The Con Man Wore Hiking Boots

garden. The other was potentially more troubling. When he had originally seen Nicholls's sign on the trail, the hiker said, his first thought was not of some divine religious calling but rather, "Oh, that's probably some sucker Christian guy."

"We laughed," Nicholls recalled later. Remnants of a past life. That day, before the formerly famished hiker headed out on the trail again, Nicholls gave him a stock of food, a $50 bill and a new trail name. For the next six months -- during a bizarre odyssey that would strain the faith of Christians, the patience of law enforcement officers and the unshakable confidence that Appalachian Trail hikers have in one another -- David Lescoe would be known as "Saved."

"What Satan had meant for evil, God turned around for good!" Nicholls exulted in an e-mail to another Christian after his success in reaching Lescoe. And then, in big, bold letters, he typed, "TAKE THAT, SATAN, YOU LOSER!"

A quick primer on the Appalachian Trail is in order here -- if, for no other reason than to explain why its hikers might be enticed to God with only hot water and hamburgers.

First, the trail is not usually lighted or paved or even tremendously scenic. It mainly winds through woods, woods and more woods, where hikers find their way by looking for tree trunks marked with rectangular "blazes" of white paint. The actual path on the ground is narrow, muddy, rocky and often steep -- essentially like any other hiking trail in every dimension except one. That is its length, an astounding 2,175 miles. The AT, as hikers call it, starts at Springer Mountain in north Georgia and doesn't stop until it reaches Mount Katahdin in the vast, empty woods of northern Maine.

The idea of a trail along the East Coast's wooded spine was concocted in the 1920s by Benton MacKaye, a former U.S. Forest

Service employee. He was looking for an antidote to dreary urban life, and he came up with the idea of a series of rural work camps, connected to one another by a trail along the Appalachians. In this isolated archipelago, MacKaye argued, "cooperation replaces antagonism, trust replaces suspicion, emulation replaces competition."

But the U.S. government was not interested in building radical backwoods utopias. Of MacKaye's vision, only the footpath got built, and that was done mainly through private initiative.

Today, most of the 3 to 4 million people who use the AT annually aren't planning an escape from reality. They are dog walkers, day hikers or Boy Scouts who want to hike a small stretch -- like the sections of the AT that run through outer Loudoun, Fauquier and Frederick counties -- and then return to the Starbucks-and-Wal-Mart world they left. Then there are the "thru-hikers." Every year, 1,500 to 2,000 people get on the trail intending to walk it all at one go. Some years, more than 20 percent actually make it. During their five- to seven-month journeys, thru-hikers typically subsist on 4,000 calories a day of gorp, Powerbars and pasta. They drink filtered water they pump out of natural springs. They walk 14 miles or more a day and become so conscious of the weight in their 30-pound packs that they will cut the handle off a toothbrush to save a few ounces. They also, after hiking day upon showerless day, develop a smell that would turn heads in a sewage plant. When a thru-hiker comes by on the trail, the heads of passing day hikers jerk like Frenchmen in a Pep Le Pew cartoon.

It is these smelly, half-starved people -- cut off from the real world and inducted into an alternative, minimalist society of backpackers -- who actually come the closest to making MacKaye's dream come true. "They all have the same gear to carry. They all have the sore collarbones and the sore feet, so there's a commonality," says Bob Peoples, who runs a $4-per-night hostel along the trail in Hampton, Tenn. "You'll have multimillionaires hiking with homeless people. Where do you see that in society?"

The kindness that these hikers show to one another is legendary: They share food and water, and have been known to carry the packs of strangers who seem to be faltering. And beyond the hikers themselves, small-town churches run cheap hostels, volunteers maintain wooden sleeping shelters, and regular people fill up coolers full of food and drinks and leave them along the trail.

Hikers refer to all these good deeds as "trail magic." And there is a lot of it out there, offering thru-hikers a pretty encouraging vision of humanity in the wild. But the trail has a serious downside.