Beginning a Thirteen Year Odyssey on the Appalachian Trail
By: Crystal Newsom
Tags: Travel, Appalachian Trail, Hiking, Solo Travel, Outdoors

The following is adapted from Sticks and Stones by Diane “Sticks” Harsha.

On the Appalachian Trail, there is a revered tradition for long-distance hikers to adopt trail names. The origin of this practice has been lost to time and conflicting claims, but it has been practiced for decades. As far as I know, this is the only sport or activity (except for perhaps professional wrestling) where the participant is known almost solely by his or her alias.

Who chooses this moniker? It is customary for fellow hikers to bestow the name; it is rare that it is self-imposed. For example, someone might call a hiker “Chips” because he eats a lot of them or “Barefoot” because she rarely wears shoes. I suppose some people try to name themselves, but it seems the ones that stick are those that evolve organically. You might start your hike thinking you’re going to earn a trail name like “Superman” or “Blazer,” and then you become something like “Squirrel Nuts.” And — fair warning — these things are hard to undo.

So you can call me “Sticks” now. But it would not be until halfway through a thirteen-year section hike on the Appalachian Trail that this name was assigned to me. When my hike and this story first began in 2005, I was still known by the name given to me at birth in 1959 small-town Alabama.

I was not born into a family of adventurers or into a community of outdoor enthusiasts. There was a smattering of nature-bonding experiences — Girl Scout camps and backyard sleepovers — but these were hardly the stuff of the wild. My parents did take my siblings and I, first as eager young children and then as sullen adolescents, on occasional car-camping trips in the hot summer months to Elk River in nearby Lauderdale County. Daddy fished and drank Schlitz, Mom read Harlequin romances while reclined under a tall sycamore, and we kids waded in the creek to look for crawdads under rocks. The Swiss Family Robinson we were not.

I grew up and moved away, as some people do. My interests outside of work seemed to be mostly urban-centered, and there was no time and space in my life to appreciate nature or take to the outdoors. What vacation time I had (and with what little money I had) was spent at the beach or visiting family.

As my twenties gave way to my thirties, I met and married my husband. We bought a small tent and a camp stove for weekend getaways in the Ozark Mountains of southern Missouri, a short drive from our home in Kansas City. That gear was packed away with the birth of our daughter, which happened to coincide with our transfer to Detroit. Neither of those two events were conducive to outdoor activity.

When said daughter was in kindergarten, we moved once again, this time to Nashville. By then, we figured she was old enough that we didn’t have to worry obsessively about plucking her from a campfire or lake. So we dug out the old camping gear and introduced our only child to nature.

For several years, until this daughter reached the eye-rolling stage, we enjoyed an annual tradition of camping at one of Tennessee’s state parks. We hiked on easy trails or canoed on placid rivers or boated on still lakes. These weekends were about family harmony and simple pleasures; there were no attempts to conquer the wilderness or take on physical hardship.

As our daughter grew and our lives became more settled in some ways and more complicated in others, I began to be drawn to the idea of the peaceful serenity of the silent woods and yet also to the challenges of serious hiking. I craved quiet strength, physically and emotionally.

Long walks, for several hours, became a habit on the weekends. (As a lifelong habit, at least as an adult, I also ran a few miles several days a week, but this was more about staying fit for my job and my vanity than as an enjoyable pastime.) The idea of hiking the Appalachian Trail, or at least part of it, began to seep into my mind. I don’t know how this idea came about or even when I first heard of the Trail. I suppose, on some level, I was always vaguely aware of it. After all, the southern portion of it is not far from our home, and I occasionally read news reports about an event on the Trail or a certain hiker’s accomplishments or woes.

I read Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods (as anyone who appreciates biting humor, intelligent wit, and piercing insight should) and found it so beguiling that I searched out other books about the AT and long-distance hiking. How lovely, I thought, strolling along a pine-needle-covered path bordered by wildflowers and moss-covered trees, listening to birdsong, breathing the clean, fresh air. I suspected perhaps Bryson, in his wry manner, had overexaggerated the difficulties of such a hike. Really, how hard could it be?

A thru-hike was impossible; I had neither the desire nor the means to leave my family and career for several months. But, it began to occur to me, there’s no reason in the world I can’t at least try it for a few days. If I like it, I can go back from time to time. These were my thoughts at the very beginning of the twenty-first century. But I was an FBI agent and the world had other plans.