appropriate place for the trail to start. Here a hiker abruptly enters the wilderness of the Chattahoochee National Forest and remains in forest so lush with understory that it prompted one early thru-hiker to call the A.T. "the long, green tunnel."
Although it's revered among hikers for its prominent role on the A.T., Springer, at 3,782 feet, is an otherwise anonymous mountain. Unlike its northern counterpart, Mount Katahdin, Springer has little history or myth associated with it. Katahdin, with its panoramic views, stands alone, the centerpiece of the Maine wilderness. Springer is just one of many beautiful mountains in a rugged part of north Georgia. Springer's twin distinctions are that it unites the two branches of the southern Blue Ridge Mountains and is the southern end of the A.T.
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