Sporting

     One thing he may have known, however, was that the 550-mile Virginia stretch of the Appalachian Trail, as it’s now called, would serve as a sort of hub for section-hikers, day-hikers and flip-floppers alike, particularly as it nears the West Virginia border at Harpers Ferry.

     It was this 50 miles of the Virginia section, between Front Royal and Harpers Ferry, that my four hiking partners and I contemplated on a chilly Monday morning in March a few years ago, at the start of the northbounders’ season, when we piled into Sawbriar’s pick-up in Harpers Ferry for the drive down to the Manassas Gap trailhead.

     Sawbriar, or the Pack Nazi, as we would later (and affectionately) call her, was a five-foot-tall sprite with auburn hair, whom we had hired for a small fee to shuttle us down to our start. A veteran of two truncated thru-hikes, she could not resist the temptation to lighten our load of all non-essentials—a trowel, a novel, dog-eared New Yorkers—as we geared up in the hotel parking lot. Only later, late in the five-day slog, would we appreciate her packing wisdom, shedding a 28-ounce jar of peanut butter and gobs of gorp as we went.

     Though we didn’t know it then, Sawbriar (whose trail moniker came from a tangle with a sawbriar thicket near Springer Mountain) was the first of many trail angels who would cross our path in those five days. In dispensing advice, cooking meals and offering small gestures of kindness, trail angels practice trail magic, acts of no-strings-attached generosity that, to bone-weary backpackers, seem just short of miraculous.

     Two days in, and Sawbriar’s mantra was reverberating in my head. “Food. Miles. Shelter. Food. Miles. Shelter.” Stripped down, sort of, to the barest of necessities, and communicating only with your partners and those you meet in transit, you become both keenly focused on what you need to get you through the day and aware of all the excess that clutters your life back in the real world.