The Appalachian Trail

Perhaps for some the following will summarise the feeling that we all have tackling a strenuous hill/mountain. It is a passage taken from a book written by Bill Bryson when at the age of forty-four he set off to hike through 2,200 miles of remote mountain wilderness filled with bears, moose, bobcats, rattlesnakes, poisonous plants, disease bearing ticks, salamanders and a range of other mammals, flora and fauna.

The Appalachian Trail is the longest continuous footpath in the world, stretching from Georgia to Maine through the Smoky Mountains, Shenandoah National Park, Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia (...in the shade of the local pines!!) and the Great North Woods of Maine:-

"The hardest part is coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill. The thing about being on a hill, as opposed to standing back from it, is that you can almost never see exactly what's to come. Between the curtain of trees, the ever-receding contour of rising slope before you and your own plodding weariness, you gradually lose track of how far you have come.

Each time you haul yourself up to what you think must surely be the crest, you find that there is in fact more hill beyond, sloping at an angle that kept it from view before, and that beyond that slope there is another, and beyond that another and another, and beyond each of those more still, until it seems impossible that any hill could run on this long.

Eventually you reach a height where you can see the tops of the topmost tress, with nothing but clear sky beyond, and your faltering spirit stirs - nearly there now! - but this is a pitiless deception. The elusive summit continually retreats by whatever distance you press forward, so that each time the canopy parts enough to give a view you are dismayed to see that the topmost trees are as remote, as unattainable, as before. Still you stagger on. What else can you do?

When after ages and ages, you finally reach the tell-tale world of truly high ground, where the chilled air smells of pine sap and the vegetation is gnarled and tough and wind-bent, and push through to the summits open pinnacle, you are, alas, past caring. You soon realise - again in a remote, light-headed, curiously not-there way - that the view is sensational: a boundless vista of wooded mountains, unmarked by human hand, marching off in every direction. This really is heaven, it's splendid, no question."

Extract taken from a 'Walk in the Woods' by Bill Bryson