Hikers behaving badly
BAXTER STATE PARK, Maine — When Jackson Spencer set out to tackle the Appalachian Trail, he anticipated the solitude that only wilderness can bring — not a rolling, monthslong frat party.
Shelters where he thought he could catch a good night's sleep while listening to the sounds of nature were instead filled with trash, graffiti and people who seemed more interested in partying all night, said Spencer, who finished the entire trail in July in just 99 days.
“I wanted the solitude. I wanted to experience nature,” he said. “I like to drink and to have a good time, but I didn't want that to follow me there.”
Spencer, or “Mission” as he is known to fellow thru-hikers, confronted what officials say is an ugly side effect of the increasing traffic on the Georgia-to-Maine footpath every year: More people than ever causing problems.
At Maine's Baxter State Park, home to the trail's final summit on Mount Katahdin, officials say thru-hikers are flouting park rules by openly using drugs and drinking alcohol, camping where they aren't supposed to, and trying to pass their pets off as service dogs. Hundreds of miles away, misbehaving hikers contributed to a small Pennsylvania community's recent decision to shutter the sleeping quarters it had offered for decades in the basement of its municipal building.
With last year's release of the movie “Wild,” about a woman's journey on the Pacific Crest Trail, and what experts call a growing interest in outdoor activities, the number of people on the Appalachian Trail has exploded. And the numbers are only expected to climb further after “A Walk in the Woods” hits theaters this week.
More than 830 people completed the 2,189-mile hike last year, up from just 182 in 1990, according to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, based in Harpers Ferry, W.Va. At Baxter, the number of registered long-distance hikers grew from 359 in 1991 to more than 2,000 in 2014.
The growing number of hikers is becoming a management nightmare at Baxter, where officials say they also believe the culture and attitude of the people using the path is changing.
Jensen Bissell, park director, said in a letter to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy late last year that AT hikers are “open and deliberate in their desire for freedom from all rules and regulations.” He warns the trail may need to end somewhere besides Katahdin if something doesn't change soon.
“If we have 2,000 hikers now, how will it be when we have 3,500 or 4,000 hikers?” Bissell said.
Some say there appears to be a growing sense of entitlement among thru-hikers, many of whom are just out of college or have enough money to leave work for months at a time.
“We had to take off half a year of working, and not a lot of people can do that,” Karl Berger, a 24-year-old Maine resident known on the trail as GQ, said from a camp site in Baxter. “I don't think a lot of hikers acknowledge that it's a privilege to be out here.”
Many hikers said they believe the concerns are being overblown.
“There is always a bad apple or two, but these are people that spend four to six months for a year on the trail, on their feet, experiencing the wilderness. I can't imagine them wanting to do things that would violate the wilderness,” said Scott Jurek, an ultramarathoner from Colorado who last month completed the trail in a record time of 46 days, eight hours.
After celebrating with a bottle of champagne at Katahdin's summit, Jurek received citations for consuming alcohol, hiking with a large group and littering. He argued the citations were unfair and that Baxter officials were using him to send a message to problem hikers.
