From a former trail hiker

I have enjoyed reading your posts on Sam’s trip. When I was 11 or 12 my parents sent me to a summer camp for boys at Tuxedo, NC (near Ashville). I canoed and sailed some, but mostly went on the hikes. I was there for six weeks and took a number of 2 and 3 night trips around the area. I was selected for the two “honor” hikes, one was a gorge hike in which we hiked in and along a river gorge for 4 days, beautiful but wet. The last one was a 7 day hike on the Appalachian Trail. We got off at Clingman’s Dome , but I am damned if I can remember where we got on. We saw Fontana damn but I can’t remember if it was at the beginning or the end or along the way. We carried everything on our backs, food, old style heavy sleeping bag, no pad, and a shelter half. One of the guys had a Trapper Nelson backpack and it was considered state of the art. I had a Boy Scout Yucca Pack for all my previous hikes, but by the end I had a cheap aluminum frame-I tied the old canvas pack to it and thought I had died and gone to heaven. The counselors had Swiss Army style rucksacks. We carried round loaves of Pumpernickel bread, peanut butter, chipped beef in the little glass jars, and other heavy food items. We had some freeze dried items that we ate toward the end of the hike, but it was ghastly. We only saw one other group on the trail.
I will never forget the beauty of the trail and how much fun we had on that trip. We were tired, starved, and all stank by the end, but none of us wanted to stop.

Lem