Skywalker--Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail Read Online Free PDF Page A

attempting to warm up, was a big, hefty fellow named “Study Break.” He was taking a semester off from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School to attempt hiking the AT. I tried bundling up in all three corners of the shelter to stay warm, but it was useless. The shelter was exposed to the high winds, and it was necessary to get out of there quickly.
    For the first time it wasn’t clear where to go, as Study Break and I started off in one direction, then another. Finally, identifying a badly faded blaze on a rock, we started the 2.5-mile descent into Neel’s Gap. I kept hiding in the rhododendron bushes to shield myself from the wind while Study Break caught up. But he kept warning, “I’m slower than Christmas, Skywalker. Don’t wait on me.” It soon became clear that he was correct, and I hurried to get to a lower elevation.
    I was amazed after one thousand feet of descent to see how much the intensity of the wind had waned and the visibility improved. Soon I was at Neel’s Gap. The archway, with a blaze painted on top, at the Cherokee Outdoor Center there is the only place on the entire AT where the trail runs through a building.
    Justin and Seth soon arrived. “Did ya’ll meet Study Break?” I asked.
    “Yeah,” Justin laughed. “He’ll be down by dinnertime.”
    It was only one o’clock, so we went inside to see if they had any “real” food, and gorged ourselves on the available fare of microwaveable hamburgers and ice cream sandwiches.
    When I went back outside Study Break had arrived in high spirits after a five-day walk from Springer Mountain—a trip that had taken everybody else three days.
    “I’m first going to call my wife,” he announced buoyantly, “and let her know I haven’t been eaten by a bear yet.”
    I had gone thirty-one and seven-tenths miles in three days without feeling overly taxed. But I was feeling impatient and set my sights on going all-out starting the next day.

     
    Hypothermia refers to any condition in which the core body temperature falls below a level at which it can carry out its normal bodily functions. It can happen at any time of the year, even on a seventy-degree summer day. In fact, hypothermia is actually more likely when the temperature is above freezing. And it’s a killer, make no single mistake about it. In the 1990s an average of seven hundred, fifty-four people per year died from hypothermia.
    The common thread in most hypothermia stories is human error of some sort. Stories are legion of outdoorsmen dying with their backpacks full of clothes. At forty degrees a human head may lose half of its heat production. The process is insidious and can kill in minutes. The key is to avoid letting even mild hypothermia begin.

     
    Wednesday, April 13, I awoke restlessly at four o’clock, anxious to leave early and cover a lot of miles. But it was raining, and I wanted the owner of the Cherokee Outdoor Center, Lyle Wilson, to do a “pack shake” before I started, so I waited around. Wilson advertised that he could reduce a hiker’s backpack weight by an average of ten pounds.
    He proceeded to rearrange my pack in dizzying fashion as I stood over him, tensed up. My biggest concern was whether I would be able to remember how to pack everything once back on the trail.
    His manner was so self-assured that when he said a Thermarest self-inflated pad was an absolute necessity (Warren Doyle had said just the opposite), I relented. But the Thermarest was only six feet long—almost a foot shorter than me. Meanwhile, the Ridge Rest sleeping pad I had traveled all around Atlanta looking for, but would now be giving up, was seven feet. “No problem,” he said when I pointed this out. “I’ll just cut off a foot from your Ridge Rest that we’re getting rid of, and you can put it at the end of your new Thermarest.”
    A week later at a shelter in North Carolina a hiker right next to me pulled out the remaining six feet of my ridge rest for her sleeping pad. I