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In 1993, three people rolled a measuring wheel along its entire length and came up with a distance of 2,164.9 miles. At about the same time, a careful measure based on a full set of U.S. Geological Survey maps put the distance at 2,118.3 miles. What is certain is that it is a long way, and from either end it is not easy. The peaks of the Appalachian Trail are not particularly formidable as mountains go—the highest, Clingmans Dome in Tennessee, tops out at a little under 6,700 feet—but they are big enough and they go on and on. There are more than 350 peaks over 5,000 feet along the AT, and perhaps a thousand more in the vicinity. Altogether, it takes about five months, and five million steps, to walk the trail from end to end. And of course on the AT you must lug on your back everything you need. It may seem obvious, but it came as a small shock to me to realize that this wasn’t going to be even remotely like an amble through the English Cotswolds or Lake District, where you head off for the day with a haversack containing a packed lunch and a hiking map and at day’s end retire from the hills to a convivial inn for a hot bath, a hearty meal, and a soft bed. Here you sleep outdoors and cook your own food. Few people manage to carry less than forty pounds, and when you’re hauling that kind of weight, believe me, never for a moment does it escape your notice. It is one thing to walk 2,000 miles, quite another to walk 2,000 miles with a wardrobe on your back.

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This is at the very beginning of Bryson‘s journey he is contemplating the trip he is about to take in the equipment that might be necessary for it. This is similar to somebody assessing the situation that they have to tackle or a problem that they have to deal with, and observing all of the obstacles they have to overcome along the way. Often times this can discourage people from even trying things at all because the obstacles seem to hard to overcome but in life we’re always going to be faced with obstacles no matter what it is and we’ve always got a try and persevere and overcome.

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Every year between early March and late April, about 2,000 hikers set off from Springer, most of them intending to go all the way to Katahdin. No more than 10 percent actually make it. Half don’t make it past central Virginia, less than a third of the way. A quarter get no farther than North Carolina, the next state. As many as 20 percent drop out the first week. Wisson has seen it all. “Last year, I dropped a guy off at the trailhead,” he told us as we tooled north through darkening pine forests towards the rugged hills of north Georgia. “Three days later he calls me from the pay phone at Woody Gap—that’s the first pay phone you come to. Says he wants to go home, that the trail wasn’t what he expected it to be. So I drive him back to the airport. Two days after that he’s back in Atlanta. Says his wife made him come back because he’d spent all this money on equipment and she wasn’t going to let him quit so easy. So I drop him off at the trailhead. Three days later he phones from Woody Gap again. He wants to go to the airport. ‘Well, what about your wife?’ I says. And he says, ‘This time I’m not going home."

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They are beginning to discuss the process in how you get to the beginning of the trail. In the passage he claims that 2000 hikers set off on the trail during the spring time and no more than 10% actually make it all the way to Katahdin. This is a great example of people taking on issues and starting to handle it but becoming overwhelmed with the amount of work they have to complete or how hard they have to work to complete it. The story of the man Who started on the trail but only traveled for three days until asking to be taken back home is quite interesting. However his wife forces him to return for a second time to attempt it fully as he already spent the money on the equipment necessary. He tries again and again reaches the three day mark before asking to be taken home, he even goes as far as not going home to his wife yet to make it seem as if he did complete the walk. Often people will make it seem as if they’ve completed certain things to appeal to others and satisfy what those around them want.

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I asked her about the dangers of the trail, and she told me that in the eight years that she had worked for the ATC, there had been just two confirmed cases of snakebite, neither fatal, and one person killed by lightning. I asked her about the recent murders. She gave a sympathetic grimace. “It’s awful. Everyone’s really upset about it, because trust is such a kind of bedrock part of hiking the AT, you know? I thru-hiked myself in 1987, so I know how much you come to rely on the goodness of strangers. The trail is really all about that, isn’t it? And to have that taken away, well. …” Then, remembering her position, she gave me a little bit of the official line—a brief, articulate spiel to the effect that one should never forget that the trail is not insulated from the larger ills of society but that statistically it remains extremely safe compared with most places in America. “It’s had nine murders since 1937—about the same as you would get in many small towns.” This was correct, but a wee disingenuous. The AT had no murders in its first thirty-six years and nine in the past twenty-two. Still, her larger point was inarguable. You are more likely to be murdered in your bed in America than on the AT. Or as an American friend put it to me much later: “Look, if you draw a two thousandmile-long line across the United States at any angle, it’s going to pass through nine murder victims.”

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In this passage Bryson wonders about the dangers he will face on the trail. Not including the normal dangers of weather, animals, and the terrain, they have also been to recent murders on the trail. I believe this speaks to when going through trials and tribulations in life, they’re always going to be those in opposition to you who seem like I’m trying to bring you down.Pair this with the many obstacles we face in our lives and it can seem impossible to complete certain things, however like the passage says there’s only been nine murders in the 70 or so years the trail has been hiked on. Why would you let the fact that there’s a chance of something happening, stop you from pursuing something you want to achieve. If we looked at everything in life with such a scared outlook, doing something as simple as crossing the street would be something that takes a huge amount of time in contemplation. We as humans don’t have time to think about simple things like that the small chances of these things happening aren’t things we can really take into account if we’re looking to achieve bigger things. We can't think that just because there is a possibility that every water bottle might be poisoned, that we should never drink water again.

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I hate all this technology on the trail. Some AT hikers, I had read, now carry laptop computers and modems, so that they can file daily reports to their family and friends. And now increasingly you find people with electronic gizmos like the Enviro Monitor or wearing sensors attached by wires to their pulse points so that they look as if they’ve come to the trail straight from some sleep clinic. In 1996 the Wall Street Journal ran a splendid article on the nuisance of satellite navigation devices, cellphones, and other such appliances in the wilderness. All this high-tech equipment, it appears, is drawing up into the mountains people who perhaps shouldn’t be there. At Baxter State Park in Maine, the Journal reported, one hiker called up a National Guard Unit and asked them to send a helicopter to airlift him off Mount Katahdin because he was tired. On Mount Washington, meanwhile, “two very demanding women,” according to an official there, called the mountain patrol HQ and said they couldn’t manage the last mile and a half to the summit even though there were still four hours of daylight left. They asked for a rescue team to come and carry them back to their car. The request was refused. A few minutes later, they called again and demanded in that case that a rescue team bring them some flashlights. That request was refused also. A few days later, another hiker called and requested a helicopter because he was a day behind schedule and was afraid he would miss an important business meeting. The article also described several people who had got lost with satellite navigation devices. They were able to report their positions as 36.2 degrees north by 17.48 degrees west or whatever but unfortunately didn’t have the faintest idea what that meant, as they hadn’t brought maps or compasses or, evidently, brains

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In this passage Bryson is talking about people using various forms of technology on the trail and how it’s affecting not only the trail but daily life as well. He mentions how there are some hikers using laptops/computers in different GPS systems to make their way along the trail. Not only that they are also using these devices to come in contact with various things like rescue teams, and evacuate and helicopters in order to extract them from the trail because they don’t want to complete the rest of it. I think we see this a lot in our society nowadays many people are too focused and driven on technology to the point where people don’t really have true interactions anymore. Everything seems to be so wrapped up in the technology world and then no one takes the time to actually look around them and see what’s going on anymore. As mentioned in the passage even the people with the GPS systems are getting lost as they’re able to locate their longitude and latitude however they have no clue whatTo actually do with that information. It’s insane to think that this book was published in 1998 and we see the effects of only gotten worse and worse as time goes on.

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As I mentioned before, like most people examine things before I take them on to see how long this task is going to take and how demanding it will be. Sometimes I let it discourage me from doing things when I see there’s too many obstacles or it’s going to take too much time. However this usually leads to me ending up overwhelmed with work anyways and regretting not tackling it when I originally could have. I think what I need to do is stop looking at things in such a big picture way and just think of these little hurdles to jump over to the greater goal in the end if not life would fall to shambles.

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Sometimes when we have something we aspire to do, we look at those around us in the examples of those who have already tried and either is succeeded or failed. For a lot of people it can really be disheartening to see how many people try and achieve a certain thing versus how many people actually reach that goal. But, you never going to get anything in life if you just sit there and don’t apply yourself to anything because you see how many people have failed. If everyone thought this way, nothing would get done they have to be people willing to take the risk of trying new things and trying things that people haven’t done in abundance before. If not the world will be pretty stagnant and to apply it to myself there’s been a lot of instances where I mean I give my full effort into something because I had to see those around me doing it better in my eyes or I just feel as though I can’t complete the task in a satisfactory way. But I’m slowly learning that I need to break this if I want to grow more mature within myself.

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The dangers of the trail are similar to the dangers of life, every day we face uncommon dangerous but it doesn’t mean we’re not gonna go out and live our lives. A great example in today’s climate is the coronavirus, obviously we are in a global pandemic is so certain things are limited. But this doesn’t mean that we can stop life altogether people still have to work to support themselves and their families we can’t just put a hold on things because of a danger being presented. Every time we step out of our house we are presented with danger, something as simple as crossing the street I think we see as minuscule can be potentially dangerous, this doesn’t mean we’re going to stop crossing the street. This can be applied to trying to tackle an issue or accomplish something, there’s going to be dangerous along the way no matter what. Say you’re trying to start a small business, on the plus side you can create revenue for yourself and not have to work for anybody well being able to support yourself and your family. However on the opposite side there’s a chance your small business doesn’t work out and you lose whatever money you put into it, this can discourage a lot of people from even trying something like that to begin with, but those that try it in our successful are always grateful that they took the chance and roll the dice with the dangers ahead of them.

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I agree strongly with how Bryson feels about technology in our world. It’s fascinating that this book was published way back in 1989 before technology was even as prevalent as it is today. Technology is such an integral thing in our day-to-day lives it seems like people can’t go without it for more than five minutes. And that’s not to say that I’m not guilty of it too, I spent a good majority of my day looking at the screen whether it’s my laptop or my phone. However, unfortunately this is become a normal way of life for my generation we were raised with screens in front of us and will probably raise our children the same way. Not to mention how integrated technology has become into schools systems as well, it’s almost impossible to escape the screen. This is definitely had effects on the world both negative and positive. You could definitely argue both sides however I feel as it’s definitely more negative than positive. There is an extreme social disconnect between people as most of the interactions that they have with one another or through a screen and so when it comes to a face to face interaction it is an entirely different scenario. You rarely see kids my age or younger going out to have fun outside anymore, they would rather talk on the phone or play video games and not really enjoy the things going on in their lives. I’m trying to break that habit myself with using my phone less and getting out and enjoying time with my friends more especially given that this is my final year of high school I feel as though it’s important to make the most of it and spend time with those who truly care about me instead of the social media personas who couldn’t care less about any of us. It pains me to see so many people glued to their phone screens even though absolutely nothing beneficial comes of their frequent phone usage.