The Con Man Wore Hiking Boots

The group told him no thanks, and pitched tents and went to sleep. In the morning, Holt went to retrieve a bag that she had hung in the shelter, to keep it safe from rodents. It held all her food, her camp stove, her insect repellent, her toothbrush and even her titanium spork. The bag was gone. "So was the section-hiker," she wrote.

Lescoe. Or so it turned out. Nobody knew the thief's name for almost three weeks, until, after his encounter with Nicholls in New Jersey, the hiker now called Saved walked into the dead-end Susquehanna River town of Duncannon, Pa.

Duncannon amounts to one street of pizza parlors and run-down buildings, long since bypassed by the highway to Harrisburg. But it's a landmark to hikers, because it's one of the few towns the AT actually runs right through.

For them, this little place has two chief institutions. One is the Doyle Hotel, a century-old pile where a room costs $17.50 a night. The other is Trail Angel Mary.

Mary Parry, 56, started helping out hikers about five years ago, when she was evicted and living among the backpacking crowd at the town's small campground. The first thing she gave them was bananas, for potassium. It built from there. Now, Mary's good works include filling up coolers along the trail with food and cold drinks. She drives hikers to outfitters for new boots. She takes them to the hospital for bad cases of poison ivy. She lets them sleep in her home and drive her car. During her Sunday-night "feeds," she cooks for a dozen at a time, serving up dishes like stuffed trout, Amish-style baked corn and her famous peanut butter soup.

Parry frequently spends up to 40 hours a week helping hikers. One day, after she'd been doing this for a while, she heard a hiker named "B-Man" call her "Trail Angel Mary." She had never heard the title before, but it fit: Trail angels are the highest and most prolific practitioners of trail magic. And, in a world with few authority figures, the title has made Parry a kind of moral arbiter, a person to whom problems are brought. That's how she came to know Lescoe: After his encounter with Nicholls, he had confessed his theft to another hiker, who passed it on to Mary.

"I hear you did something you have regrets about," she said when he finally arrived in town.

"Yeah." He showed her Holt's food bag and camp stove.

She didn't call the police to report a theft. In fact, Mary says she wasn't even aware that the trail had police. (It's easy to get that impression, since a grand total of two U.S. park rangers are assigned to the AT full time.) Instead, Parry imposed her own kind of trail justice: Clean my apartment for two hours, she told Lescoe. In exchange, "I will send [Holt] a food bag in your name."

A few days later, a surprised Holt checked in at a post office in Hanover, N.H., and found a cardboard box waiting for her, full of Pop Tarts, Fruit Roll-Ups, macaroni and cheese mix, and Ramen noodles. "About 30 pounds of hiker food," Holt wrote.

By that time, Lescoe was headed south on the trail again.

No one can carry six months of food at one time. So most thru-hikers arrange for someone back home to mail regular care packages to post offices along the trail.