Walking with Spring

Earl Shaffer’s classic account of becoming the first known Appalachian Trail thru-hiker, featuring photos from his historic journey

It was the summer of 1948 and a young man from Pennsylvania had to work out of his psyche the sights, sounds, and losses of World War II; he took a hike. Earl Victor Schaffer became the first person known to hike uninterrupted the entire length of the Appalachian Trail, from Mt. Oglethorpe in Georgia through 13 states to Katahdin in the central-Maine wilderness. He covered more than 2,000 miles of footpath created in the 1920s and '30s by volunteers and maintained by volunteers ever since. Earl Shaffer, a woodsman, naturalist, and poet, went on to become one of those volunteers with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC) and worked with ATC to secure federal protection for the Appalachian Trail.

Written soon after the first of his three thru-hikes and including photographs from 1948, Walking with Spring chronicles Shaffer's adventures along a path that at the time was showing the neglect of the war years and has since been rerouted significantly to its permanent location. His simply stated story has served as an inspiration for the thousands of people who have since followed in his footsteps . . . and many thousands more who have tried.

Earl V. Shaffer (1919-2002) was the first person to report a single-season hike of the whole Appalachian Trail, in 1948, walking of the war. He hiked it again in 1965 and 1998. He lived a modest life in central Pennsylvania, often writing poetry.