With humor and unvarnished honesty, she tells us how she carried out her quest, section by section, to hike the AT while also fulfilling her role
The Appalachian Trail stretches for almost 2,200 miles from Springer Mountain, Georgia, to Mount Katahdin, Maine, along the spine of the mountain chain that gives this iconic footpath its name. The path, as a rule, is about eighteen inches wide, lined with fragrant pine needles and musky fallen leaves, bordered by clingy bramble bushes or the hade-green leaves of laurel and rhododendron, meandering up and down, switchback by switchback, under a canopy of hardwoods and evergreens. It is marked with four-by-six-inch white blazes painted on trees every fifty feet or so. But the many exceptions to these rules give the Trail its appealing diversity and its maddening challenges.
