ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 9, 1996 TAG: 9606100074
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C-8 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: OUTDOORS
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN
I can't remember very many times when I've felt threatened in the outdoors, but a notable exception occurred recently.
I was camping along the Rapidan River, near the Shenandoah National Park, when during the night a carload of the locals, drunk and rowdy, showed up.
The Rapidan comes tumbling clear and cold out of the park's timbered ridges, and is one of Virginia's best catch-and-release fly-fishing streams. I had it to myself.
Arriving late in the day, I pegged my one-man tent under some hemlocks between the stream and the winding gravel road that follows it.
About midnight, I was awakened by the roar of a car that had a gutted muffler. I could see the headlights through the fibers of my tent when the vehicle stopped. There was yelling and cursing and the sound of beer cans hitting the rocks in the road.
I listened, unmoving in my sleeping bag, then the car turned and roared off into the distance. I was a long while getting back to sleep.
I can't say for certain I was in any danger, but I think about it now and then. I did again last week when word came that the bodies of two women were found on the Appalachian Trail in the Shenandoah National Park.
There can be dangers in the back country, but most often they are hypothermia or heat exhaustion, burns or blisters, skunks or snakes, dogs or dysentery. Not assault. Certainly not murder.
We've come to a certain uneasy acceptance of violence in urban areas, but when it occurs in the wilds it chills us. The knowledge that we can't quite hike away from civilization far enough to be entirely safe robs us of something precious.
I know last week when I stopped my pickup to give a lift to a thru-hiker heading toward the trail after a stop at a country store, he looked me over carefully through my back window as he loaded his pack over the tailgate. He paused to peer at me when he opened the door to accept my gesture of kindness.
The week before, there would have been no hesitancy. I would have been a ``trail angel,'' nothing more. There would have been no thought of some beady-eyed character lurking inside the truck.
Now, for a time, Utopia is gone; innocence is lost. A bird in the laurel causes you to jump; strangers make you uneasy.
It was that way in 1990, and 1988, and 1981, and 1975 and 1974 - other years when murders were reported on the Appalachian Trail.
All this doesn't mean the trail is unsafe. You've got to remember we are talking about 2,159 miles, from Georgia to Maine, in 14 states, where an estimated 4 million people hike annually.
Hikers have an axiom: The greater the distance from a road, the higher the quality of the people you meet. Thugs, in most instances, simply aren't going to expend the energy necessary to leave roads very far behind.
For that reason, trail maintainers, like the Roanoke Appalachian Trail Club, erect overnight shelters well away from roads, even though it means considerably more work. This year, members of the Roanoke club and the U.S. Forest Service used Suffolk draft horses to pull a sled load of materials to the War Spur shelter in Giles County. In many instances, no attention is drawn to the trail when it crosses roads. Officials figure the real hikers will be willing to work hard enough to find it.
Just before the deaths of the two women in Shenandoah National Park, a story distributed by The Associated Press trashed trail officials, saying they purposely were making it difficult for people to locate the famous pathway out of fear of overuse.
There are some people you hope never find the Appalachian Trail.
LENGTH: Medium: 69 linesby CNB