PINEWOOD, S.C. (AP) - A Pinewood resident got to do something not a lot of people get to do in their lifetime: hike the entire Appalachian Trail.
Paul Wilkinson started on March 18 at Springer Mountain, Georgia, and finished at Mount Katahdin at Baxter State Park in Maine on Sept. 24.
“I went through eight national forests, two national parks, 14 states and four pairs of shoes,” the 65-year-old retired Pocalla Springs Elementary School art teacher said. “When I started off, there was a lot of snow, especially into Virginia. I was stuck for four days in Gatlinburg (Tennessee) because of closed roads.”
Wilkinson, who retired in June 2016, saw a lot of beautiful views along the way.
“Shenandoah was (one of the) prettiest parts; there were lots of bears and deer,” he said. “Maine was also (one of) the prettiest (with it being) fall (and having) changing leaves.”
However, some parts of the journey were tough.
“The White Mountains in New Hampshire were one of the hardest parts,” Wilkinson said. “There were 35 days straight of rain in Virginia, which was also hard. Maine was the hardest as far as physically demanding; it was also cold, and there was a lot of rain.”
Wilkinson also noted that some of the states he visited weren’t interesting to him.
“The mid-Atlantic states, like New York and Pennsylvania, were the least interesting,” he said. “There were lots of rattlesnakes.”
He said in the spring he saw green tunnels and wildflowers.
When Wilkinson was in the South, there were people cooking hamburgers for the hikers on the trails. They were individuals who had done the trail before and called themselves “Trail Magic.”
“It was their churches’ outreach mission,” Debbie Wilkinson, Paul’s wife, said of Trail Magic. “Trail towns were friendly to hikers, and Damascus, Virginia, was one of them.”
“It was less frequent up north,” Paul Wilkinson said of Trail Magic.
Every three to five days, Paul Wilkinson said he would either hitchhike or walk to town to resupply on food.
“We would also filter water out of streams,” he said.
Paul Wilkinson started the trip out by himself, but he ended up joining with other people along the way.
He ended up walking between 15 and 20 miles per day.
“It was something he always wanted to do,” Debbie Wilkinson said. “He decided it was time to do it if he was going to go ahead and do it. He grew up in West Virginia, and when we moved down here, streams and mountains were things he missed.”
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Information from: The Sumter Item, http://www.theitem.com
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