Joe Liles' Appalachian Trail Hike

Just added a fun map of Joe’s flight home (data from FlightAware.com), courtesy of Dan & Elizabeth Page (NCSSM ‘82), who flew up to fetch Joe back to North Carolina. Joe has already been spotted hobbling the halls of NCSSM on sore legs, seeing old friends. His final Trail Report will be up soon.

The weather is partly cloudy with barely any chance of rain up on Mt. Katahdin in Baxter State Park today. Stay tuned for news of Joe completing his epic 2,178-ish mile journey up the Appalachian Trail.

You know what they need up there…a Katahdin-Cam that updates to the internet.

A quick entry here to note that Joe should summit Katahdin tomorrow!

Elizabeth (NCSSM ‘82) and Dan Page are preparing today in Cary to fly their plane up to Millinocket, Maine, and wait for Joe to appear out of the wilderness and welcome him back to civilization. Joe has asked to fly over some particular points of the Trail on the way home, so we can expect to see some nifty aerial images in a week or so.

Meanwhile, in Durham, Joe’s next-door neighbors the Scovilles have created a Welcome Back poster and placed it on his front door. They’re asking anyone in the area to come by in the next day or so and sign it.

Instructions: Go up to his front door, and open the storm door. You’ll see the poster on the inside of the door. You can latch the door open while you’re there to make it easier to work. Choose a marker from the box on the stoop and write a message, a drawing, or your name on the poster. Return the marker to the box. (His housesitter is aware that people will be doing this, and has agreed to leave the front porch light on so you can come by even when it’s dark.) Before Joe returns, the poster will be turned around so it will be visible through the door.

Contact me if you need the address.

A couple of quick notes about the end of Joe’s hike. He predicts he will finish on or around September 15th. 1982 NCSSM alum Elizabeth (Grainger) Page and her husband Dan own a 4-seater plane and are flying up to fetch him back to NC. What a wonderful act of generosity, though I also think it will be a tremendous amount of fun and wish I could stow away onboard. So Joe should be back in North Carolina in 2 weeks. Soon after I’m sure he’ll want to start making plans to share his trip with everyone in person in some fashion or another, and if I know Joe, he’ll want to probably make a slide show of his journey from his pictures. I know NCSSM has tentative plans to schedule something to celebrate his trip in the spring of 2010.

After the hike is over, I will keep this blog up and running for the purpose of posting news about events and appearances both on the NCSSM campus and around the state so many of us might finally congratulate him face to face.

- Colin

At the end of Joe’s last post he commented that he figured he was going 14-20 miles a day. That got me to thinking and since I have all the data so far, I decided to calculate a table of his miles per day for each Trail Report leg of his hike. Note that these numbers include ALL his zero days, so his low numbers usually mean many of those interim days he wasn’t hiking at all.

Anyway, I propose to those of you keeping up with this Trail blog, that we have a pool to guess what DAY Joe will finish and summit Mt. Katahdin.

Use the data I provided above as a helper, or just close your eyes and point to a date on the calendar. Only 1 rule: leave all your guesses in the comments of this blog post. If more than one person picks the winning day, I’ll have a random draw of the names that chose it.

THE PRIZE: I was thinking about what could be a prize and it was immediately pretty obvious… how about Joe’s Appalachian Trail Reports printed and bound as a booklet – and I’ll see about getting Joe to autograph it as well before sending it on to the winner.

(I’ll rule myself out of the contest, but I’d guess September 12)