Appalachia, June 2000

By Roger Sheffer

On the inside cover of the 1956 Madison Hut register, some bossy person wrote the following admonition:

This is page #2 of the new, clean, 1956 register. THE OFFICIAL WORD is keep the book neat and clean. Camps use one or two pages (not the whole book, I said NOT THE WHOLE BOOK). Don't write letters in the book to a friend. Yes, we have post cards and stationery for this purpose. The official word in simple words is . . . DON'T MESS THIS BOOK UP.

If hikers followed the rules and never messed up the register pages, there would be no trail art, trail poetry, trail jokes, tall tales — only monotonous lists of names and addresses, page after page. But the "rules" aren't always spelled out, and the hikers go ahead anyway and make a "mess" of the registers. More in the spirit of the creative hiker/writer is the inside cover of the Galehead register from 1950, with its hikers eagerly clambering up the vertical cliff below the hut in order to be the first to sign in, as if the register itself were the main attraction. "Hooray!!" the lead hiker exclaims. "A new book!"

For certain Appalachian Trail hikers, the register itself is the main attraction along the way. These hikers call themselves "register hounds." I've met them on the trail, or seen their comments in the shelters. In 1987 a woman wrote in a Pennsylvania register, "One of my greatest fears on the Trail, especially when hiking alone, is that I will get to a shelter...and there will be no register! When that happens, it's like coming home and finding your telephone ripped out of its jack, the TV gone, the radio broken, and the newspaper burned. These registers are our only means of communication in the Long Green Tunnel, and mean more to me than any of the above ever did at home." Another hiker, writing in the register at Mizpah Spring, commented in the margin of a well drawn page, "Who makes all these great pictures?" Good question. Sometimes the pictures are signed; more often they're anonymous, especially in more recent examples where the hiker-artists, when they bother to sign their work, use trail names, such as the "Yankee Scribbler" or "Toon."

Hundreds of registers have been archived at the AMC headquarters on Joy Street in Boston. In these books one can find trail art dating back to the 1920s. Some of this art is conventional, almost "fine art," as in a drawing from the 1926 Carter Notch register, a pen-and-ink rendering of a hut set among trees. Whether it's fine art or cartoon art, the subject is usually the landscape, the hikers, or a combination of the two in which a story of the hike is told through pictures. A very early example of this can be found in the Carter Notch register from 1923, a five-part cartoon strip entitled "Pictorial Views of trip so far," including the journey by car, a breakdown along the way, the climb to the hut, and — my favorite — a long reception line of hikers being "glad-handed by Hutmaster White." The last frame shows people tripping over each other as they run toward a well stocked dinner table.

In the Carter Notch register from the following year, a hiking party is shown making its way across the page from the top of Webster and over eight additional peaks on the way to Carter Notch. At one point the stick-figure hikers seem to be tumbling from the top of Mount Washington into the Peabody River, where one figure is shown upside down, his head in the water. The style is very rough, almost a kind of folk art in its skewing of perspective and proportions, with the Summit House teetering on the pointed top of the mountain.

A more recent illustrated hiking story appears in the Galehead register from 1948, picturing an AMC Labor Day trip. The more general view shows the profile of the mountains and the sequence of weather conditions encountered. Below the standard list of names and addresses, a "close-up" shows the stick-figure hikers, first at Zealand, then on Mount Hale (casting a worried glance toward the sky), then hunched over in the rain while hiking down to Little River, then basking on the rocks at Little River before heading up North Twin, to the caption of "Puff, puff, puff, puff."

The representation of the hiker as a stick figure is not just a matter of artistic convenience; it's also an expression of the hiker's physical condition, if slightly exaggerated. In a picture from the Madison register, 1978, captioned, "That's what we looked like," three young men are pictured. One clings desperately to the edge of a cliff; another is sliding down head first, yelling "Aaaaaa!" The third is rendered in more detail, standing at ease — hair messed up, a bit of drool hanging from his chin, pack on his back, hand on walking stick, huge boots. The main thing one notices is this: he's bone-skinny. Even skinnier is the guy in a Lakes of the Clouds register, whose body (except for the large head) could be stuffed in one pocket of his enormous pack. Also in this picture are an "alpine spider seen on hut window" and several "alpine ants," who appear much healthier than the hiker, perhaps because they have made off with his candy. Two hikers are self-depicted as animals — actually two hutmen, in the 1948 Greenleaf register, "Doldrum Dodging Dave" and "Don the Puddle Jumper," who call themselves the "Donks" and are represented as human bodies with donkey heads. They are carrying 100-pound packs of whiskey and Ballantine ale. Other, slightly more normal looking hikers are the guy who is hanging by a rope from a cliff (Carter Notch, 1926), and "Chester," whom the artist identifies as "the registered trademark of Canadian Club Whiskey Booze, Inc., Madison 1975." Except for the big feet, Chester doesn't look much like a hiker. The style is similar to that of another drawing from the same register, of a big-footed giant making his way over the ice-capped summit toward the "MADison" Hut.

Next: Registers Restore a Time Long Past