Appalachian Trail hiking guide
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EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General) North American (US General American - GenAM)Transcript
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welcome to exploring the Appalachian Trail. We're glad to have you join us for what promises to be a fine outdoor adventure. You may not have realized that when you bought or borrowed this book, but if the truth be told, it's all about a long standing love affair. The authors of the hiking guides in this series have been in love with the Appalachian Trail since before we can remember, and we've come to believe that if you truly love something, you will probably act positively to protect it. So when we invite you to join us and walking on the trail were also inviting you to let yourself be seduced indeed, to go ahead and take the leap into a sweet and enduring love affair of your own. But then be sure to act on the responsibility created as a by product of that love. It's called service and Support in the section below. Called Joining Up, you can read more about how each of us can contribute to the health and continuing life of the trail. The appellation trail will give you many gifts. Be sure you give some back. Unlike other good books about walking the Appalachian Trail. This one will encourage you to slow down, to yield to the many temptations offered up freely by nature and by the social historical world along the trail. Benton MacKaye, considered by most to be the chief visionary of the early Appalachian Trail, once defined the purpose of hiking on the 80 as to see and to see what you see. McKay was something of a romantic, and we know he read Emerson, who instructs us all to adopt the piece of nature. Her secret is patience. We can't improve on that. Our intention is to help you plan and carry out a wide variety of hikes on the nation's longest continuously marked footpath, surely one of the most famous walking trails in the world. We'll guide you from point A to point B, to be sure, but as far as this book is concerned, it's what happens for you between points A and B that counts the most. If the goal of hiking on the Appalachian Trail is to come home refreshed in body, rejuvenated in mind and renewed and spirit that along with the fun of being outside in the mountains, a little work will be required. The most obvious work is of the muscular variety, less obvious. But Justus rewarding is the mental kind, and it's here that the books in this series will help you the most. The famous world traveler spend O'Laughlin, Blood said. Travel is not about where you've been, but what you've gained. True travel is about how you've enriched your life through encounters with beauty. Wildness and the seldom seen in these 80 hiking books will pause to inspect the rocks underfoot and the giant folding and crunching of the entire Appalachian landscape. We'll take time to listen to birds and to look closely at wildflowers. We will deliberately digress into the social history of the area. The 80 passes through thinking sometimes about industry, other times about politics, and now and then about a well known or an obscure but colorful character who happened to live nearby. We'll explore trail towns and comment on trail shelters and campsites they're not all alike and to help make you a savvy hiker, if you aren't already, we will offer up some choice bits of hiker wisdom that just might get you out of a jam or make your load a bit lighter to carry. This is a participatory book. You will enjoy it and profit from it most if you carry a small notebook in a pen or pencil, if you bring along a camera and perhaps a burning book or a wildflower guide or a guide to some other aspect of the natural world, bring a compass and use our maps. Or, better yet, supplement the maps in this book with the more detailed ones available from the Appalachian Trail Conservancy and other local sources. Chatting with your walking companions is a delightful thing to do some of the time while out on the trail. But the more noise you make, the less wildlife you'll see. And besides, it's hard for anyone to be both in conversation and simultaneously in close observance of the rial details of the natural realm. Try hard to make some part of every hike Ah, silent Walk, during which you open all your senses and your imagination to drink in the marvellous environment of the Appalachian Trail, the appellation trail in southern New England, landscape and environment make up with the exploring the Appalachian Trail. Siri's calls southern New England the next volume. Northern New England covers New Hampshire and Maine in southern New England. The 80 ranges from a low of about 500 feet above sea level in Connecticut's Who's a Tonic River Valley toe over 4000 feet. At Killington Peak in Vermont, there are about 260 miles of Appalachian Trail in southern New England, walked here in 29 hikes. Hundreds of miles of side trails link with the 80 to form a vast network of hiking possibilities. In this region, contrasts are dramatic in plant and animal life, weather and degrees of challenge to the hiker. There are woodland walks, benign enough for a toddler and mountain climbs ambitious enough to satisfy the most robust hiker. The 80 spends considerable time in the neighborhood of small towns and villages, making it easy to plan one or two card day. The 80 spends considerable time in the neighborhood of small towns and villages, making it easy to plan one or two car day hikes between road crossings. But there are wilderness sections to where Backpackers conspire a full day or two and deep forest, well separated from the sounds and sights of civilization. In Connecticut, the temperate climate supports even dogwood Ah, flowering tree associated more with Southern states while on Mount Greylock in Massachusetts, end in the Coolidge Range, Killington and other peaks in Vermont. The forest is boreal, comparable to the tundra hundreds of miles farther north. The great opportunity and pleasure for a hiker on the southern New England 80 is to appreciate the variety of environments and the numerous hiker friendly towns, many of them graced with lovely historic architecture, where services, supplies and distractions are readily available. If you have never visited the region, Ah, colorful armchair travellers introduction awaits you in the Smithsonian Guide to Historic America, Southern New England.