By Jill Nagy
April Weygand was at loose ends. Shortly after finishing college, she was back home living with her parents, working part-time jobs and generally miserable.
“I needed something different to do,” she recalled.
So, on little more than a whim, she decided to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail, approximately 2,100 miles of some of the country’s most difficult hiking, from Georgia to Maine.
At the time, she had hiked a bit as a Girl Scout and camped out one night in the Catskills.
“I was not considered a hiker by any stretch of the imagination but I loved the outdoors,” she said.
She read everything she could find about the trail, including a two-volume, 2,000-page book about the first 50 people who thru-hiked the trail soon after it opened in the 1940s. She made a pilgrimage to a large outdoor store in New Jersey and spent about $1,500 on gear for the expedition. And, she was ready to go.
It took two tries, but she did complete the hike and, 20 years later, she wrote a book about it. The book also required two attempts. The first version was over 1,000 pages, unwieldy to put it mildly. After many months of workshopping and editing help, she produced a lively, sometimes funny, 230-page paperback called Trail Gimp. The book is available, in paperback or as an e-book, at Northshire Books in Saratoga Springs and Manchester, Vt., And Weygand is ready to start marketing it further afield.
Trail Gimp is full of mud and blisters, magnificent sunsets, deep friendships, and the occasional “trail magic”—events like someone arriving at a campsite with chili dogs and cold drinks for everyone.
When Weygand set out, her boots were too small, her pack was too heavy, and she was badly out of shape. She soon developed the injuries that earned her the handle Trail Gimp. After 400 painful miles, she gratefully accepted a ride home and spent the summer healing.
Two years later, in the spring of 1998, Trail Gimp was back in Georgia. That time, she completed the hike, arriving at Mt. Kitahdin, Maine, on October 10, 1998, a foggy and miserable day. Accompanied by the scout leader who had introduced her to hiking, “I just powered up that mountain,” she reports, and doesn’t remember finding in at all difficult. (It has a reputation as a very difficult, somewhat scary, climb.) At the top, “we couldn’t see a thing.” “I wish we could see the valley” someone, maybe her, said. A mighty wind came up and cleared away the clouds for “about 10 seconds” and the celebration was over.
Shortly afterward, she met, and later married, Brian Weygand. They have two children, Madison and Tyler, and she owns a commercial cleaning company called April Fresh Cleaning. One day, when the boys were small, the family went to see the movie based upon Bill Bryson’s Appalachian Trail book, ‘“A Walk in the Woods.” One of the boys jumped up and informed the audience, “My mom did that!”
Weygand feels that she learned valuable lessons on that hike. She learned perseverance and toughness and that “wanting to do something and actually doing it are not the same thing.” She said that she sometimes daydreams of hiking the Pacific Coast Trail or making another long trek but really does not hike anymore. But, she finds that the lessons learned on that trail have served her well as she raised her family and grew her business.
April Weygand can be reached at her shop by telephone, 518 258-7380, or online at AprilFresh.org.