03/22/2026
Earl Shaffer.
Appalachian Trail, Georgia to Maine, 1948
The Man Who Walked Away From Everything and Found It All
Earl Shaffer was twenty-nine years old in 1948, a veteran of the Pacific War, and he could not sleep.
He had fought at Iwo Jima. He had watched his best friend since childhood — Walter Winemiller, who had grown up three farms over in York County, Pennsylvania — die on a Pacific beach.
He came home to a world that had not been at Iwo Jima and could not understand what Iwo Jima had been, and the gap between what he had seen and what anyone around him could receive was so wide that he stopped trying to cross it.
He decided to walk.
He decided to walk the Appalachian Trail — all 2,050 miles of it, from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine — alone, in one continuous journey, which no one had ever done before.
People told him it was impossible. The Trail was barely maintained. There were no guidebooks. There was no support infrastructure. There were gaps where the trail had not been completed.
He started in April 1948 with a pack, a sleeping bag, and a camera.
He walked north.
He walked through Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia. He walked through rain and heat and the specific loneliness of a man who has chosen solitude as the only medicine available. He ate at farms and small-town diners. He slept under stars and in lean-tos and twice in barns whose owners asked no questions.
He walked through Pennsylvania and New Jersey and New York and Connecticut and Massachusetts and Vermont and New Hampshire.
He arrived at the base of Mount Katahdin in Maine on August 5, 1948 — 124 days after he had started.
He climbed to the summit alone.
He sat on the summit of Katahdin for a long time.
He said later that somewhere in Vermont he had stopped having the nightmares. Somewhere in New Hampshire he had started being able to think about Walter without the thinking being only pain. On the summit of Katahdin he realized that the walk had done what the walk was supposed to do — not erase what he had seen but give him enough sky and enough distance and enough continuous forward motion that he could carry it without it carrying him.
He came down the mountain.
He went home to Pennsylvania.
He slept.
He was the first person to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail. He did it again at age seventy-nine — fifty years later — just to prove he still could.
The Appalachian Trail today receives 3 million visitors a year. Thousands attempt the thru-hike every season.
Every one of them is walking a path that a man with nightmares walked first — alone, in 1948, because he needed 2,050 miles of America between himself and Iwo Jima.
"He walked until the war was behind him instead of in front of him. That is all he did. That is all it took. 2,050 miles of American wilderness and one man who needed to be in motion until he could be still." — Appalachian Trail Conservancy, Earl Shaffer memorial
