Purist's Dilemma

[rafe]

Okay, a very simple and very real situation. See attached sketch. A shelter has two approach paths, one leading in from the north, another from the south.

Let's say you're NOBO. Upon arrival, you take the path from point B to the shelter and spend the night. By what route will you depart, the next morning?

[Pokey2006]

Die-hard purists will disagree, but I say take the route that makes more sense. To me it's just good old fashioned common sense, a no-brainer.

By the way, this all looks so familiar...in fact, I think I did the blue blaze at that shelter, or a shelter just like it. Was it in Pennsylvania, maybe??? That's where I found the piece of blue blaze that now adorns my wall (picked it up off the ground, not off a tree).

[Johnny Swank]

Take route A, but do 50 jumping jacks and spin around 15 times once you reach the trail again as your punishment for missing that .000000023432 mile of trail!

FWIW, I've seen people hike around blowdowns, just to dive back into them so they won't miss 2.5' of trail. That's too much like a job in my mind.

[Blue Jay]

Take route A, but do 50 jumping jacks and spin around 15 times once you reach the trail again as your punishment for missing that .000000023432 mile of trail!

FWIW, I've seen people hike around blowdowns, just to dive back into them so they won't miss 2.5' of trail. That's too much like a job in my mind.

Take Route A and 50 jumping jacks is no where near enough punishment for a purist. You have to damn yourself to hell and then start over again at Springer. When ever you leave the trail for any reason at all, you have to leave a marker and go back to that exact spot. If someone moves your marker even an inch, your thru is over and you must start again.

[Frolicking Dinosaurs]

TT, take this diagram to a shrink and see if he / she can help you untangle this dilemma.

[rafe]

By the way, this all looks so familiar...in fact, I think I did the blue blaze at that shelter, or a shelter just like it. Was it in Pennsylvania, maybe???

Kirkridge Shelter in PA, just south of DWG, has exactly this arrangement. But there are many others with dual approach paths.. or approach paths that "fork."

[rafe]

TT, take this diagram to a shrink and see if he / she can help you untangle this dilemma.

It's only a dilemma for purists, FD.

[Lilred]

looks like low gap just out of Neel's. People worry about this stuff???

[Blue Jay]

This thread is very very important. Even if the shelter has one path into it, you must mark the spot your foot left the AT. If not, in the morning you could cut the corner of the path out and accidentally miss whole INCHES of the trail, then you must start again. Countless thruhikes have ended this way. to the insame religion of Purism.

[Rebel, with a Cause!]

Icewater Springs Shelter in the GSMNP has this same situation. You go to the shelter off the main trail and in the morning leave by way of the spring just downhill that meets the AT. In 2005 while hiking with my son Captain Chaos, I was talking to 2 purists about this situation. When I mentioned the situation at Icewater, it appeared that they had missed over 50 feet of the trail. The look on their faces was PRICELESS BTW, we were almost to Walnut MT shelter near Hot Springs during this conversation.

In 2002, I was hiking and found myself several feet lower than my group that was above me on another trail. It seems I had taken a small detour around some rocks and came back up the trail and finally met them. The first thing one of them said was: You missed part of the trail !!! I replied, No I didnt, you did. They actually went back to check it out to see which path was correct. Unfortunately it was I that was on the wrong one. I didnt go back

Cya on the Trail, Right one or wrong one, I like them all

[Lilred]

So how many people would be offended if I blue-blazed to Katahdin and called it a thru-hike? Now that would be an interesting goal, hike from Georgia to Maine using as little of the AT as possible, just using it to reconnect blue-blazes......hmmmm it wouldn't be a thru hike, perhaps an 'around' hike? or maybe instead of a flip flop, we could call it a flopped flip??

[Tractor]

Driving on interstate highways usually requires exiting on exit ramps and re-entry on an entry ramp. No matter how many pitstops I need to take I never consider I have missed some of the road along the way....

[Programbo]

OMG..I was going to post a similar map and a similar question just 2-3 days ago in response to someone elses thread and decided against it because I didn`t want to get flamed...They had said it was an "official" thru if you passed every white blaze or something...But I was going to counter by saying there are places where the trail blazers and official AT signs actually give you an option to go one route or another..One I know of is a shelter situation like yours where two trails go in and out and once at the shelter signs direct you back to the trail with arrows saying "AT North ->" etc...I have a photo in my hand now which I will gladly scan and post which says "AT South via High Rock view (And then has an arrow pointing ahead to a blue blaze trail). AT South No View (And has an arrow pointing to the side to the regular AT)"...In this situation the trail continues south along either route "officially" even though one is a blue blazed trial....I guess what I`m saying is I wouldn`t worry about it and the "purist's"..Just go the route which makes the most sense in these rare situations as even the trail makers allowed for either route in or out...The trail changes year to year anyway..Heck it`s 150 miles longer now than it was 20 years ago.

[JJB]

This is all too funny. One of the reasons I'm out in the woods is get away from inane stuff just like this. Peace. J.J.B.

[rafe]

... I was going to counter by saying there are places where the trail blazers and official AT signs actually give you an option to go one route or another..

Yeah, I've seen at least one or two places where there was an official (or semi-official) "high water" route.

It seems on almost all my section hikes I manage to lose the trail once or twice, and sometimes without even knowing it.

Hiking northbound, below Falls Village CT, the map showed the trail leaving the road and following the Hoosatonic (again) for a while... but in spite of my sincere and concerted effort, I managed to miss that junction. So I ended up walking maybe 3/4 mile -- along what was clearly the old AT -- to Falls Village proper, and then down the hill to where I re-found the "real" AT.

An hour or so before that incident, I had the experience of doing a "purist" march 3/4 of the way around the perimeter of some damned cornfield, leaving me standing about 100 feet from where I started. Stooopid.

[emerald]

I've often wondered how one could complete a pure, 2000-mile hike of the A.T. over many years. While it's possible to stick to the white blazes maybe 97% of the time or more, by the time one reports the completed hike to ATC, some of the A.T. hiked is apt to no longer be the official route, even though it may have been the official route at the time it was hiked.

Even in the course of a continuous hike from one terminus to the other, the official route can change by the time the opposite terminus is reached. I'm sure it must have been true in 1980, that by the time I reached Katahdin, some of the route I walked was no longer the official route. The A.T. was being moved all over the place then!

What's your take on this Terrapin as someone who is hoping to complete the A.T. over many years?

[rafe]

What's you take on this Terrapin as someone who is hoping to complete the A.T. over many years?

I'm not a purist but I do keep tabs and have made a rough estimate of my total blue-blaze transgressions. So far, they add up to less than 5% of the total.

In '90 there was a portion of the trail south of Erwin that was inaccessible, and there was some nastiness near Laurel Falls that was causing people to skip around that section. Pond Mountain was added to the trail in '89 or '90 (if I got my history right) and skipping that climb was my very first blue-blaze transgression. (Thanks, LW. )

I have 587 miles of AT left to walk (hopefully in August/September of this year) and plan to be reasonably purist about it.

With regard to the dilemma posed at the start of the thread, It's a no-brainer. If I'm nobo, I'm not going to take the sobo return path!

[Rain Man]

Icewater Springs Shelter?!!! Heck, that thing's only a few feet off the AT.

You wanna real dilemma, how 'bout Siler Bald Shelter??? The one below Wesser, NC, not the one (Silers Bald Shelter) in the GSMNP.

Siler Bald Shelter is about HALF A MILE off the AT. (That's a MILE if you count both the south and north shelter approach trails.)

To answer the question, I took the shelter trail in from the south and the other one out to the north, yet I still don't consider myself a blue-blazer. For whatever that's worth.

RainMan

.

[rafe]

I think it was Pecks Corner, maybe? The approach trail was the better part of a mile. (The day after Icewater Springs, as I recall.)

[weary]

Okay, a very simple and very real situation. See attached sketch. A shelter has two approach paths, one leading in from the north, another from the south.

Let's say you're NOBO. Upon arrival, you take the path from point B to the shelter and spend the night. By what route will you depart, the next morning?

I would depart by path A. I would do the same if the destination was a scenic overlook or waterfall, rather than a shelter. These paths were build by the maintaining clubs for hikers to use. They lead to amenities or trail features that the clubs want hikers to use or see.

To say they are not part of the trail is absurd in my opinion.

This situation, however, is different from deliberately skipping sections because a hiker wants to catch up with buddies, or because you are running late, or getting bored, or are taking a short cut to town. In such cases one can call oneself anything you want, but you clearly have not followed the rules for a 2,000 miler patch.

Weary