When he set out from Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia on May 31, 1951, Espy had no idea his name would be woven into the Appalachian Trail’s history. He had never heard of Earl Shaffer, who walked the entire south-to-north trail in 1948. Espy didn’t learn the importance of his own feat until he encountered a farmer along the trail in Virginia.

"He said, 'Son, if you get to Maine, you’ll be the second one to hike the trail.’ I said, 'Whatcha mean?’ He said someone had hiked it three years before. I thought it had been hiked lots of times," Espy says.

He did know the world’s longest wilderness footpath, begun in New York in 1922 and completed by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1937, was not well traveled at the time. Sometimes he would go a week without seeing another human being.

He just kept walking. There were many miles — more than 2,000 through 14 states — to go. Espy got his first taste of the Appalachian Trail in 1945, when, as a Georgia Tech student, he and a friend spent a school break hiking and camping in the Great Smoky Mountains. "I knew then I wanted to do it."

He ordered guidebooks and maps from the Appalachian Trail Conference, organized in 1925 to help lay out the path, and shoes and equipment from L.L. Bean, the Maine outfitter founded in 1912. "I quietly planned my hike," he says.

By the spring of 1951, the 24-year-old Espy was ready. He quit a job he didn’t like but, ever the quintessential Southern gentleman, won’t name the company. Although he knew beginning the journey at the end of May could make for scorching Southern days and bone-chilling Northern nights later on, he waited for a Scouting friend to get out of school so they could hit the trail together.

They stepped off from Mount Oglethorpe with backpacks weighing nearly 50 pounds and a two-man tent they planned on toting in turns. On the second day, Espy’s friend feared his pack was too heavy and the trail too treacherous. He headed back to the young men’s hometown of Cordele, Ga. Espy would spend the next four months alone.

"Some people hike the trail because something bad happened. The first fella that hiked it was in the military service during World War II and his best friend got killed, so he was walking it to get over that. Some people walk it after they get a divorce or they get fired from a job," Espy says. "I was out to see God in nature."

Over a small gas burner, Espy cooked cornmeal with powdered milk and added sugar and raisins. He never killed an animal for food. And, according to a footnote in the collection of stories "Hiking the Appalachian Trail — Volume One" compiled by James R. Hare, "Gene Espy is probably the only hiker who ever walked the entire 2,000 miles of the Appalachian Trail without building a single campfire for any purpose."

Espy mailed supplies ahead to ease his load. Dehydrated potatoes were among the foodstuffs he became partial to and had waiting for him in post offices along the trail.

During his 123-day trip, he took only six days off, mostly due to inclement weather when he had found a dry place to hole up. "I tried to make it to a shelter or a good place to camp every night. I averaged 17 miles a day. There were days I’d go 30 miles," Espy says.

Espy seems to have been born with a strong sense of wanderlust.

"When I was in the 10th grade, they taught us Spanish for the first time. I talked one of my buddies into riding our bicycles from Cordele to Mexico. About a week later his daddy heard us talking about it and said, 'No, sir.’ "

Espy’s parents couldn’t talk their rambler out of a summer adventure. He pedaled off on his bike for a weeklong solo camping trip of 740 miles through Georgia, Alabama and Florida.

Perhaps the elder Espys had given up worrying by then. Their son already had made two trips down the Ocmulgee and Altamaha rivers to the Atlantic. On one, the teen-age Espy continued down the intercoastal waterway to Daytona Beach.

Espy wasn’t so adventurous, however, when it came to choosing a university. He simply followed his older brother, John Lee, ChE 44, to Tech. Hitchhiking was Espy’s favorite college pastime. "I’d hitchhike on weekends just for fun. One time I told some of my classmates, 'This weekend I’m gonna hitchhike from Atlanta to St. Louis and back.’ They said, 'You can’t do that,’ and I said, 'Yeah, I can.’"

He took a circuitous route thanks to the truckers and businessmen who picked him up, but he did it — 1,600 miles and 11 states. "I made it back for classes on Monday," he says, a grin stretching across his face. "I spent $2.35."

Espy finds delight in fictitious reports he has read about his Appalachian Trail journey.

When he arrived at the end of the trail in Maine, a forest ranger alerted the local media.

"The ranger told the reporter, 'Here’s this fella that hiked all the way up from Georgia.’ She said, 'You must have lost some weight.’ I said, 'Yes, ma’am, I lost some weight.’ She said, "How much did you lose?’ I said, 'I don’t know.’ She said, 'How much did you weigh when you started out?’ And I told her. The next thing I knew I picked up the newspaper and it said I’d lost 28 pounds," Espy says chuckling.

When asked whether he in fact killed 20 rattlesnakes as reported in one publication, he leans back in his chair and says, "Well, it was between 15 and 20."

He pulls himself up and takes down his walking stick from its place of honor on a wall in his home. He has had the stick, species uncertain, since he picked it up off the ground as a 12-year-old Boy Scout. "It was about this high when I started out," he says, holding his hand several inches above the top of the stick.

"I was knocking the weeds back and about stepped on a rattlesnake. He coiled up and I backed up slow to be sure I didn’t step on his brother," he says, an impish grin on his face. "I came down — whap — and hit him in the head pretty hard but didn’t quite kill him. It broke off my stick at an angle. Then I finished him off and took my knife and rounded off the sharp point." Sometimes Espy deliberately left the trail and reconnected with civilization.

When crossing Skyline Drive in Virginia, Espy came across an upscale resort. Despite his bearded face and trail-worn clothing, the lure of a hot meal was too great to resist. "I went to the back door because I looked out of place and asked about getting a carry-out meal," he says.

The manager, surmising a hobo was on the premises, slammed the door in Espy’s face.

"There was a big hush" when the undaunted hiker walked through the front door to dine with the tourists.

Espy had planned on shaving every day in the wilderness. When his friend abandoned the journey, however, he was forced to lighten his load and get rid of all nonessentials. His shaving kit was among the items mailed home to Cordele.

He encountered plenty of hospitable people too. Espy spent a handful of nights in farmers’ barns and, because of a fortuitous meeting with the police chief in Damascus, Va., slept in the town jail.

The police chief also owned the town diner, was so impressed with the young man’s goal of hiking the trail that he drove him around town in his squad car before offering him the jailhouse bed. The next morning Espy was treated to a breakfast of "six eggs, two orders of ham, toast, a pint of milk and two waffles."

A Boy Scout Espy met also did him a good deed. Espy visited with the troop camping along the trail in Massachusetts.

"Tupperware was just coming out at that time. One of those boys had this Tupperware container and I admired it," Espy says, holding up a pitcher with the burp and seal lid that made the company famous when it was launched in 1946.

"He insisted I take it with me. It was good for making up powdered milk."

A deer Espy fed in Maine resulted in a photograph sent out over the Associated Press wire. After finishing his hike, Espy began to rid himself of his rations. He emptied leftover sugar and raisins into his hand and held it out to a deer eyeing him from the edge of a stand of trees.

The deer, somewhat tame from hanging out around a campground, ate from Espy’s hand. The reporter and photographer from the local paper arrived on the scene shortly thereafter.

While the photographer was setting up his tripod, Espy was watching the deer. He again extended his hand and the deer again licked Espy’s hand but scampered back into the woods when it discovered there was no more sugar to be had.

The photographer preserved the moment the deer touched the hiker’s hand. It’s an image now painted on canvas and hanging on a wall of the Espy home.

Espy had no idea the folks back in Cordele would get wind of his arrival in Maine so soon. "My family was of average means. We didn’t use long-distance telephone. I sent them a 1 cent postcard. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, the news reporter and photographer sold the story and picture to the Associated Press."

A woman in Cordele heard the news on the radio and called the Espy family. Eugenia read of the completion of the journey in an Atlanta newspaper.

After his Appalachian Trail adventure, Espy settled down with Eugenia and raised two daughters, who now have a daughter each. But when he retired from Robins Air Force Base as an aerospace engineer in 1995, Espy hit the road again. "Eugenia drove me up to North Carolina. I hiked back to Springer Mountain, now the southern terminus of the trail. I was gone a week."

Espy, who is writing a book about his lifetime of adventures, still gives talks about his 1951 journey and "Hiking the Appalachian Trail" chronicles where he slept along the way as a guide for the thousands who have followed his path.

On this day Espy stands in the Amicalola Falls State Park visitors center. Some of his hiking equipment — the Army rucksack he bought at a surplus store after the war for $5, his Boy Scout canteen, a pair of his trusty L.L. Bean shoes — is encased behind glass.

A video plays continually, a young Espy in a photo taken on the trail in Pennsylvania, an older Espy documenting his journey for a film crew.

Hikers who come in to the visitors center wonder why this gentleman holding an old stick is being photographed and his every word written down. They are told it’s Gene Espy, the second person to thru-hike the entire trail. One by one they come over to shake his hand.

It’s a quiet day at Amicalola, which receives about a million visitors each year. Espy hikes to a viewing platform beside the waterfall for a photograph.

Back in ’51, nothing was here but trees, rocks and water. The tribute inside the visitors center seems fitting to the trailblazer gazing up at the waterfall he first set eyes on all those years ago.

©2005 Georgia Tech Alumni Association