Self-identified Bros get a bad rap sometimes. Sure, we like a good time. Sure, sometimes our friend Chad yells “CHUG IT, YOU PUSSY” a little too loudly near picnicking families at the beach. But we’re mostly harmless fun-loving creatures navigating our way through life just like anyone else.
One of the places accused of becoming a party magnet for Bros is the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail. According to an AP report by Alanna Durkin, partying along the Maine to Georgia footpath is becoming increasingly problematic for hikers who just want a respite from society in the woods. Maybe that’s why park rangers on Mount Katahdin in Maine made an example out of Scott Jurek by citing him for alcohol after he completed a record-setting thru-run from Georgia to Main in 46 days. Buzzkills.
Via:
“When Jackson Spencer set out to tackle the Appalachian Trail, he anticipated the solitude that only wilderness can bring — not a rolling, monthslong frat party.”
…
At Maine’s Baxter State Park, home to the trail’s final summit on Mount Katahdin, officials say thru-hikers are flouting park rules by openly using drugs and drinking alcohol, camping where they aren’t supposed to, and trying to pass their pets off as service dogs. Hundreds of miles away, misbehaving hikers contributed to a small Pennsylvania community’s recent decision to shutter the sleeping quarters it had offered for decades in the basement of its municipal building.
So why all the partying? The piece wags a finger at the increase in hikers on the trail, largely thanks to its increased popularity in pop culture:
More than 830 people completed the 2,189-mile hike last year, up from just 182 in 1990, according to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, based in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. At Baxter, the number of registered long-distance hikers grew from 359 in 1991 to more than 2,000 in 2014.
The growing number of hikers is becoming a management nightmare at Baxter, where officials say they also believe the culture and attitude of the people using the footpath is changing.
Jensen Bissell, director of the park, said in a letter to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy late last year that AT hikers are “open and deliberate in their desire for freedom from all rules and regulations.” He warns that the trail may need to end somewhere besides Katahdin if something doesn’t change soon.
“If we have 2,000 hikers now, how will it be when we have 3,500 or 4,000 hikers?” Bissell said.
Stop buying Patagonia fleeces and going into nature, Bros! You’re ruining for the Henry David Thoreau-loving hipsters who read Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums their sophomore year in college and just want to selfishly experience it FOR THEMSELVES. AND THEMSELVES ONLY. “That book, like, changed my life, man.”
“We had to take off half a year of working, and not a lot of people can do that,” Karl Berger, a 24-year-old Maine resident known on the trail as GQ, said from a camp site in Baxter, where he was resting with his father behind finishing the hike up Katahdin. “I don’t think a lot of hikers acknowledge that it’s a privilege to be out here.”
Damn selfish zen-seeking transcendentalists who majored in sociology and philosophy. Those assholes never want to share the woods with others.
Not everyone is blaming a surge in thru-hiking Bros, though. After all, Bros can love nature and be stewards of the earth just as much as the guy who read Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods over summer break.
“There is always a bad apple or two, but these are people that spend four to six months for a year on the trail, on their feet, experiencing the wilderness. I can’t imagine them wanting to do things that would violate the wilderness,” said Scott Jurek, an ultramarathoner from Colorado who last month completed the trail in a record time of 46 days, eight hours.
I grew up two miles from the Appalachian Trail in South Central Pennsylvania. Those woods hold a pretty special place in my heart. I spent a lot of my childhood, adolescence, and college years on the stretch between Harpers Ferry and Carlisle. I’ve had some wonderful solo hikes and met some really incredible thru-hikers. I’ve given them rides to town. I’ve broken bread with them. I’ve had long, rambling campfire conversations with them about the work of John Muir and Edward Abbey like the state school-educated English major twat waffle that I am.
I’ll also admit that during the warm weather months, I’ve partied with friends on the trail at various shelters (my group of Bros always obliged by a very strict carry-in, carry-out policy). We were never any more or less obnoxious than the friendly strangers that we happened to be sharing the shelters with.
As awesome as retreating to the woods is to experience the desolation and majesty of nature, the social experience of the AT has always been a big part of the trail’s culture. It’s within and hour or two of America’s biggest metro areas. It draws a huge cross-section of humanity from the Eastern Seaboard and most aren’t thru-hikers. If you spend any significant amount of time on the trail between March and October, it’s impossible to not meet people. That’s a large part of the draw for many in their early 20s who want the adventure of a thru-hike. And you know what happens when you meet people who share similar interests in shared activities and experiences? You become friends. And you know what you do with friends? You hang out. You socialize. If you romanticize the idea of escaping society and go completely off the grid, you don’t go to the Appalachian Trail — you pull a Chris McCandless (but please, unlike Chris — know what you’re doing).
The people who tend to “trash” the trail in my experience aren’t Bros from Shippensburg University out for a fun weekend in the woods with the boys — They’re usually uneducated hillbilly trash that treat State and National forests like their own personal dumping grounds. They respect nothing, including themselves. And, just like us Bros, they tend the gravitate to the social experience of the trail as well. Just in a less socially and environmentally-responsible way.
The conclusion here? Just be good people out there, Bros. Have a blast, take great ‘grams, have a couple 40-mile days, eat ice cream at Pine Grove Furnace to mark the half-way mark, and check that long stroll through the woods off your bucket list. Like everything in life, just don’t be assholes.
[H/T: Death And Taxes — S/o Stefan Sirucek for the graphic]