How and when did you get the hiking bug?
In an attempt to lighten the mood, tell us how, when, or what gave you to hiking bug.
Blackheart
When I was but a wee grasshopper I had a teacher who hiked the Appalachian Trail every summer. He would talk about it every now and then after school (my mom was a teacher so I got to spend extra time...) To this day I don't know if they were sectioning the whole thing or what but it intrigued me. I credit my desire to hike the AT to Mr. Nicholls.Originally Posted by BuckeyeBill
In an attempt to lighten the mood, tell us how, when, or what gave you to hiking bug.
2,000 miler. Still keepin' on keepin' on.
Back when I was a fledglingmy brothers and I would work our wings and stretch our legs on the AT near the Pulpit as we were wee boys and needed to get our hiking legs... most of teh time we slept... but at night we could cover great distances ... my first was a 10 mile... I was so sore...
As for the bugs... we ate them... as we got bigger ...shelter mice... today I am in pest control solutions.
Dogs are excellent judges of character, this fact goes a long way toward explaining why some people don't like being around them.
Woo
As a boy scout hiking at "Philmont Scout Ranch" in New Mexico !
My dad was a deer and bear hunter after WWII. I started going with him when I was 10. Lots of walking hunting bear with dogs. When I was 12 I hiked all the AT in the GSMNP.
KK4VKZ -SOTA-SUMMITS ON THE AIR-
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As a boy Scout.Went to Philmont scout ranch, then the Army.Have had a pack on my back since..
My love for life is quit simple .i get uo in the moring and then i go to bed at night. What I do inbween is to occupy my time. Cary Grant
I grew up in urban New Jersey. Sometime around 10th grade my grandfather took me on a hike in High Point State Park. I did not take to it - there was nothing to see!
Fast forward a few years to college at Rutgers U and my friend hailing from New Mexico said: "hey, let's hike the grand canyon. Want to head out west after finals?"
Eight years later I hiked the AT
My dad tried for about 5 years to get me and my boys to go day hiking in the Smoky Mountains. I finally gave in so I could get him off my back. While hiking for a day, I saw a couple guys with large backpacks hiking up the mountain. I stopped them and asked a lot of questions. We also gave another hiker a Gatorade since he was out of fluids and Double Spring was dry. My boys were at an age that I needed to spend a little more time with so it was the perfect solution. I'm always planning for the next trip
I hiked GA with my wife's boss and his best friend. During the hike I decided to get divorced. Thanks AT!
Pain is a by-product of a good time.
i was a kid, probably 8 or 9. my family used to do regular dayhikes. oh man the schoolboy crush i had on dorothy hansen. i would run up blood, run back down to meet my family walking up, finish the hike back up with them, then run back down and stay under dorothy's feet until they made it down. i became enamoured with the CCC because of those two buildings, its turned into a lifelong research project, trips to the national archives to search locations of old camps, including the one in my town, locations of existing projects and buildings. old photos of the boys decorate my home. i'm fascinated by their construction techniques. what they did for this country has rarely been matched. i've wrote countless letters to my congressmen urging them to reactivate the CCC. my heroes had names like bartram, mackaye, muir, lewis, clark. then it happened, i learned that little stretch of trail, wasn't so little. that i could walk it all the way to maine. i was hooked and never let it go. i soloed the summer i was 13, made it into virginia before i ran out of lawn mowing money. my dad could have cared less, my mother had a dozen different conniptions. i was a hard kid to raise, never wanted help, cringed at authority, always came home too late, disappeared for days. she didn't deserve all that. i've put off countless thru attempts, always the responsible choice, always grit my teeth about it. since then i've hiked all over the world, but i still love "the trail"
so, theres my sharing quota for the month
I obtained the hiker bug after my 2008 Mississippi River "thru paddle' End to end on the river of dreams.
I know that sounds odd but it stoked my adventure spirit.
My father was a Boy Scout Exec in RI and CT, so I grew up with wonderful memories of summers spent at Yawgoog and Sequassin. Once we even lived on a Scout Reservation for a couple of months. Thus, traipsing in the woods with the dirt and the bugs and the rocks and streams and skunk cabbage and fungii and.....well you get it....was second nature to me. Everywhere I lived, city or suburb, I'd be sure to find whatever postage stamp of woodland I could to explore and make my playroom.
As I got older, I camped....hitchhiked to the Barrens on weekends to Parvin SP or Wharton SP and wandered through the woods of Mullica (all of this in NJ) with friends and/or my boyfriend - future husband (we started dating after a weekend spent on a group camp). When the first couple of kids came, we brought them along....even tagged the third along once. But there came a time when it was all too much work and we left the woods behind, as too often happens I imagine, for the sake of the struggles of day to day life. Ho Hum.
I started homeschooling my oldest grandson (Eddie/Snacktime) 3 years ago, and each year we've included some form of travel adventure as sort of an extended field trip to make his studies more interesting. The year before last, we decided to take an adventure walk across our home state of RI. Of course, at that time he wasn't Snacktime, but Ed, of Eddie's Challenge (the facebook page for the fundraiser we tied into our walk). It was a 5 day trek, 51 miles, on city streets and bikepaths through the suburbs. The final day we decided to take a wilderness "shortcut" of 14 miles from Coventry to the CT border on the Trestle Trail. On this path we encountered several challenges like crossing brooks and fording a river. The greatest of these was escaping a mud/bog by scaling a 15ft cliff using roots and outthrusting trees ...and each other...for handholds. Rising victorious (and somewhat smug) from this trial, an adrenalin-filled Ed burst out with "We just scaled a cliff! I feel like Spiderman!" We both knew at that point that wilderness hikes would have to play a part in our next big adventure.
Grandma went to work and assessed the AT as the most likely path toward wilderness hiking fun and educational opportunity. Our new FB page Eddie's Challenge II - An Appalachian Adventure was established, trail lore and customs were studied, and Teacher and Snacktime were created. The rest is legend.......
Last edited by Teacher & Snacktime; 08-07-2013 at 01:49.
"Maybe life isn't about avoiding the bruises. Maybe it's about collecting the scars to prove we showed up for it."
I first saw the AT in 1968 when on vacation with my parents. We visited Clingman's Dome and walked the trail for a few hunderd yards. Then I got into scouting with the old framed canvas pack that weighed more than its contents. In 1975 I took part in a school trip to the Grand Canyon, Walking rim to rim to rim. It was really neat as we were standing above stop signs in snow and a few hours later we were in shorts and t-shirts at the bottom of the canyon. I am just getting back into hiking and planning a 2018 thru attempt. I have been reading WB and any book I can get my hands on to earn the new ways of equipment and hiking styles.
Blackheart
In a nutshell.......9/11 and the Lord of the Rings movies. The rest of the story can be found in "Lembas for the Soul" on Amazon.com. I have the last story in the book.
"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."
For our 20th anniversary in 2010 we discussed where to go .... the Bahamas? Puerto Rico? the Virgin Islands? All sounded so exotic and beautiful, but we're not that crazy about the beach. Maybe one day at the beach, then the rest of the time in the mountains... One beach is the same as every other beach, it seemed. So we rejected the ocean and instead opted for a week on the AT in Shenandoah National Park. We covered all of 28 miles!!!!! I don't know what the AT bug looks like, but it bit us. Since then we've done over 500 miles!
I was the one always laughed at in Phys Ed and chosen last for every team. To have found a sport that I can actually do, do alone, and enjoy has been a pleasure for decades now. Why the AT? Childhood memories of mid-Atlantic woods that in my imagination went on forever.
when i was a kid, my grandpa used to take me mushroom picking in the woods of pa.with his brothers, saw my first bobcat when i was 8 yrs old.went to summer camp in the catskills when i was 12 where we did overnight hikes once a week.my real love for backpacking and the at began in 76 with my first real backpacking trip to the whites, first time on franconia ridge, and i was forever smitten.
From the first time I set foot on the AT nine years ago,I have been hooked.Once you are out there and experience that peace and serenity and the commarodrie of complete strangers that are the nicest people ever,it's hard to accept how things are off the trail.At the end of a long day all the blisters and tiredness a person can feel is a small price to pay for the huge rewards that being out there gives you!
How and when did you get the hiking bug ?
It's been a progression over a period of time. As a kid with parents who car camped up and down the east coast, a love of the great outdoors and walking trails was born.
This in turn spurred the desire to explore further , hiking day trails away from the campsite.
Getting lost is a way to find yourself.
OK so here's another thread that I love...
I grew up in NH. My parents weren't into hiking but we spent a lot of time outside exploring in NH. I didn't know/never heard about the AT until I had moved down south to Virginia.
My husband and I loved to hike. We took out kids out hiking with us from the time they could walk and before. When their little legs became tired- we carried them.
I never really payed much attention to what trails we hiked, I just loved being in the woods.
One day out hiking, when our kids were older, one of them asked their daddy where the trail ended. We were on the AT apparently b/c their daddy answered them by saying- if you continuing hiking "this way" the trail won't stop until you get to Maine. If you hike "that way" you will end up in GA. Their eyes got big as saucers. Mine did too.. LOL!
Years later... my daughter read A Walk in the Woods. She was bitten by the AT bug after reading that book. The rest is history... she has hiked over 1/2 the trail. I went out with her to pick up sections.. got bit too.
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