[at-l] ATN article, 1936 Scout Hike

[icw39@ncfreedom.net (Clark Wright)]

OK, I tried to supress this urge for several days, but it's leaking out
tonight! :)

WHO CARES?!  :)  I'm "quite certain" NONE of us are CERTAIN in the
truest sense of the word . . . and the rest is more of that ink blot
stuff! :)

Earl and the Scouts probably all had a good time hiking, though! :)

Thru-Thinker

"Bob C." wrote:
> 
> "...I  believe  Weary,  you  are injecting your own personal technique into this
> claimed   hike  for  reasons  of  personal  validation  rather  than  accurately
> investigating  whether the 1936 hike happened from the available evidence." says
> R nR.
> 
> Many  thanks  to RnR for injecting a bit of levity into these discussions. I had
> to chuckle at his observation. The last thing I need at this stage of my life is
> "personal validation," especially on something as insignificant as how I spent a
> six  months  hiking vacation. It boggles my mind that I even managed to stick it
> out for six months.
> 
> I'm  quite  certain  the  1936  hike  never happened for many reasons. First the
> existence  of the trail was largely unknown. It had not even been finished. It's
> hard  to  conceive  a group of scout leaders taking scouts on a 2,000-mile, four
> month thru hike of a trail that hadn't been completed.
> 
> It  is conceivable that those leaders might have taken these scouts on visits to
> selected segments of this trail -- and that the youngest of the group might have
> become  confused  about just what it was they were about. What might the purpose
> have been? One can only speculate. Had the adults read Benton McKaye, they might
> have  been  scouting out the work camps McKaye had dreamed of creating. Perhaps,
> they were just checking on places for future hiking excursions.
> 
> I just can't conceive of a desire to "thru hike" an incompleted trail as being a
> goal that sensible troop leaders from a big city neighborhood would choose -- or
> even think about.
> 
> The  journal of Eric Ryback, 17, hiking 23 years later, describes the difficulty
> of  finding the trail in Maine, climbing Katahdin and crossing the Kennebec even
> then.
> 
> I  can  find  no  evidence  in the ATN article, to suggest that more than a tiny
> piece of Maine was traversed by the 1936 Scouts. No mention is made of Katahdin,
> the Kennebec, the poorly marked trail, the bugs ...., nothing except the patches
> of  drifted snow. Eric, judging from his account, was a powerful 17-year-old. He
> traversed  the  30-mile  Mahoosuc  Range  in  one  day. But he still required 20
> percent more time to do Maine than the scouts claim.
> 
> Weary
> 
> _______________________________________________
> >From the AT-L mailing list         est. 1995
> Need help?  http://www.at-l.org
> Archives: http://www.backcountry.net/arch/at/
> Change your options or unsubscribe:
> http://mailman.backcountry.net/mailman/listinfo/at-l
> 
> Stay on topic!