Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, November 11, 1995 TAG: 9511130002
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
You can't come away from such a pilgrimage of discovery - living outdoors, walking mile after mile through beautiful mountain scenery - without being changed by the experience.
"I just got more and more laid back. Things didn't need to be done in a split second. I learned not to be in a hurry - that was one of the big changes in me," she says.
If not for her watch, Linkous would not have known the days of the weeks she spent hiking through 14 states from Georgia to Maine. "Being out like that is just something that will last for a lifetime."
Millions of people set foot on the Appalachian Trail each year, but only about 100 walk its entire length annually. Women who undertake the trek as through-hikers are even more rare.
Yet Linkous handled the challenge readily, with help from friends and family, and without fear. "It makes you realize you can do basically anything. It's all dreams," she says.
A Montgomery County native, Linkous grew up outdoors, roaming the wooded ridges with her bow-hunting father. Out there, she recalls being 9 years old, meeting hikers on the trail and listening to their stories, tales that kindled her desire to shoulder a backpack and go.
Time and adulthood never doused that flame. She and her husband, Sam, talked about the trip for years. She read about the Appalachian Trail and undertook shakedown hiking missions of a week or two.
This was the year of her window of opportunity; together, they threw open the sash. Peggy obtained a leave of absence from her job as a groomer at Blacksburg's Companion Animal Clinic. Sam drove her down to the mountains of northern Georgia, where the trail begins, and waved goodbye March 12.
Winter was the first of four seasons she would experience on her trip. South of the Smoky Mountains, she walked through blowing snow; in Maine, she skimmed rime ice off her tent in the morning.
In between it was a great year to be outside, she says, even when the weather was hot and dry, and she was swatting mosquitoes in 100-degree heat.
Along the narrow wilderness footpath, Linkous bore a pack that weighed as much as 55 pounds. Usually she carried about nine days' worth of food, stopping in towns and at post offices near the trail to resupply at prearranged intervals.
Most of her food and other provisions were nonperishables she bought and packaged before she left home. Her husband's job was to mail them in time.
"There's no way I could've done the trail without Sam," she says.
Besides stoking the home fires, Sam offered long-distance encouragement. They didn't see one another for more than four months. "That was hard," she says.
Companionship among long-distance hikers is legendary. They travel like bands of backwoods gypsies and assume colorful nicknames like truckers' CB handles. Linkous' nom de trail was "Mountain Pirate," a moniker her sister gave her as a child.
But her goal was to walk the trail by herself, amid the other long-distance hikers yet not necessarily in step with them. "I felt comfortable with that. I decided from the very start I wanted to do it by myself."
With her walking stick, she averaged 12 miles daily, not hesitant to pause and savor a beautiful mountaintop or pitch her tent beside a stream. "I did take a little while," she laughs. "I wanted to have total freedom."
Even so, the trail exacted a physical toll for its rewards. Linkous, 42, lost 20 pounds and endured aching knees, and a painful bone spur in her foot at journey's end.
Being outside in the woods for so long can make a body appreciate the small comforts of day-to-day life, like bathing. "Everybody on the trail smells the same, and that's rotten. You sweat all the time. I didn't think that much about it," she says.
Linkous might well have worn one of those "No Fear" stickers on her backpack. She felt secure, even as a woman alone, in an wild environment that a founder of the Appalachian Trail once called "Barbarian Utopia."
Trail people - hikers and people who live in towns near the pathway (like Pearisburg, for example) - share a special bond, and watch out for one another. Linkous says the mountainous trail was also a great social leveler.
"Everybody on the trail has the same goal, and that's to reach Katahdin [the Maine mountain that marks the A.T.'s northern terminus]. You could be sitting and talking around a campfire with a doctor, or a lawyer, and it didn't matter what you did or you are."
Nature did pose some surprises. Linkous saw two bears, one in northern New Jersey that was smarter than the average. This Yogi would wait for hungry hikers to wade into the trailside huckleberry bushes, then swipe their backpacks.
She also saw two copperheads and nearly stepped on a forearm-thick rattlesnake on a Virginia mountain called The Priest.
That snake was lucky that Linkous didn't bite it, given her ravenous appetite. Trail hikers get that lean and hungry look after daylong aerobic workouts.
Linkous recalls one monumental meal in a trail town McDonald's: two double Big Macs, a super order of fries and a large drink. She polished all that off, ordered another burger to go and headed back for the hills.
With so much beauty along the Appalachian mountain chain, Linkous says its difficult to pinpoint the most striking scenes. But for this Southwestern Virginia native, the first walk above treeline on the trail in New Hampshire was memorable.
Seeing it all only reinforced here feelings about home. "I love Virginia, always have, always will. The mountains here are so pretty. We're so fortunate."
So she feels happy and fulfilled, back home with a new perspective on life.
"The fast motion - that's the first thing I noticed," she says. "Cars, people walking, it really seemed strange to me."
by CNB