"And their eyes — wow, it was like someone turned the lights on."

The image is from Earl Shaffer's Appalachian Hike Diary (1948), every page of which you can see at that link, at the Smithsonian website. 

I'm reading about Shaffer this morning in "Walking off the War on the Appalachian Trail," a new article at Gaia GPS. The author is Abby Levene.

Shaffer was the first person to through-hike the Appalachian Trail:

He travelled alone, walking around 17 miles a day. Shaffer packed light. He nixed a tent when he realized his poncho could double as a shelter. He mended his clothes, and cooked cornbread in a pan over an open fire. Shaffer made it over the rocks, roots, and rubble in just one pair of Russell Moccasin Company “Birdshooter” boots. He resoled them twice, and they were in tatters by the end. 

You can still buy Russell Moccasin Company “Birdshooter” boots. They're from Berlin, Wisconsin. 

The article says that Shaffer's motivation was to “walk the war out of my system.” The main focus of the article is Sean Gobin, a Marine veteran who through-hiked the Appalachian Trail and thinks it was good for his mental health:

"Your brain really has nothing to do but start to focus on your life experiences and what you’ve gone through,” Gobin says. “You come to terms with it, and then start focusing on the future and what you want to do with your life; what’s really important to you. It was this really personal, cathartic experience.” 

He worked with Appalachian Trail Conservancy to bring the benefit of through-hiking to other veterans. His group is Warrior Expeditions. Describing the first group to do the hike, which he'd seen at the beginning and and then at the end, he said:

“The people I met in Maine were not the same people who started in Georgia,” Gobin says. “Physically, they had lost tons of weight. The pudgy vets who started up the trail no longer had an ounce of body fat. And their eyes — wow, it was like someone turned the lights on.”... 

Hiking with a heavy pack all day, every day helps burn off anxiety. The physical toll and time in nature alleviates depression. The routine puts hikers on a normal sleep schedule where they’re up with the sun and sleep when the sun sets. Plus, they’re so tired that they actually get a good night’s sleep. 

“It’s very structured,” Gobin says. “It strips away all the things in life that are unnecessary. It breaks life down to its most basic elements.”

Breaking life down to its most basic elements is an idea you see in Thoreau's "Walden": "I wanted... to reduce [life] to its lowest terms."

The full Thoreau sentence — diagram it! — is: "I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

And, yes, I have read Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods," and I know he insults Thoreau:

The inestimably priggish and tiresome Henry David Thoreau thought nature was splendid, splendid indeed, so long as he could stroll to town for cakes and barley wine, but when he experienced real wilderness, on a visit to Katahdin in 1846, he was unnerved to the core. This wasn't the tame world of overgrown orchards and sun-dappled paths that passed for wilderness in suburban Concord, Massachusetts, but a forbidding, oppressive, primeval country that was "grim and wild... savage and dreary," fit only for "men nearer of kin to the rocks and wild animals than we." The experience left him, in the words of one biographer, "near hysterical.”