Thru-Hiker Springtime

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In a wild symphony of green, May started arriving on the Appalachian Trail. It crept up the mountains, and for a very long time the trees looked as if they had been dipped, ever so slightly, in yellow-green paint. But eventually, even at the highest elevations, hikers began to see the rusty red green of budding maples, and the low green of blackberry brambles, and the yellow green of the poplars, and the pea green of the wild cherry trees.

Against the emerald green of rhododendrons and pines appeared the greenish-white of the dogwoods, the tiny white of wild strawberry blossoms, and the dusty white of dandelion seeds. Violets and purple trillium carpeted the ground in moist areas, and here and there the branches of red bud trees lilted with tiny, fuschia-colored flowers. Patches of bluets covered the rolling Virginia meadows, and hikers breathed air perfumed with lily-of-the valley. Flame azaleas in yellow and orange and peach zig-zagged on the mountain sides. Leaves in hundreds of shapes—round and low, spikey like blades, shaped like palms or hearts, or pointy like needles—were born. With the new leaves came the sound of fluttering breezes. No longer draped in splotches of gray and brown, with trees creaking in the cold winter winds as if they were about to snap apart, the world exulted in its rebirth.

Hundreds of hikers were on the Trail, and the human bracelet stretched from Virginia to Georgia. Hikers who were just leaving Amicalola in early May saw a far different Georgia than the ones who left in March."Thunder was in the background all day, and it finally decided to give us a shower in the afternoon. But the flowers are beautiful. I've taken plant taxonomy and am carrying a flower guide, so this is neat," noted Sneakers.

Hikers who saw nothing but snow and ice in March probably wouldn't believe that flowers grow in Georgia, too, but late season hikers knew it to be true. A week or so away from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, Zuma confided that "although there were a few days in the Sno-kies when I could get no sleep because I was trying to stay warm, now that the leaves are coming out, we are beginning to see a softer, friendlier side to the Trail." Painting a magnificent picture of a mid-spring, clear air sunset, Waldo described the moment at Cheoah Bald, North Carolina: "It began with the sun turning that light orange, outlining the clouds in front of it. Then it dipped lower, shading the trees and giving all of the mountain folds an amazing level of depth, lighting the clouds from within. Then the sun's edge touched the earth, turning it blood red and lighting the clouds from beneath, giving their tops an ominous dark shadow. From there the sun seemed to be sucked down, disappearing in seconds, leaving us in twilight."

Elsewhere, people hurried to and from their jobs, their errands, their daily routines and watched spring arrive in their asphalt and clock-governed lives with only passing notice. Not so for the Appalachian Trail thru-hikers. They were living this change of seasons, living it with every step they took.

The challenges, of course, weren't over, even as the weather moderated. Steve and Lea found Siler Bald shelter"full" and together with other thru-hikers had to tent through a wild thunderstorm. Overcrowding, still a problem in the Smokies, caused thru-hikers to compete for bunk space in the shelters, where they continued to be amused by novice hikers. One night as they slept once again in a crowded shelter in the Smokies, the sound of a father thrashing his backpack with his walking stick awakened Bonnie and Clyde.

Hwoooff! exploded the sound across the shelter.

"Daddy, Daddy, look at the mice. Look at the mice!"

Hwoooff! came the sound again.

"Get him, Daddy get him!"

Hwooofff!

"Get him, Daddy, oh get him get him!"

"Do you have food in your pack?" Clyde questioned through the darkness.

"Yeah."

"You shouldn't have food in your pack. Do you have food in your sleeping bag?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

"You shouldn't have food in your sleeping bag, either."

"Well, are they going to run around all night long in here?"

"Yeah. You'll never get any sleep if you don't learn to ignore shelter mice."

Other hikers had trouble understanding why their fellow hikers tolerated the mice. "I hate mice," stated Betty Crocker, "and I can't figure out why these hippies are against mouse traps, while not one says anything against shooting boars." Lucky (?) for the hikers, the mouse problem seemed to lessen as the temperatures warmed up and the snakes came out.

Not that May was all flowers and leaves and grass and sunshine. It wasn't. Trail Gimp welcomed the month by looking outside her tent to see a romantic, near-full moon shining directly into her tent. But, she went on to note,"it was light enough to see shadows of mice crawling all over my tent, under the rainfly, trying to get in. I wasn't particularly scared, just a bit irritated." Annapurna gambled and lost with the rain. "As I crossed Fontana Dam the rain began to sprinkle on [Dragonfly and me] and by the time we stepped into the woods, it just opened up." Annapurna pulled her way up the steep Shuckstack mountain haul anyway. What was her choice? "We made it to that first shelter, Birch Spring, which is a dump of a shelter, and called it a day."

The month was by turns hot and cold, wet and dry. On May 4 at Knot Maul Branch shelter, Gutsy just put out her Therm-a-Rest on a ground cloth and slept underneath her sleeping bag, underneath the stars and a big, round moon. On the 6th, Download was pitching his tent in the rain—again.

On the 8th the weather was once again hot enough for some old-fashioned river fun. Trail Gimp, who was hanging out in Hot Springs trying to let her bum ankle heal, went with a group of 11 other hikers to the railroad trestle in order to go diving into the French Broad River. With everybody soaked and laughing, it wasn't long before the Thru-Hikers Co-ed Naked Bridge Jumping Team was born.

"Nine hikers, men and women, of all different body shapes and sizes, dropped drawers and threw shirts, and climbed up to the railroad tracks and started walking across the tracks to the middle of the river. 'Where are you supposed to look?' I wondered. You try to keep eye contact, but how can you look someone straight in the eye, try to remain serious, when you're outside and they're buck naked? Anyway, they all jumped and I served as the designated photographer."

Trail Gimp also served as the designated spokesperson when the local cop appeared on top of the railroad tracks, too.

But then on May 13, Think About It walked through snow on Chestnut Knob. Seeing snow on the mountain tops, hikers wondered how much of what they saw was snowflakes and how much was petals dropping from the trees. In the Smokies Bonnie and Clyde hiked through rain and snow and fog and saw nothing of the views. Then on the 14th temperatures rose into the 70s and for the first time in the season, thru-hikers found themselves struggling with the heat. Sweet Dreams didn't care for the change at all. "The weather was too humid, too hot. When you walk with 60 pounds on your back and you climb straight up for more than seven miles, that's hard."

Once again high up on the mountaintops, with the days punctuated with monster thunder and hail storms, hikers often found themselves running, as did Scamper and Rosy. "I enjoy being a spectator in the stadium of the sky, but as my wife and I were on the AT starting another enjoyable day, the weather to the west got darker as we proceeded. I watched it to see what it might do for as long as I could. But we dropped down into a ravine and stopped at a spring for water.

"The sky we could see was breaking up, so we took a break, which was a mistake. As we climbed out of the ravine and onto the crest of the ridge, I looked over my shoulder and there was a black wall. We took off to the next shelter.

"We weren't but half a mile from the shelter when the rain came down in buckets and then the lightning. I love lightning when I'm a spectator, but when we hit the top of the hill, we became players in the game.

"Bolts of lightning struck everywhere, and then one flashed past us within meters. We broke into a trot down the muddy trail. But not 10 meters down the trail we smelled smoke from the strike. It was a hair-raising experience, literally, beautiful but deadly."

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