A Very, Very, Very Long Walk
Erin Tainer, a 2007 Washington and Lee alumna, stepped off from Springer Mountain, Ga., on March 27, bound for Mt Katahdin, Maine. On foot. That’s a 2175-mile walk known as an Appalachian Trail thru-hike.
Erin’s most recent blog post was on July 29, and she estimated then that she was 600 miles from her destination. But to get a sense of what the trip has been like, you really need to go back and start reading Erin’s posts from the beginning.
Her blog, “Erin’s Appalachian Adventure,” is not so much a day-by-day travelogue (computer time is at a premium along the trail, after all) as a series of stories in which the reader meets the colorfully nicknamed fellow hikers and gets a real flavor for her adventures — juvenile delinquents in Tennessee and black bears in New Jersey.
Facebook members can see some of Erin’s photos on her page, too. Just do a search for her, and you can see an album titled “See you at Katahdin!”
A geology major at W&L, Erin did her graduate work in geology at Utah State, where her research was on holocene stratigraphy of the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon.
If you know any W&L alumni who would be great profile subjects, tell us about them! Nominate them for a web profile.
