Posted on 08/30/2015 10:07:05 AM PDT by Theoria
The storied Appalachian Trail, which begins 2,190 miles away in Georgia, ends here, with a final scramble up Maine’s highest peak — some of it nearly vertical, much of it blocked by boulders. For those who have trekked five or six months, Katahdin’s iconic summit is an exhausting challenge with a rewarding end.
“It takes your breath away,” said Chuck Wood, 64, a hiker from Norristown, Pa. “Just to be there, it’s like an audience with the Lord.”
But that experience is now in jeopardy. Faced with increasing crowds and partylike behavior by a few — including an ultramarathon runner who celebrated at the summit last month with a spray of champagne — officials here are threatening to reroute the end of the trail off Katahdin and out of Baxter State Park.
The very idea has stunned the hiking world. Katahdin has been the trail’s northern terminus for more than 80 years. For the thousands who set out annually to follow its entire path, moving the trail’s endpoint off this rocky peak would be a momentous detour, forcing long-distance hikers to end their treks not with a bang but a whimper.
“It would lose all its epicness,” lamented Ryan Mennett, 22, a trail hiker from Burlington, Conn. “Where would they end it? At a stream? On a piece of grass?”
The matter is coming to a head in part because the marathoner, Scott Jurek, broke a handful of strict park rules.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
It’s stuck up snobs like Bissel who make simple things like backpacking worse.
I thin he’s been in his position far too long and is no longer effective.
Don’t know of any “frat” parties that hike their beer in up to Katahdin peak. This is a bunch of local stoners, or regional— who, everywhere along the trail (just as in CA in Mendocino County) have ruined the solace and solitude of backpacking in the high country. The great unwashed and living at home with mom and dad on obamaumaocare, unemployed dishwasher stoners, aimless except as wreckers.
Advice— if you’re gonna hike, bring both teargas and more deadly protection.... from the animals, you see.
Damn, if you’ve hiked the whole trail I would think you’ve earned a little celebration.
The AT is a tough trail. One mountain to another. And its steep. Might not be as high as the western trails, but just as difficult.
No different than what the liberal animas and pantheistic religionists (they masquerade as environmentalists, btw) are trying to do to Yosemite.
OMG - somebody sprayed some champagne on Gaia!
Good thing the park Nazis didn't see us. They would have thrown us off the mountain!
LMAO. Yeah, that about covers it. Got news for these pious earth worshippers. AT Thru Hikers celebrate topping Katahdin in all sorts of... shall we say...hedonous ways.
How did the earth survive millions of years without bureaucrats?
2000 folks a year are out of park hikers who enter Baxter and climb Katy?
That’s overcrowding ...to this richardhead Bissel who charged the guy with littering for champagne spray on rocks?
What an asshole.....Mainiers are not known for being all warm and inviting but this guy is jerk
Over 600 a year permit to climb Everest.....in just a 6 week window
We’re talking maybe 10 folks a day are long distance trail quest people into Baxter
What a stupid fight over nonsense....
Parks are nothing like in my youth when Rangers were men.....real men and admired
Anybody remember the lightweight shell Bean made long ago in honour of this park when Bean was the real deal
And Banana Republic and Abercrombie both were deep in outfitting
Bland corporatism
It will end with the firing of the moron bureaucrat.
Put the end of the trail at this moron’s house. I’m sure he’ll be glad to accommodate the hikers instead of ruining “his” park.
drugs, parties all night, so let’s go hiking! Not as bad as the trail to Mt Everest where frozen bodies are left and tons of garbage. But it won’t be long.
www.foxnews.com/us/2015/08/30/hikers-behaving-badly-appalachian-trail-partying-raises-ire/?intcmp=hpbt4
Would they respect it more if they had to pay? They think it’s free now and boy do I hate litter.
how about pay for the trip up but if you bring down a bag of litter you get a refund for what you bring. It can be your trash or another’s.
Like the Forest Service in my neck of the woods, these petty bureaucratic tyrants think they own the land in which they work.
Slightly off topic, but interesting side story on the AT. Our Maine US senators have recently secured funding to acquire more lan surrnanding the SERE facilty.
Not sure that I buy into this conpsircy theory on her disaperance.
The Bollard
M.I.A. on the A.T.
June 30, 2015
by Hutch Brown
What role did a covert Navy “torture school” play in the disappearance of Geraldine Largay?
This July 22nd will mark two years since Geraldine “Gerry” Largay vanished from the face of God’s green earth.
Largay, a 66-year-old grandmother and retired nurse from a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee, was attempting to complete a “thru-hike” of the Appalachian Trial. Her journey began on April 23, 2013, in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. It ended somewhere in the mountains of western Maine, in the thick forest between Saddleback and Sugarloaf. Her disappearance prompted the largest search-and-rescue effort ever undertaken in this state, a search that is still ongoing.
Largay was last seen early in the morning of Monday, July 22. She spent the previous night at the Poplar Ridge lean-to, a covered camping area next to the trail, where she’d befriended two fellow female hikers on their way south. The next day, one of them took a photo of their new friend just before she continued north, toward her ultimate destination: Mount Katahdin.
. . .
There are three things that puzzle and trouble me about this case, only one of which is the disappearance itself.
The second is the fact that Largay vanished along a section of the trail bordered, to the north, by a secretive military facility where trainees are left to fend for themselves in the woods, then hunted down and tortured in a mock prisoner-of-war camp. Operated by the U.S. Navy, and located in Redington Township, the facility is one of our country’s notorious SERE Schools. The acronym stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, though very few students have ever managed the last part.
The SERE School’s boundaries are not shown on most maps, including some commonly used guides to the A.T., but DeLorme’s Maine Atlas and Gazetteer indicates exactly where it is.
http://thebollard.com/2015/06/30/m-i-a-on-the-a-t/
On a totally separate note, my friend and outdoors writer, Cary Kish is completing his second AT trek 38 years after his first. He is currently in NH.
Kinda interesting: Long Trail
A few years ago in N. Georgia a serial killer[Gary Michael Hilton] had kidnapped and killed a wonderful women. He let her dog go, and he had previously killed a hiking couple as well.
Always have a plan on any trail and be careful of any type of potential animals/man.
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