Earl shaffer boots

Earl was a native of York County, Pennsylvania. His family moved to a small farm near the Village of Shiloh when he was five years of age. He grew up in this rural environment. His mother, whom he lost in his midteens to complications from surgery, encouraged him to read and appreciate poetry and literature. He went on to graduate from William Penn Senior High School in 1935. This was during the depression and jobs were hard to find for adults much less a young man just out of high school. He worked on area farms and hunted and trapped for furs in the winter. Later, he gained employment as a carpenter.

In 1941, when the military draft was looming, Earl was awaiting his turn for entering the service when he decided to volunteer for active duty in order to get it over with. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, he was already in advanced training in the States. He spent his entire Army career in the Pacific Theater, spending a great amount of time "down under" on small islands constructing radar and communications facilities. Much of that time was spe

•

Walking with History: Revisiting Earl Shaffer’s “Walking With Spring”

“Most people never in all their lives sleep under the open sky, and never realize what they are missing.” – Earl Shaffer

I started my flip-flop hike of the Appalachian Trail on April 15. As preparation for my hike, in addition to the usual obsessing about gear and doing several shakedown hikes, I read books. A lot of books. These included books on how to prepare to hike the Appalachian Trail (Appalachian Trials, and Long Trails: Mastering the Art of the Thru-Hike), first-person accounts of hiking the Appalachian Trail (AWOL on the Appalachian Trail), and some hiking-related works of literature (Henry David Thoreau’s Walking). But by far my most enjoyable preparatory read was a revisitation of Earl Shaffer’s classic account of his 1948 thru-hike, Walking With Spring.

For those who might be unfamiliar with his story, Earl Shaffer was the first individual to complete a continuous end-to-end hike of the Appalachian Trail. Prior to his epic “walk with spring,” Shaffer served four and a

•

“The Long Cruise” of Earl Shaffer

Celebrating Over 75 Years of the A.T. Thru-Hiking Tradition

The bit of Appalachian Trail history that was made in 1948 was the appearance of the first “thru-hiker,” Earl V. Shaffer of York Springs, Pennsylvania, who reported completing the entire 2,050 miles in an uninterrupted backpacking trip beginning April 4 and ending August 5. Shaffer had lost his closest friend while they were in combat in the Pacific Theater and was “walking off the army” by “walking with spring” — the title of his book about it — along the Appalachian Trail he had read about in a magazine.

While he was halfway to Maine, the already legendary Myron H. Avery was presiding over the Appalachian Trail Conservancy’s first postwar, regrouping meeting, at Fontana Dam in North Carolina — part of which was devoted to a discussion on how unlikely a thru-hike would be. The chairman was particularly disturbed that Shaffer had no official guidebooks and maps; Shaffer, “The Crazy One” as he called himself, said he wrote for but never received them so instead used oil-company maps and