Thomas McLaughin is writing a series of articles on hiking in the region.

When asked why she hiked, Grandma “Emma” Gatewood, the first woman to complete the Appalachian Trail, replied, “I want to see what’s on the other side of the hill – then what’s beyond that.” Earl Shaffer, a World War II combat veteran and the first person to hike the entire Appalachian Trail, gave a different reason. Shaffer wrote that it was to “walk the war out of my system.”  

There’s something both intriguing and therapeutic about a long walk on an open-ended trail with no end in sight. You don’t know what’s ahead and there’s a calming, repetitiveness to each step as you pass through miles of forests, fields, meadows, hills, mountains, and streets.  

It had been more than 30-years since I had done any climbing, hiking, or walking that could be measured in miles. In my early twenties I climbed Mt. Washington, but I hadn’t hiked much since then. My desire to hike again was rekindled by rising blood pressure readings and a movie. 

The movie was, “A Walk in the Woods,” based on Bill Bryson’s best-selling book, starring Robert Redford and Nick Nolte. Bryson moves to Hanover, New Hampshire where he discovers that the Appalachian Trail (AT) runs through his new hometown. He teams up with an old friend to hike the AT. I loved both the movie and the book.

This made me want to hike and learn more about it. I devoured whatever I could find on the AT and hiking. I watched too many AT hiking videos on YouTube, and read numerous articles and blogs on The Trek. I read Ben Montgomery’s “Grandma Gatewood’s Walk – The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail,” and D. Dauphinee’s “When You Find My Body – The Disappearance of Geraldine Largay.” The former was inspiring, the latter was sad, but both were informative. I also watched hiking and running documentaries on Netflix – “Beyond the Tree Line,” and “Like Harvey Like Son.”

Late in the summer I drove out to the Appalachian Trail in Western Massachusetts in Lee, Becket, and Tyringham, and I hiked some small sections there. These were just day hikes that reminded me of my need for greater physical conditioning, especially when going uphill. On my way up Becket Mountain I crossed paths with a couple of southbound (SoBo) hikers in late August who said they had walked 640 miles in three weeks from Mt. Katahdin, Maine. The straight distance between these points is far less, but the AT meanders through the Presidential Range of the White Mountains and goes through Vermont’s Green Mountains before descending into Massachusetts so it adds more than a couple of hundred miles to the journey. I was getting winded going up Becket but the two thru-hikers were breathing fine as they passed through their fourth state. 

Northern New England is considered to be the hardest, most challenging part of the trail so it seemed like clear sailing ahead for these two hikers, but in the month that followed, Hurricane Helene would close 700 miles of the southern portion of the trail. I figured if they hiked 25-miles per day, they probably made it just past Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley when Helene hit. A week after I had been on that section of the AT in Becket, 31-year-old Tara Dower, ran through the area on her record breaking 40-day run to Georgia, reaching the end of the trail just in the nick of time as Helene was arriving there.

The winter came and went and I yearned to get back out there without snow and mud, but as much as I liked being on the AT, it was an 80-to-90-mile drive just to reach to it. I knew a little bit about the Midstate Trail from seeing signs throughout this area so I looked at online maps and researched it. 

Since I was only doing day hikes anyway it donned on me that I should put my time into hiking on our own parallel trail right here in Central Mass. The Massachusetts portion of the AT is 90-miles long and runs through Western Massachusetts in the Berkshires, south and north from Connecticut to Vermont and vice versa. The Midstate Trail is 92-miles long and runs through Central Massachusetts from Rhode Island to New Hampshire, south to north. It didn’t make sense to ignore what was right here in my own backyard, just one town away, so I began hiking the Midstate in April and I’m glad I did.