©
By Rex Bowman
A hiker found dead on the Appalachian Trail in Botetourt County on Friday apparently had been hiking only a few days and was at the very beginning of what he anticipated would be a three-month adventure, authorities said Monday.
The hiker, Michael Wade Smith, 60, of Big Pine Key, Fla., appeared to have begun his northbound trek in Daleville last week, judging from entries in the journal he kept, said Botetourt sheriff's Maj. Delbert Dudding.
The hike ended about 36 miles later at the Cornelius Creek shelter just off the Blue Ridge Parkway, where the man's body was found by another hiker about noon Friday. The dead man's journal described his intention to hike northward on the rugged trail until September.
He never made it out of Botetourt. The hiker who said she discovered his body wrote about it in an online account.
"The flies were really loud," hiker Amy Forinash posted on trailjournals.com. "I became uneasy and looked at the guy again. His posture was totally normal. Nothing looked out of place but the flies. And his hand was kind of dark."
Foul play is not suspected, but the body was taken to the state medical examiner's office in Roanoke to determine the cause of death.
Meanwhile, a Colorado woman hiking the Appalachian Trail posted a note on a Web site for trail enthusiasts suggesting she might have been the last one to see the man alive. Christy Cleaver of Fort Collins said she and a fellow hiker saw the man at the Cornelius Creek shelter during lunch Friday.
It "was his second day on trail," she wrote in the online forum at whiteblaze.net. "He sounded like he may have struggled up the incline that day but seemed fine when we spoke to him. He was talkative and in good spirits, happy to be on trail. Must have been natural causes. Our condolences to his loved ones."
Cleaver described him as a section hiker -- someone who doesn't hike the entire 2,179-mile trail in a single year, but hikes it in sections over a series of years.
Dudding described the 60-year-old as "pretty heavy" and said the journal contained references to "some shoulder pains and chest pains."
Shoulder pain is not uncommon among hikers just setting out on the trail as they get used to their backpacks. Monday, northbound hikers said word of the death has spread up and down the trail.
Several hikers said it's possible the Florida man went by the trail nickname "Roadrunner." A hiker using that name signed the register at the Fullhardt Knob shelter just east of Daleville at 9:35 a.m. Thursday, noting that he was "feeling good" after hiking five miles from the Howard Johnson lobby in Daleville. After his name he scribbled "Lakeland, Fl." At 4:20 p.m. Thursday, he signed in at the Bobletts Gap shelter, noting that he had already hiked 18.5 miles and hoped to hike another 6.5 miles that day.
The Bobletts Gap shelter is about 17 miles southwest of the Cornelius Creek shelter, which is located two-tenths of a mile from the Blue Ridge Parkway, near the Peaks of Otter.
The Florida hiker's death is the second on the Appalachian Trail in less than a month. On May 8, a 26-year-old hiker from Michigan was found dead at the Icewater Spring shelter on the trail in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
Twitter
Google
Yahoo
hikiing should be banned
Becuase it's hazardous to your health. Why not? That's the self-righteous call on other things that used to be considered one's own individual's responsibility to participate in something dangerous. Better than dying alone in a recliner all alone vice doing something he loved and was excited about undertaking...It's the American way. Or at least used to be.
Kind of freaky about that
Kind of freaky about that death at the Icewater Spring shelter. My wife and I were vacationing in the Great Smoky Mountains around that time, and hiked that part of the Appalachian Trial to see the view from a landmark in that area called The Jumpoff. We took the short hike from the Jumpoff to Icewater Spring shelter to take a rest before heading back to our car at Newfound Gap, plus we were curious to see what an AT shelter looked like. We rested there long enough to eat a quick lunch and then left. It was a nice enough place, little did we know that someone died there only 7 days before we went there.
Icewater Springs Shelter
...was also the site of a large search operation for a missing boy scout back in the late 70's. The search involved hundreds of personnel, and lasted for several days. They found the boy dead from hypothermia in a ravine about a half-mile to the northwest of the shelter.