The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached, or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Baltimore Magazine. Need some forest therapy? The Appalachian Trail is only an hour away. The Appalachian Mountains are old; the rocks at their core formed more than a billion years ago when the Earth was a single supercontinent surrounded by one great ocean.
The peaks themselves were born some million years ago when the ancestral continents of North America and Africa collided, pushing and stacking rocks that had been on the sea floor upward and west, until they became the ridges that run from Georgia to Canada. Amazingly, sediment, sand, and pebbles from that ancient sea floor are visible, layered in outcrops in places like the Newfoundland Gap along the Tennessee and North Carolina border.
Map illustrations by Stephanie Shafer. The Appalachian Trail, however, is not so old. His call to action worked, too. Two years after that, MacKaye organized a trail conference out of which grew the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, now headquartered in Harpers Ferry, WV, and affiliated with 30 clubs, whose mission remains preserving the trail.
The nearly 2,mile footpath was ultimately completed in and since then, more than 12, hikers have completed the pilgrimage. Army-issued boots, rucksack, and diary, which evolved into the book he wrote about his experience, Walking with Spring. In , two months shy of his 80th birthday, he completed the hike again on the 50th anniversary of his initial endeavor. Shaffer died in , after living happily among his cats and goats in a log cabin without running water or electricity most of his life, about five miles from the AT.
But no one gets through life unscathedβeven if his or her own slings and arrows of fate are nothing like surviving war or domestic violence. Those studies also reveal walks through leafy, green areas lead to measureable cognitive improvements and more positive outlooks.
