Gilligan on the AT Revisited

May 7, 2008

Starting on 08-May-2007, I’ll be “publishing” my journal from my hike of the Appalachian Trail (A.T.) back in 1993. As I mentioned in an earlier post , the A.T. has been popping into my life for years. To expand on that informal list a bit:

• The nominal mid-point of the A.T., and home of the Appalachian Trail Conference headquarters, is Harpers Ferry, WV; Gommie and Dee, my mother’s mother and stepfather, lived just a few miles from Harpers Ferry, and Kim and I visited every summer of our childhood; I took a few day hikes on the A.T. with my parents as a kid, and the Blue Ridge Mountains were firmly established in my youth as idyllic scenery
• I started hiking the A.T. with the hopes that the trip would help me figure out what I wanted to do with my life; I was thinking “with my career,” which I didn’t figure out (that took another decade)
• I did figure out that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Julie
• Julie and I were engaged on Mt. Katahdin — the mountain whose peak is the northern terminus of the A.T.
• Benton is named after Benton Mackaye, the man who conceived of the A.T. in the first place
• Carson’s middle name — Baxter — comes from Baxter State Park, where Mt. Katahdin is located in Maine
• My parents’ cabin on Lake Rangeley is something they found as a result of my hike — when they started looking for a place in Maine, they asked for my input (I pointed out that my view of Maine was an awfully narrow corridor, but did comment that “Rangeley seemed nice”)
• It was in an A.T. hostel in Rangeley — no longer there — where I learned that Dee, my mother’s stepfather, had passed away; I last saw Dee — very much on the decline — when I took a few days off in Harpers Ferry, WV, which is the nominal mid-point of the A.T. and the home of the Appalachian Trail Conference headquarters
• I’ve kept, “Hiked 2,000 miles from Georgia to Maine upon college graduation” as the last line on my resume for years — sufficiently low on the page that it’s not a claim of qualification, but I’ve always believed that it does two things: 1) shows that I can set a goal and accomplish it, and 2) gives the interviewer an easy topic for informal chit-chat early or late in an interview
• I’ve used “Gilligan” — my trail name — as a moniker in any number of situations, including my professional blog — Gilligan on Data

And, I can point you to friends who have seen me spout A.T. anecdotes on demand! There were a lot of people and experiences crammed into a 5-month period.

So, I’m going to look back on that experience over the coming 5 months. From an integrity-of-the-documentation standpoint, I’m planning to publish every entry exactly as it was written. I know there are a few things that are a little embarrassing in some of my thoughts — all embarrassing to me; if I find something that might be embarrassing to someone else (I don’t think there is anything, but you never know), I may selectively edit those parts out.

If you’d like to subscribe to just these posts, you can do so through the Second Tree A.T. feed (they’ll show up in the overall Second Tree Blog feed as well).

Posted in Appalachian Trail