7 make pilgrimage on Appalachian Trail

The hike was eight days and 61 miles.

It started on the Appalachian Trail in the middle-of-nowhere Maine and was designed around the idea that studying pilgrimages requires taking one.

At the center of the expedition was University of Virginia religious studies assistant professor Heather Warren, who spent the spring semester teaching Pilgrimage and the Appalachian Trail.

Warren was able to teach the course with a $2,000 grant from the university’s Mead Foundation endowment that encourages thinking outside the traditional classroom experience, Warren said.

That’s where the wilderness hiked in.

Prepping for the trail took the six students Warren picked for the class — out of roughly 30 applicants — in different directions. (All six were women, though an all-women group was not the initial design.)

One of the class’ questions was, “How much of a pilgrimage is an inner journey and how much of it is physical?” Warren said.

So they studied both.

In addition to the mass of readings — from Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” to Thoreau’s “The Maine Woods” — trail maintenance, hikes and Habitat for Humanity volunteering were part of the grade.

But the group didn’t study getting rained on for five of the seven nights it camped along the trail.

Stephanie Miller said she came to the end of the trip — having summited the Appalachian Trail’s north star, Mount Katahdin, at 5,267 feet — with her ankle bones having disappeared beneath swelling.

Several days into the hike the group was moving up the trails about 10 miles a day.

“The hardest days, the thing that would hold me back was not the pain in my knees, it was just not having the will to keep walking through the mud and the rocks. … You can do it, you just really have to want to,” said Miller, a rising fourth-year student.

Nature took a toll on all of them by the end, they said.

For one, they and their clothes reeked, they said.

But in the end maybe they came away smarter, having learned that crossing a rushing stream takes planning (rising Sarah Yates) and that when hiking with open-toed shoes, it’s best to be mindful of the hiking poles in your hands so you don’t stab your feet (rising third-year Paige Backenstose.)

Or, maybe, part of the trip was all about having met the guy who could only remember people’s “trail names” (rising fourth-year Jean Adler aka Squash).

Or, maybe, “it was just really cool to be living outside and experiencing nature and having to live with nature and all that it does,” said Lindsay File, a fourth-year who made the hike. “How it doesn’t really care about us little humans.”