[HN Gopher] Appalachian Trail Hiker Photo Archive
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Appalachian Trail Hiker Photo Archive
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 142 points
Date : 2024-09-07 22:23 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (athikerpictures.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (athikerpictures.org)
| thepuppet33r wrote:
| > Between January and April 2009, 12,779 images representing over
| 18,000 Appalachian Trail hikers were carefully removed from old
| notebooks, barcoded, scanned at 600 dpi, and placed into archival
| quality sleeves and slip-covered albums. The entire process took
| sixteen volunteers over 425 hours to complete.
|
| Quite the effort! Always fun to see people come together for
| stuff like this.
|
| They mention difficulty in trying to figure out names, dates,
| trail names, etc. I realized I'm so used to the ubiquitousness of
| social media and cell phones because my immediate thought was,
| "Why did these people not put down their numbers?"
| thepuppet33r wrote:
| I wonder if this could add clues to the handful of people who
| go missing on the trail.
| ahepp wrote:
| There is a separate project (now also managed by the AT Museum)
| called the hiker yearbook, which collects phone numbers and
| emails along with pictures. It looks like the first one may
| have been published in 2014.
| waltwalther wrote:
| Wow. Thank you for posting this. I am fifty years old. In 1989 my
| best friend, Geof Allen, and I spent an entire year planning to
| walk the AT after high school. During long nights in my parents
| basement we literally mapped out every step by figuring out how
| many steps were in a mile, and then multiplying. Life happened.
| He walked the entire AT from Spring Mtn to Mt Kahdin. I
| reluctantly followed my parents wishes and went off to college.
|
| Even in high school Geof was unlike anyone I ever knew. He did
| not have the best life, but he always smiled. When we were
| winter-camping together Geof knew how to make your frozen feet
| not-so-bad. When we were lost deep in a cave in Newport,
| Virginia, Geof showed no signs of worry, while I openly panicked.
|
| After walking the AT Geof joined the Navy, and when a slot opened
| up he became a Blue Angel...not a pilot, but still a prestigious
| position with a flight suit as a uniform. He married his high
| school sweetheart, and after the Navy, moved back home and became
| a police officer.
|
| I had totally lost contact with Geof, and was working in IT
| across the street from my local police department. As I was
| walking to my car one afternoon I saw Geof standing in the
| parking lot. We chatted and caught up a bit, and then lost
| contact again.
|
| The next time I heard Geof's name was years later. He had
| committed suicide. I almost want to say that he didn't have a
| choice. You see, he had watched all of the other males and one
| female in his fathers bloodline be taken away by Huntington's
| Disease. I found out later that Geof was in the early-stages, and
| it was easy to deduce that he needed to take action while he was
| still able.
|
| We were all from the same hometown. I knew his Uncles and his
| Aunt, and watched what Huntington's did to them, and I was there
| the day his father committed suicide.
|
| I found Geof's picture on athikerpictures.com. He is second from
| the left. Blue pants and white shirt. I am certain that he made
| life easier for the three hikers pictured with him. His trail
| name was Alpha. Alpha Geof Allen.
| dano wrote:
| Thanks for the story about your friend Geof. It was touching
| and made this archive just that much more valuable. Hope you
| have a few more good memories today.
| gullywhumper wrote:
| Wow - thank you!
| ultimoo wrote:
| Touching story. You are a good friend and Geof seems like he
| was an excellent individual.
| michelb wrote:
| Thank you for your touching story. It's beautiful when people
| live on in memories like this.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| I'm sorry for how this affected you, and for the situation your
| friend found himself in. It sounds like he lived well, was
| loved, and (however sadly) took his leave on his own terms.
| Thank you for telling us about him.
| echelon wrote:
| That was a very touching anecdote that stole away the mundanity
| of reading the morning news. I had to go look. These are the
| things that make life so human. Thank you for sharing with us.
| ibizaman wrote:
| What a moving story. I am younger than you but also had a
| friend die on me and now I wish I spent much more time with
| him. I hope you don't mind that I link directly to the photo so
| that it's easier to find.
| https://athikerpictures.org/hikers/4119
| setgree wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. I have a story similar to yours, I had a
| college friend who hiked the AT and then later died by suicide.
| I wrote about it here:
| https://journeys.appalachiantrail.org/issue/spring-summer-20...
|
| (Here is my friend's picture:
| https://athikerpictures.org/hikers/22103)
| sizzle wrote:
| Sorry for your loss. You have a way with words, keep writing
| please.
| michelpp wrote:
| I thruhiked in 1995, and while I did go to the ATC headquarters
| to sign in, I don't recall having my photo taken, but it may have
| been. I do however vividly recall the photo archive at Rusty's
| Hardtime Hollow just off the Blue Ridge Parkway section of the AT
| a few miles but was well worth the trip.
|
| Rusty had polaroids of hikers going way back, they lined the
| walls of every building, when he built new bunkhouses, he started
| new annual collections. There were thousands of them. Every night
| he would roll his truck down into the parking are blast James
| Brown and feed what he could to whatever he had or whatever
| hikers could bring. Wood fired hot tub, sauna, huge garden, it
| was a paradise after almost a 1000 miles on foot.
|
| I hope the ATC was also able to recover Rusty's photos, because
| he had a real gold mine. The few years after hiking when I lived
| in the area I would bring beverages and hot dogs for the hikers.
| I lost touch with Rusty after I went west. I was hiking recently
| in Maine and talking to another thruhiker who went through in the
| 2000 and she said the Hollow is gone now which would be a shame
| of his archive could not be recovered.
| SaggyDoomSr wrote:
| I thruhiked in 2001. Stayed for a few days at Rusty's. That
| place was amazing!
| michelpp wrote:
| I found my pic, they spelled my trail name a bit differently:
| https://athikerpictures.org/hikers/2329
| codeangler wrote:
| Thanks. Found myself
| codeangler wrote:
| Great. Thanks for sharing. Found myself 2004 thru hike.
| raddan wrote:
| Wild! I don't even remember this picture being taken, but here I
| am with my (future) wife.
|
| https://athikerpictures.org/hikers/9660
| plants wrote:
| This is great. Found myself on 5/30/22. Looking forward to
| catching up with photos of people I hiked with. Also love the
| pics from '79 - total time capsule! Short-shorts never went out
| of style in the hiking community.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Short-shorts love those who don't skip leg day.
|
| And thruhikers _never_ skip leg day.
| wyclif wrote:
| I'm an AT hiker but I hate the short-shorts. I prefer the
| length to be just above the knee. If you've ever walked
| through a tall patch of poison ivy before you noticed what it
| was, you'll understand.
| elif wrote:
| Psht class of '07
|
| Give me the shortest running shorts pls and I'll cut the
| extra fabric like pockets off.
|
| The only brush you'll walk thru on the AT is off trail so
| just don't walk in poison ivy lol
| carabiner wrote:
| I did the PCT. Felt like going to college again in my 30s.
| Freedom, meeting tons of new people from around the world, and a
| richness and rawness of life I've never experienced before or
| since.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Hiking the trail has been a life goal of mine for a decade now.
|
| Seeing stuff like this is inspiring to me.
| zxexz wrote:
| Found my sister! I think I met up with her a few days after this
| photo was taken. I was envious of her being able to thru-hike -
| but I made the time to go visit her along the trail and probably
| did about 400 miles of it, on and off.
|
| Excited for a time I can just say screw it, and walk off into the
| woods for as long as I want. Always felt most at home living out
| of a bag, calorie starved enough to take immense pleasure in
| eating things I would never buy in my normal day to day - but
| filled to the brim with energy. The rush of hill after mountain
| after hill is greater than the most doomscrolling-optimized feed,
| and you feel it with all your senses.
| derbOac wrote:
| The increase in numbers each year is pretty remarkable.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| The 2010 data seems to be screwed up and/or incomplete. A search
| by year with a blank in the search box returns 17 pages of
| results (with very few trail names). 2009 and 2011 return 76 and
| 89 pages of results respectively. Master Chief's photo is a
| Katahdin photo (happy to see he finished!). There are a couple
| photos with a trailname of "original" and "edited" that are of
| the same hiker, but "edited" is cropped. And they're definitely
| missing pictures of a bunch of folks whose town names I know.
|
| I'm bummed, because I'd sure like to see pictures of some of the
| rest of the class of 2010.
|
| It also looks like they might've stopped recording (or
| transcribing from photos?) trail names for a while. I was SOBO in
| '03, and found a bunch of familiar faces by trail name. A blank
| search for 2003 and a sort by trail name descending gives me 68
| pages. For 2011, the same procedure gets me 2 pages.
| wyclif wrote:
| Found this legend. I hiked with him in '98 and '99. I'd
| absolutely put Baltimore Jack in the top 10 of American
| outdoorsmen of all time. I think he thru-hiked the entire AT
| eight times. Pretty sure that's the record:
| https://athikerpictures.org/hikers/3969
| mauvehaus wrote:
| You may be pleased to know that he was still sectioning in
| 2010. I met him in the Smokies and bumped into him periodically
| as I went up the trail. RIP.
| xtiansimon wrote:
| What an internet treasure.
| Tepix wrote:
| Neat. They seem to have bought a digital camera around
| 2008-05-30. Much better image quality from thereon.
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(page generated 2024-09-08 23:01 UTC)