This story is excerpted and adapted from The Appalachian Trail: A Biography by Philip D’Anieri, published in June 2021 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. On April 4, 1948, Army veteran Earl Shaffer set out from the southern end of the Appalachian Trail (AT) to, as he famously said, “walk the war out of my system.” When he finished at the northern terminus, Maine’s Mt. Katahdin, 124 days later, Shaffer became the first person known to have thru-hiked the 2,000 mile-plus trail that snakes its way up the mountainous spine of the…
