Trail Stories - Suck It Up, Buttercup (with Carl Roberson)

In 1974, a 14-year-old kid from Delaware named Carl Roberson hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. He carried a 37-pound Kelty pack. He used per-state paper guidebooks and a compass. He went two months in the Smokies and north of Virginia without seeing another human being, scared himself half to death by nighttime noises every single night, crossed a swollen river in Erwin Tennessee and grabbed a tree branch to keep from being swept away, got ambushed by a military SERE training exercise and brought to a base where they fed him the best dinner of his life, and got hauled off by a park ranger in Pennsylvania who could not believe his parents were in Delaware. His father's standing instruction: call home from every town, or he's coming to get you. He was adopted. He was the luckiest kid in the world to have the parents he had. He made it to Katahdin. He joined the Marine Corps because it was the hardest branch to get into. He operated excavators for 47 years. He wrote a book by hand in spiral notebooks and submitted a movie trailer to 500 production companies. He volunteers at an AT hostel in Pennsylvania and starts fires in the rain. He is the Season 12 premiere. The full interview with Carl drops Wednesday in two parts on the Hiker Trash Radio feed.