FEATURES: The long and winding (mountainous) road

Upper Freehold resident completes journey along the Appalachian Trail.

By: Scott Morgan
   UPPER FREEHOLD — The most common reason people give for climbing a mountain is "because it’s there." So what reason could anyone give for scaling an entire mountain chain?
   Bob Pyhel has no idea. But he did it anyway.
   "I asked myself that question every day for five months," he said.
   Last March, Mr. Pyhel, 53, a self-employed carpenter and family man who lives on Route 526, stared at the foot of Springer Mountain, Ga., the southern terminus of the 2,160-mile-long Appalachian Trail. Five months later — and 30 pounds lighter — Mr. Pyhel summited Mount Katahdin, Maine, ending a journey he now looks forward to never doing again.
   But it is something he never will regret having done.
   Mr. Pyhel refers to his trip as "the summer of my insanity," a time in which ibuprofen became a staple food and the loss of sensation in his feet simply was a welcome relief from the agony of the walk; a time of beauty and longing in which the desire to quit nagged him with every step, as the presence of "trail angels" and show tunes kept him from caving in.
   "Trail angels," Mr. Pyhel said, are people who understand firsthand the rigors of the Appalachian Trail. Those who have hiked it before — in whole or in part — often leave food and drinks at various points along the trail for those still trudging onward. Food, he said, was always a welcome sight.
   Of course, he said, the food always looked better in the small trail-town restaurants he encountered whenever he decided to spend a night off the trail. Especially hiker-friendly were the all-you-can-eat buffets filled with hamburgers and ice cream and "anything with fat." Just the type of food hikers crave after weeks and months of dehydrated trail mix, he said.
   "You clean those right out," he said of the buffet restaurants. "They see hikers coming."
   As for those show tunes, Mr. Pyhel said singing anything and everything he could recall kept his mind occupied as the thrill of a great adventure blurred into the reality of the task, and ultimately into an exercise in sheer will.
   "Two months in, it becomes a mental game. I wouldn’t let the trail beat me," he said.
   Mr. Pyhel said he wanted to quit every day he was on the trail. He wanted to return home to hot showers and home-cooked dinners. And he wanted to return to his family.
   But still, he managed to carry on, through three blizzards in the south (one which obscured his view of the Great Smokey Mountains in North Carolina), three pairs of shoes and countless nights in a tent, alone.
   Occasionally, he would hike a portion of the trail with someone he met along the way, and at one point, his daughter met him in Pennsylvania to accompany him for a little while. But for most of the trip, it was Mr. Pyhel versus the mountain. And then the next one. And the next, and the next, and the next.
   Even for a seasoned hiker — Mr. Pyhel said he has been hiking portions of the Appalachian Trail since the 1970s — the journey proved enormously taxing. He said he was not surprised by the amount of work it would take to traverse the entire range, but said it certainly hurt getting there.
   He traces his desire to conquer the trail from his many trips to smaller areas of it through the years. Over time, the idea of hiking the entire trail became something he felt he had to get out of his system.
   Mission accomplished.
   And now that the whole arduous trek can meld into a great summer war story, Mr. Pyhel said he has learned a few things about himself. First, he will never hike the entire trail again, though he did say he will continue to hike parts of it. Second, if he were to ever do it again (and he won’t!), he would take a Walkman. Third, and most important, he said he learned to appreciate home.
   The next journey, Mr. Pyhel said, is to get reacquainted with his family.