A beer bottle in the forest

The Appalachian trail and alcohol have gone hand in hand for a while. Moonshiners have been making the illicit alcohol along the trail as explained in this exhibit. While there are people making alcohol along the trail, there are also people drinking it along the trail. This isn’t a new thing either, this goes back as far as the 1940’s. There is a correspondence between C.F Mersch, a trail supervisor and Edward Freeland, the superintendent of the Shenandoah National Park documenting and incident along the trail. Trail Club members reported that they had found two men drinking at a shelter and in possession several bottles of alcohol. This was reported after the fact so nothing could be done about it, as I mentioned in the previous page it’s a matter of logistics, but the superintendent mentions that the shelter they were at would be more closely monitored.

So people are drinking on the trail, how do they get it? Carrying alcohol on the trail isn’t exactly optimal, adding more weight to the load, so most hikers go into town to drink. These “bar blazers” essentially hike from town to town as a bar crawl. It is the most effective way to drink on the trail. No carrying alcohol, you can stop in town also to resupply, and you can get a good drunken night’s sleep.

There is another breed of drinkers on the trail, and that is “amber blazers” who hike into town to try the local craft beer. There are whole articles written as guides for the local craft beers you can get while hiking in just Virginia. For example, the Damascus Brewery in Trail Town, USA (Damascus Virginia) is one of the go to stops for all hikers. It has over 30 different kinds of beer and live music. Both of these breeds of hikers for obvious reasons generally don’t complete a thru-hike.

If you’re not a “bar blazer” or “amber blazer”, most of the drinking along the trail generally conglomerates around the shelters after a long day of hiking. Although drinking on the trail is fairly common, the rules vary between the park services in charge of the trail. For example, the Shenandoah National Park permits alcohol but no in parking areas or in the lower Rapidan area.