Today on Outside/In, we’re sharing an episode from our friends and partners at Common Land.

Common Land explores the creation stories behind protected land. Each season takes a deep dive into the history, science and politics behind the creation of one particular patch of protected, common land.

Season two of Common Land, produced in partnership with New Hampshire Public Radio, follows documentarian Matt Podolsky as he attempts to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail with his 65-year-old mom, Candy. Matt and his mom face extreme weather, illness, and injury as they trek 2,200 miles from Georgia to Maine. Along the way, Matt shares stories of remarkable people, surprising history, and the modern challenges facing the Appalachian Trail — all as the iconic footpath marks its 100th anniversary.

You can listen to episode two of the new season right now, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you prefer to listen.

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CREDITS

Outside/In Host: Nate Hegyi

This episode of Common Land was reported, produced, and mixed by Matthew Podolsky, with editorial help from New Hampshire Public Radio.

The staff of Outside/In also includes Justine Paradis, Marina Henke, Felix Poon, and Jessica Hunt.

Executive producer: Taylor Quimby

Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio

Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio

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Audio Transcript

Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.

Nate Hegyi: Hey, you're listening outside in a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I'm Nate Hegyi. I'll be the first to tell you I have not hiked the Appalachian Trail, but I have literally crossed its path while exploring New Hampshire this past year on trails where masses of tourists out for the day are sometimes unknowingly overlapping with one of the world's most iconic footpaths. So today we are sharing a new project, a collaboration between NPR and Common Land. It's a podcast that explores the creation stories of America's protected spaces. In this season, it is all about the atom. We helped shape this 12 part series that takes listeners all the way from Georgia to Maine, with stops along the way to learn the history. Meet the people and dig into the controversies of the Appalachian Trail. We're going to play the very first episode, and if you dig it, the next episode is available right now on the Common Lands feed. All right. Enjoy. Happy 4th of July and happy hiking.

Matt Podolsky: I think I'm just gonna feel like I'm forgetting something until we're, like, a couple days in.

Candy Podolsky: I think you're right.

Matt Podolsky: I'm Matt Podolski. Back in the spring of 2022. I set out with my mom, Candy, to hike the entire length of the Appalachian Trail.

Candy Podolsky: That feels pretty good. Yeah. How's yours feel? It feels fine.

Matt Podolsky: I guess we're in trouble if it doesn't feel good. And we haven't even hiked in a single mile.

Candy Podolsky: That wouldn't be good.

Matt Podolsky: My mom and I had just been dropped off at Amicalola Falls State Park in Georgia. This is where many Appalachian Trail through hikers begin their journey. We were nervous walking through the parking lot searching for the registration center.

Matt Podolsky: AT hiker registration. That way I know. Huh? Well let's... I guess we can ask.

Candy Podolsky: This is where we register?

Attendant: Shelter two on the opposite side of the playground.

Candy Podolsky: Okay.

Matt Podolsky: All right.

Attendant: Thank you.

Candy Podolsky: Okay.

Matt Podolsky: The A.T., as people call it, is managed by the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. They maintain a through hiker registry, and all through hikers are strongly encouraged to sign in before starting the hike. It's a little bureaucratic, but also a literal rite of passage.

Candy Podolsky: All right, here we go. Yeah.

Attendant: 27.

Matt Podolsky: 27.6. That's pretty good. Yeah.

Matt Podolsky: It's also a tradition to weigh one's pack as a part of the registration process. A lightweight pack is crucial for such a long hike, and my mom and I had carefully selected each item we brought with us.

Candy Podolsky: Yours is much heavier. Okay, let's try it. It's about 27.

Matt Podolsky: Almost 28.

Candy Podolsky: All right.

Matt Podolsky: I'll call it 28. Although many Appalachian Trail through hikers begin their journey from this exact spot, the trail itself begins at the summit of Springer Mountain. My mom and I snapped a quick photo under the famous stone archway that marks the start of the approach trail. The trail that takes you to the beginning of the trail. And we began our long walk. Well we spent all day and made it to the beginning of the trail. It's nice up here. It's beautiful.

Matt Podolsky: Appalachian National Scenic Trail, Springer mountain, elevation 3782. Southern terminus. All right.

Candy Podolsky: Well that's awesome.

Matt Podolsky: Every spring, several thousand people travel to northern Georgia to begin a long distance trek that occupies a unique space in American culture. For some, walking nearly 2200 miles from Georgia to Maine is a test of one's physical endurance. For others, it's an escape from the monotony of a desk job.

Hiker: It seems that I've been looking for some big, epic adventure pretty much my whole life.

Matt Podolsky: Many hikers treat their journey as a way to heal from the grief of a loss, or as a treatment for depression.

Hiker B: During the 80s. To get rid of the stress, I had a heart attack in October. I had a stent put in.

Matt Podolsky: The trail represents something different for each person who walks it. And more than 3 million people set foot on this path each year. For me, it represented blissful calm. You're constantly surrounded by beauty, and at other times it represented frustration, fear, discomfort and pain.

Hiker C: I don't ever remember experiencing slippery lichen like that. It was very stressful.

Matt Podolsky: But this show is about more than the through hiker experience. It's about the connections between the trail and the people who walk along its path.

Guest: I wanted to kind of experience the pain and suffering that my people went through during the removal.

Matt Podolsky: It's about the ecosystems that encompass the length of this ancient mountain chain, and how the trail has become their protector. I would call the Appalachian Trail corridor in general, a hot spot. You're going to see multiple timber rattlesnakes, but above all else, this is a show about our complex human relationship with protected landscapes. This is common land. For me and my mom, this journey really started way back in 2013. Back then, we did our first big hike together and end to end hike of Vermont's Long Trail.

Matt Podolsky: So we made it. It's the start of the trail. What do you think? Are you ready? Ready to hike 273 miles to Canada?

Candy Podolsky: I have no idea. I'm going to take it one day at a time.

Matt Podolsky: It took us about a month to do it, but we needed that time to process something we were both going through. When we set out on that first hike. It had been just months since we lost my dad to cancer.

Matt Podolsky: Do you remember me first proposing the idea of doing a long distance hike back when dad was sick?

Candy Podolsky: I do, I do, I remember it quite vividly. Um, and I thought it was a fabulous idea. I had actually been thinking. Similar thoughts.

Matt Podolsky: I mean, what what is it about an experience like this that helps overcome grief?

Candy Podolsky: I think that when you're out in the woods, you're with yourself. Even if you're hiking with somebody else, you spend a lot of time alone. And I found after your father died that I was constantly busy. I was looking for things to distract my mind from dealing with the difficulty of losing him. You couldn't do that on the trail. You had to deal with it. You had to think about it and to mourn. And then to start thinking about how to heal..

Matt Podolsky: What's what's our next hike going to be, Mom?

Candy Podolsky: I don't know. I don't know, maybe we have to do the whole Appalachian Trail.

Matt Podolsky: Nine years later as we stood on the summit of Springer Mountain, that conversation felt like a distant memory. We were overwhelmed by the enormity of what lay ahead of us, but were also giddy with excitement at the prospect of spending six months living in the woods.

Matt Podolsky: Well, how do you feel? We made it.

Candy Podolsky: I feel great.

Matt Podolsky: Yeah. Another plaque. A foot path for those who seek fellowship with the wilderness.

Candy Podolsky: Oh, I see a white blaze.

Matt Podolsky: Oh, yeah. First white blaze. Yeah.

Candy Podolsky: Wait, wait. I have to get a picture of that.

Matt Podolsky: Yeah.

Matt Podolsky: The next six months of my life would be guided by white blazes. These small, white rectangular blazes painted on trees marked the path of the Appalachian Trail. Although there are other hiking trails that are longer, the eight is the longest hiking only footpath in the world, and the only to be regularly marked with these iconic white blazes. After a day or two of walking, my mom and I quickly settled into a routine. Wake up at sunrise. Pack up. Eat a bar to start walking. Walking became my job and my sole responsibility. All I had to worry about was the distance that I covered each day. I thought a lot about my wife and son back home in Idaho. I thought about my dad imagining what he might think of our 2200 mile long trek. But I also thought a lot about the land that I was passing through. I've spent the past 15 years producing documentaries about the connections between humans and nature, and to me, the trail represented a laboratory for examining our relationship with the natural world. I knew from my research that the southernmost 635 miles of the trail fall within the former boundaries of the Cherokee Nation. Long before the word through hiker ever existed. People have been following footpaths all throughout these mountains.

Laura Blythe: When we were placed here, the creator gave us our customs and our traditions.

Matt Podolsky: That was the voice of Laura Blythe, the director of the Cherokee Historical Association and an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

Laura Blythe: So when we talk about it, we are the principal people on on the young we are and we come from this earth. We were placed here. This is where we have called home since the beginning of time. So prior to contact, before Europeans came over, the Cherokee people were one of the largest tribes in the southeast. We actually had territory in eight different states. Today, there needed to be a big decision made and we had to call multiple towns together. They would send runners. You know, the Deer clan were known as like the long distance runners. And sometimes they could. They would fast and they would run up to 100 miles a day. All of the Cherokee Nation understood what was going on in surrounding areas.

Lamar Marshall: I would say that that all of the most all of the what is now the Appalachian Trail were used by native people as early on.

Matt Podolsky: That's Lamar Marshall, a historian and land surveyor who has mapped the historic Cherokee footpaths that run throughout southern Appalachia.

Lamar Marshall: There were trails that collateral trails crossed the Appalachian Mountains at all the gaps and the passes, Saddles or whatever you want to call them. And sometimes the native people would go up a trail to a gap, jump on what would eventually become the Appalachian Trail, and then follow that ridge to the next gap and drop off, because that was feasible.

Laura Blythe: So once Europeans began to arrive, many changes began taking place. Uh, trade and treaties started. Alliances with the French and British began. We had, you know, multiple smallpox epidemics. Treaties were made which resulted in land loss. Wars resulted in towns being annihilated, and our Cherokee people and territory began to dwindle down over time.

Lamar Marshall: When the the white people moved into this area, they immediately took over the best Cherokee trails, which were in the valleys, and made the and widen those trails into wagon roads. Cherokees still knew the backcountry. They knew these shortcuts across the gaps, and they followed these ridges from Cherokee, North Carolina boundary down to where their friends lived in other parts, and they could stay out of the out of the sight of the white people by following these ridges. And that could have happened, you know, in sections of the Appalachian Trail also.

Matt Podolsky: The lead up to the Revolutionary War was a chaotic period in history. The French and Indian War had just ended, and in its aftermath, the Cherokee Nation scored a big win against encroaching colonists and land prospectors.

Lamar Marshall: The British they created a proclamation boundary about 1763, and they said that no white settlement could take place over the crest of the Appalachian Mountains.

Matt Podolsky: This proclamation boundary marked a crucial historical turning point. It fueled hope for many Native American communities, but it also stirred anger amongst many white settlers who were eager to push west across the continent. It's one of the factors that historians cite as an underlying cause of the American Revolution.

Matt Podolsky: Did you know about this?

Candy Podolsky: No.

Matt Podolsky: My mom and I visited the Museum of the Cherokee People in Cherokee, North Carolina, which has an exhibit on the proclamation boundary of 1763.

Video Narration: When King George issued his proclamation forbidding whites to settle in the Appalachians in all parts West we thought we would be safe. But then came the American Revolution.

Candy Podolsky: I had no idea.

Matt Podolsky: It's one of those things that you don't learn in history classes in the us, like on purpose, you know? Yeah, like they don't teach that. And there's reason why they don't teach that.

Matt Podolsky: Already the trail was shifting our perspective and our journey had only just begun. We'll be back with more about the Appalachian Trail and Cherokee history after a short break. I'm Matt Podolsky. This is Common Land, a series about the Appalachian Trail.

Laura Blythe: The Revolutionary War was probably one of the major turning points. We were allied with the British during the American Revolution.

Matt Podolsky: That's Laura Blythe, director of the Cherokee Historical Association and an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

Laura Blythe: The British told us they wouldn't take any more land from us. You know, if we had helped them win the war, then we would not have to give up any more land. Unfortunately, that did not happen.

Matt Podolsky: The Cherokees were in a difficult position politically when the American Revolution came to an end. But remarkably, the Cherokee Nation continued to reinvent itself.

Laura Blythe: In 1808, the first Cherokee Constitution was created. In 1820, Sequoyah created the Cherokee syllabary, and within a year 90% of Cherokee people were literate. Reading and writing in our own language.

Matt Podolsky: By the 1820s, it was clear that a Cherokee cultural renaissance was underway within just a few decades. The Cherokees had established a new government with their capital at New Echota in present day Georgia. New Echota was the home of the Cherokee Supreme Court, as well as the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper, which was printed in both Cherokee and English.

Lamar Sneed: Almost every major civilized capital in the world. Subscribe to the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper. Just how unique it was.

Matt Podolsky: That's Lamar Sneed, the tribal chairman of the Georgia tribe of Eastern Cherokee.

Lamar Sneed: I mean, they had trading systems. They they actually had their own lawyers.

Laura Blythe: And then in 1828, gold was discovered in Georgia. The greed for gold is one of the biggest things that started the forced removal and the trail of Tears.

Matt Podolsky: Soon after, gold was discovered in what is today northern Georgia. Andrew Jackson was elected president. Jackson's central campaign issue was Indian removal. He relentlessly campaigned in support of the forced removal of Native American people from the South.

Laura Blythe: In 1830, Andrew Jackson signed the Removal Act. And this was for multiple tribes in the area because they wanted to get rid of all the natives, get them off the land so that the white settlers could have it and could get the gold from it, and then have more area for themselves and their families to grow.

Matt Podolsky: The Indian Removal Act gave the president authority to grant land west of the Mississippi in exchange for tribal homelands, but according to the act, these land exchanges were supposed to be mutual based on treaties.

Laura Blythe: In 1835, a group of men at New Echota signed the Treaty of New Echota, and this treaty gave up what land we had left. It was signed without approval from the majority of the Cherokee people.

Matt Podolsky: The Treaty of New Echota was not signed or endorsed by the Cherokee government. Most Cherokee citizens were opposed. Cherokee Principal Chief John Ross mounted a campaign in opposition, but the treaty was passed along to the US Senate for a vote. Regardless.

Lamar Sneed: All treaties have to be approved by the Senate. It passed the Senate by one vote.

Laura Blythe: In 1838. That was the year that the forced removal started taking place. Us troops were sent down and they started rounding people up out of their houses, started putting them into stockades with nothing more than what clothes they had on their backs.

Lamar Sneed: They built 27 removable forts, and most people just hear about the Trail of Tears. No, it don't just start like that. You've got to round up people first.

Laura Blythe: Over. Over the course of that year. Out of 16,000 members, there were anywhere between 4 to 8000 people. Who. Who who died.

Matt Podolsky: Although a lot of the interviews you'll hear on the show were conducted after my hike. I had learned a lot about this history before I ever took a step on the Appalachian Trail, and I continued to conduct research. While on the trail, I read books in my tent at night, listen to podcasts while I walked, and reached out to potential interviewees via email. Still, I struggled to visualize this history on the landscape. I was hiking through the mountains between New Echota, the former Cherokee capital, and Dahlonega, the epicenter of the Georgia Gold Rush and also the site of one of the most infamous stockades. I know Cherokees there were detained under horrendous conditions and died in great numbers. Much of the Appalachian Trail is designed to be a quote unquote, wilderness experience, but the trail also provides opportunities to learn about history. There are lots of historical markers focused on early American history and the Civil War. Cherokee history doesn't get the same treatment. But just as I was struggling to imagine what it might look like to see a company of the U.S. military walking through these woods, I crested a ridge and spotted two figures holding rifles in the woods ahead of me. At first I thought they were hunters, but this wasn't hunting season and I soon noticed the military style camo. There was a full military company consisting of maybe 25 men in the woods alongside the trail. As my mom and I walked past, these men avoided our gaze, pretending we weren't there at all as we walked right through their line of fire. Later that evening, after we had set up camp at a nearby shelter. It turns out the US Army Ranger Program conducts training exercises throughout this area. A few of us hikers walked out towards a viewpoint where we could see the flashes of light from the blanks being fired over the next ridge.

Andy: They're just in some respects, honestly, playacting because you treat it like it's real. You set up your perimeter, make sure everybody has interlocking fields of fire, but you're also looking around like, oh, that's the 80. So then it becomes like, okay, well, we just need to look like we're doing the right thing.

Matt Podolsky: That's fellow through hiker

Andy: Andrew Paul Bacon.

Matt Podolsky: But we'll call him Andy. A significant percentage of at through hikers are former military. But Andy wasn't just a military veteran. He had gone through Army Ranger training in these same mountains just a few years earlier.

Andy: It's the hardest training I did in the Army, and it's the one that taught me the most and also felt the most in line with what I thought I was getting into.

Matt Podolsky: There was a lot of conversation in camp that night about the presence of the Army Ranger School, with hikers debating the appropriateness of conducting military training alongside the Appalachian Trail. Andy clearly had a unique perspective, and the next morning I asked him for an interview. We chatted while walking along the ridgeline of Sassafras Mountain in Georgia.

Andy: Actually, I'm glad that we had that experience. Like as a group, you know, like everybody or a fair number of us saw these people. Because one of the things I'm trying to work on is being more empathetic, you know, and really trying to better understand things from other people's viewpoints. So it was really interesting just to hear other people's unfiltered thoughts and concerns to what I took to be a very especially because I had been on the opposite side of that to be a very, a fairly, you know, quotidian, I guess, is a big word to use there event.

Matt Podolsky: I do have a lot of experience around guns, and I hunt, and I grew up being taught about gun safety. It's just been hammered into my brain since I was a kid, that you don't point a gun at another human being. It doesn't matter if it's loaded or not loaded or blanks or not blanks. For me, it would have been a completely different experience if those guns weren't aimed directly at the trail where people were passing by.

Andy: Well, when we do force on force stuff. You know, you're shooting at people with these blanks. And I guess for me, you just get so used to that. It's like, okay, as long as I'm not within like three feet or whatever of this thing, then I'm okay. You're just doing what's been drilled into you, which is. All right, face out. Pull security. You're not even thinking about. Oh, maybe they're spooked by this. And I think when I was going through it, I just assumed everybody knew about it. You know? I knew that, like, hey, this is a possibility that you might see it. So I didn't think, especially when I was in it, I didn't think too deeply about it.

Matt Podolsky: You said you occasionally would walk along the Appalachian Trail.

Andy: We didn't encounter that many people. Honestly, 5 to 10 at most. It's pulling security while we were tearing down this tent. It's nice. Old lady comes by and I wasn't about to be like, super off putting because she looked like my grandma. So I was like, hi, how are you today, ma'am? Old lady didn't like that.

Matt Podolsky: So you got in trouble for saying hello to some nice old lady.

Andy: A little bit. Well, I thought I was building civil military relations, you know, winning hearts and minds.

Matt Podolsky: Day 12, April 8th. It's a bit cold, but beautiful when we wake up someone checks the weather forecast on their phone as we're getting ready. It says that there's a 50% chance of rain. We're skeptical. There's not a cloud in the sky when we start hiking.

Matt Podolsky: When that was recorded, I lay wrapped up in my warm sleeping bag as snow pelted the thin sides of my tent. We had entered the mountains of North Carolina earlier that day and were greeted by a snowstorm.

Matt Podolsky: All right, well, we made it to the North Carolina Georgia border and it started to snow.

Matt Podolsky: What began as a light scattering of snowflakes soon transformed into a heavy snowfall. Thick white flakes fell from the sky. We stopped to put on our rain jackets, now wearing every article of clothing that we had brought with us. Look at these giant snowflakes. Hiking in the snow.

Candy Podolsky: You gotta do it.

Matt Podolsky: By the time we reached Standing Indian shelter where we planned to spend the night, there were several inches of snow on the ground and temperatures had dropped well below freezing. With frozen fingers and shivering bodies, we set up our tents. Then we stood around the campfire with a group of fellow hikers and quickly shoveled down our dinner before finally crawling into our warm sleeping bags. The windbreak provided by the tent warms me almost immediately. It's not that late now, almost 8 p.m., but I'm exhausted. Our plans for tomorrow are now uncertain, as neither of us want to hike another 12 miles in the snow. We'll just have to wait and see what the new day brings. Standing Indian Mountain was the tallest peak we had ascended thus far, and by the time we stood on its summit, we were warm from the exertion of the climb. Soon the sun would emerge from the clouds and we enjoyed a magical day on trail, hiking through a landscape transformed by a thick blanket of snow. It had taken us 12 days to hike 86 miles through northern Georgia. The heart of the former Cherokee Nation. In our next episode, my mom and I reached the highest peak on the entire Appalachian Trail. Well, this is as high up as we'll get on the whole trail, and we'll dig into more of the overlapping history between the Appalachian Trail and the Cherokee Nation.

Guest: Nobody in my age group right now, at 71 years old, can can climb these mountains like I can. They can't take you there. There's… the time's running out.

Matt Podolsky: Common Land is a production of the Wild Lens Collective. This season was produced in partnership with New Hampshire Public Radio. This episode was produced by me, your host, Matt Podolsky. Music is by blue Dot sessions to listen to the next episode in the series. Just search for Common Land in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. To learn more about the show and to see a full list of credits, go to Common Land Podcast.