Connor Mahoney walks more than 2,000 miles over four-plus months
By CRAIG D. SCHENCK/Sentinel staff
LINWOOD — A Linwood man recently completed a grueling physical journey, walking the entire Appalachian Trail.
Connor Mahoney, the son of Anchorage Tavern owner Don Mahoney, started his trip from Springer Mountain, Ga., about two hours from Atlanta, and walked more than 2,000 miles to Mount Katahdin, Maine.
“It was something I could start and finish and basically set myself up for accomplishment,” he said of his motivation to tackle the trail.
Mahoney, who turned 24 mid-journey, is a 2015 graduate of St. Augustine Prep who attended Linwood’s Seaview Elementary School and Belhaven Middle School. Following high school, he played rugby at Rutgers University, graduating in 2019.
Mahoney hiked about the first 350 miles of the trail alone, meeting a few people here and there until hooking up with what he called a core group of five around Irwin, Tenn.
“When we all found each other we just stayed together,” he said, noting two were from Cincinnati, Ohio, and one was from Kentucky.
“Everyone was about the same age,” he said, adding that the Ohioans were taking a gap year between high school and college.
Among the group was a 22-year-old woman from Princeton, N.J., and a 31-year-old woman from New Hampshire. He said it is uncommon for women to hike the trail alone.
“About 70 percent of through-hikers are men, not many women do it by themselves,” he said.
Most people start the journey in March but Mahoney said he began in February so he could get back home in time to work the busy season at the Anchorage.
Starting early posed problems with weather, it being cold in the mountains. Mahoney said there are shelters about every 10 miles but they are more like lean-tos than cabins. He said they have a privy and running water nearby.
“It was a pretty good spot to stay for the night and I didn’t have to break down my tent in the morning,” he said, noting he moved on to sleeping in a tent after it got a bit warmer.
He said sleeping in a tent is a better option because the shelters often are “overrun by weekend campers.”
While the trail is long, traversing 14 states, the changes in elevation actually make it like climbing Mt. Everest 16 times, he said.
“Every state is completely different. They say it’s a lot of pointless ups and downs,” Mahoney said. “It feels like the trail takes you over every hill. You go up and down all day.”
The worst of it, he said, is in New Hampshire and Maine, which he said are “straight up and straight down.”
Even the most fit hikers have to gain “trail legs,” completing 10 to 12 miles per day for a couple of weeks before graduating to 20 miles or more. He said around mile 470 in Virginia, “if I did less than 20 miles in a day it was a waste of the day.”
Mahoney said he completed 12 “marathon days,” walking at least 26 miles, and that his longest one-day trip was 44 miles “walking from sunup to sundown.”
“It wasn’t really tiring but the last few states, we’d been walking for a while” and started to get fatigued. Weight loss plays into that, he said, noting he lost 20 pounds along the way.
Mahoney said the trail is well-developed, with a road crossing every 10 to 12 miles, some passing right down Main Street in trail towns along the way.
He said in the South, a lot of the towns’ economy is based on hikers. It is common for through-hikers to carry four to five days of food and stop in a town to shower and resupply on the sixth day.
However, some sections are longer, with portions of deep wilderness. In those cases, he said, he had to hitchhike into town, resupply and hitch back to the trail.
Toward the end of the journey, in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, progress was cut in half, he said. His goal was still 20 miles but he said he spent 14 hours hiking just 19 miles one day.
He spent four and a half months “walking for four days, staying at a hostel or hotel to get a shower once a week and then walking some more.”
Mahoney said only about 30 percent of those who set out to complete the trip actually make it.
“I decided very early on that I was not going to quit,” he said, noting about 5,000 people attempt the hike every year.
According to statistics from 2019, only 500 of the 5,000 finished the trip, quitting for “mental or physical reasons.”
He said he felt that “if I get off the trail right now, I will never have an opportunity to finish so I have to finish it now.”
The trail can be a lonely place. Mahoney said he spent about seven days alone before meeting a couple of people and then about 10 more days until hooking up with his “trail family.”
He said he listened to podcasts and audio books to dull the boredom but that you “get used to listening to the silence and the nature around you.”
“It gets harder to walk for 12 hours a day without human interaction,” he said.
As an example, Mahoney said there are log books in a lot of the shelters in which people note their progress. He said he was following another hiker for a week and reading his log entries.
“His posts in the book kept getting sadder and sadder,” he said, noting he had a similar experience.
Mahoney said it’s nice to have “shared trauma,” the experience of meeting up with strangers and just talking about the happenings of the day.
“I was seeing people here and there but never locked into a group,” he said, adding that after meeting with his core group he didn’t have to walk another day alone.
He said he met some people in Vermont and talked to one guy for 10 minutes who said it was the most human interaction he had had on the whole trail.
“The solitude can really hurt your mental health,” he said.
Mahoney said he was inspired to take the trek while working at Camp Ockanickon in Medford for six years. He said he met about four people who have hiked the trail but no one who had done the whole thing.
Now that he’s back, he is working as manager, a bar back and other positions at the popular restaurant in Somers Point.
“Dad wants me to learn it all,” he said.
