Wednesday notes: Heading to the ATC, "A Walk in the Woods" etc.

I'm a member at the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, so I'm off to Harper's Ferry this morning to get the maps for Georgia through southwest Virginia at a discount. I'm also going to ask the assistant on duty what weather I can expect in Georgia.

I've got my Irish drinking songs playlist ready on my iPod - The Pogues, Flogging Molly, The Clancy Brothers, The Young Dubliners and Dropkick Murphys- for March 17. It's something to look forward to. And fyi, Irish/Scottish stuff makes for great music to hike by.

Right now my hiking gear is a messy pile in my bedroom. I've settled on hiking in my old, hopelessly soiled Cap 1 baselayer rather than buy new, because the local outfitter didn't have my size during their huge sale last week. I also dug up a forgotten, barely worn pair of soccer shorts while emptying my dresser which I'll adopt as my primary hiking shorts. As far as other stuff I still need, I got an 18L bear bag, Sea to Summit, with 50ft of nylon cord at Cabela's Monday. All bright orange.

I've also started a lively forum discussion about ranking the extant AT memoirs over at Whiteblaze. Check it out if you're really into reading about the trail and you're exasperated when you browse Barnes and Noble for new stuff and find only the trusty old "A Walk in the Woods."

Which I recently read the first few bits of again. I skipped all the stuff about trail history, geology and the US Forest Service [Bill Bryson hates the USSF] and read just the trail narrative.

Here's a key passage set in Gatlinburg, Tenn. after Bryson and his buddy, Katz, come out of a blizzard in the Smokies:

Katz needed bootlaces, so we went to an outfitter's, and while he was off in the footwear section had an idle shuffle around. Pinned to a wall was a map showing the whole of the Appalachian Trail on its long march through fourteen states, but with the eastern seaboard rotated to give the AT the appearance of having a due north-south orientation, allowing the mapmaker to fit the trail into an orderly rectangle, about six inches wide and four feet high. I looked at it with a polite, almost proprietorial interest - it was the first time since leaving New Hampshire that I considered the trail in its entirety - and then inclined closer, with bigger eyes and slightly parted lips. Of the four feet of trail map before me, reaching approximately from my knees to the top of my head, we had done the bottom two inches.
I went and got Katz...One thing was obvious. We were never going to walk to Maine."

The first time I read that I was like, 'Shit. Really?' and felt deprived of an adventure, since I was reading it with an eye towards hiking WV->ME. Gatlinburg is just about 200 miles into the 2,179-mile hike, mind you. What "A Walk" lacks in that aspect, Bryson more than makes up for it in the breadth of his research and in his laugh-out-loud style.

But it's not the only book on the AT out there. I'll try to post a top five list here once the Whiteblaze discussion wraps up.

Anyway, have a happy Wednesday! Signing off.