The Road to Damascus... and Beyond

About the Book

In 2003, at the age of sixty-two, I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail. This is the story about that hike. The Appalachian Trail starts on Springer Mountain, Georgia, and goes through fourteen states in a rather meandering way ending on Mount Katahdin, Maine, a distance of roughly 2,175 miles (depending on the source of information as to the exact distance). My hike started on April 5. I arrived at the base of Mount Katahdin on September 14 and waited in nearby Millinocket until September 21 to complete the hike and climb the final 5.2 miles to the summit. The final day, I was accompanied by our youngest son, Will, who had flown to Boston (from Salt Lake City), rented a car, and drove to Millinocket to join me. Sometimes plans do work out perfectly for September 21 was Kris and my fortieth wedding anniversary—this to emphasize the importance of commitment, which is what this story is all about. Thru-hiking the AT has taken on different meanings through the years since Earl V. Shaffer did it for the first time in 1948, as documented in his book Walking with Spring. His was the epitome, the purist approach as a backpacking venture, carrying his own supplies, tenting and staying in shelters, and walking the entire distance along the designated path as it then existed, but has been subject to a lot of changes since his time. My intention was to do it as closely as possible, adhering to this purist attitude without all of the “designer” methodology that has come to be acceptable for being considered a modern thru-hiker. And except for 1.1 miles—this is covered in the book—that is what I did.

About the Author

I am a full-blooded Ukrainian. My grandparents came from Ukraine in 1900. I was born on December 25, 1940, in Northern Minnesota in a small very rural farmhouse less than a mile from the 49th Parallel near a place called Caribou. We moved to Fargo, North Dakota, when I was nine years old. At age eighteen, I left home to work as a topographer/mapmaker with the U.S. Geological Survey. Over the next twenty-four years, I lived in nineteen different states in seventy different towns. In austral summer 1985–86, I worked in Antarctica on a mapping assignment in the Transantarctic Mountains. Our base station was located on Bowden Neve, halfway between McMurdo Station and the South Pole. A field assignment in 1962 in Stratford, Wisconsin, where I met my wife to-be, ended my single years; Kris and I were married on September 21, 1963. Our three children were born in different states (Illinois, Minnesota, and Arkansas). After USGS, I worked as a land surveyor for eight years in the private sector in Florida. I have been a writer in one capacity or another for most of my adult life, including newspaper articles and esoteric stories in a USGS newsletter. Kris and I currently live in Wausau, Wisconsin.