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“Hey! You can’t see your house from here!” Photo: Stephanie Hall
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Local ladies find their mountain legs on the Appalachian Trail Stephanie Hall couldn’t find her friend. Huddled in the dense Shenandoah National Forest, she crouched low to the ground as the torrential rains and winds of Hurricane Delta tore through the mountains. It grew darker, the temperature dropped, and she knew the chances of hypothermia would increase if she didn’t take shelter. After pitching her tent as much out of the wind as she could, she climbed inside and attempted to rest.
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“Of course, everything was calm again in the morning,” Hall laughs. “I started looking for her, and it turned out she’d pitched her own tent less than a mile away.” That’s just one of the countless adventures the 27-year-old KDH resident encountered while completing the Appalachian Trail last fall. She left for her trek on August 5. Starting
out from its northernmost point in Katahdin, Maine, she made her way south with nothing but a backpack. She finished up on Springer Mountain, Georgia, on November 18 — 2,190 miles later. The trail typically takes about five to seven months to complete from start to finish. Hall, however, did it all in 105 days — about three-and-a-half months. While friends and family met her along the way to hike for a few days at a clip, for the most part, she was on her own. That allowed for a rapid pace. She averaged 21plus miles per day. Some days were shorter. (Hurricanes made getting anything over ten miles a challenge.) And others were longer. (One “marathon week,” she walked at least 26 miles every day.)
