For Portville native Audrey Payne, walking and hiking has always been an important part of her life.
After suffering a severe back injury more than a decade ago — a condition that eventually required surgery — during her recovery she read a book about hiking the Appalachian Trail. She was inspired and vowed to herself that, when she was able, she would hike the length of the 2,200-mile trail.
Accomplishing that feat in 2018, she now has a book of her own coming out next month — “Where the Rhododendrons Bloom: A Thru-Hiking Adventure on the Appalachian Trail” — in which she chronicles her experiences.
“When I was dealing with my back injury, I didn’t know if I was ever going to come out the other side and feel better,” Payne, a 2002 graduate of Portville Central School, said. “I had to fight to get the care that I needed, and to overcome the injury and to get through the recovery. But I fought hard and I made it through, and my life has been incredible since.”
IT ALL STARTED in 2013 when, during a group exercise class in the Washington, D.C., area, she suffered a herniated disc. For the next year and a half, she tried physical therapy, cortisone injections, medications, a chiropractor and more to try to alleviate the intense pain.
“Eventually, I was OK’d for a spinal fusion,” Payne said. “They told me I’d be healed in three months, but that definitely was not the case. After many more months of physical therapy and picking up exercises to strengthen my core, I finally started to feel better about a year, post-surgery. But it took even longer for a full recovery.”
Payne, who graduated from SUNY Brockport in 2007 and then with a master’s degree in public communication from American University in Washington in 2012, did a lot of reading while trying to heal.
“I’ve always loved to read, but it was especially important during this time because I couldn’t do much else without pain,” she said. “I picked up a copy of Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods” and the idea to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail took hold, and never left me. I told myself if I was ever healthy and well enough again to thru-hike, I would do it.”
TO PREPARE, Payne often walked the 4 miles to and from her office in Washington — across the National Mall past the Washington Monument. She also went rock climbing and did a lot of yoga, which helped to strengthen her legs and feet. She also hiked in Shenandoah National Park.
“A couple of weeks before I started the trek, I visited my family for a weekend of cabin camping at Allegany State Park, which is a place we’ve always loved to go together,” Payne said, noting her parents, Penny and James Payne, still live in Portville. “I took the family beagle, Shamrock, on a hike of the 6-mile Beehunter Trail loop, which ended up being my last day-hike before starting the AT.”
And it was more than just mental and physical preparation and commitment made to hike the trail. Payne left her job in Washington, working in communications for the World Wildlife Fund, for the experience.
“I gave up a lot to hike the AT,” she said. “I quit my dream job, something that took me years to land, because I felt so strongly about hiking the AT. It was hard and anxiety-inducing and I didn’t have as much money saved up as I should have, but it turned out to be the most beautiful, healing, profound experience of my life, and it was worth all of the hardship rebuilding my life after 100 times over.
“If an idea ever takes such a strong hold on you, find a way to follow it through, because there’s a reason for it,” she said.
ALMOST FIVE YEARS after her injury, Payne started the hike down in Georgia, heading north. Almost four years to the day after her spinal fusion surgery, she summited Mount Katahdin in Maine, finishing the 2,200-mile trek.
She said one of her favorite places on the trail is Grayson Highlands State Park in southwestern Virginia. It’s famous for its wild ponies, which were introduced decades ago to maintain the “balds” in the area — summits with just underbrush and grass.
“One night, as I was camping just outside the park, I was awoken at midnight by two large ponies munching on grass directly (below) my tent,” she said. “They had fields and fields of grass to choose from, but that’s the grass they wanted.”
Payne said the AT has a strong community associated with it. People will follow the “hiker bubble” each year to provide support and help to hikers, and “trail angels” will come out to the trail to offer spreads of food to hungry hikers.
“It’s incredibly kind, and I can’t tell you how much it was appreciated,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe how hungry you get hiking up and down mountains all day every day.”
In Maine, she met a man who told her the last of his four children was about to leave for college, so he was looking for new ways to take care of people. He got involved in providing “trail magic” to hikers, and started growing food in his garden to provide to hikers each year.
“He came to the trail with multiple kinds of homemade pies, fresh vegetable primavera pasta, pancakes and more for the hikers,” Payne said. “I was blown away by his kindness and the food.”
HAVING KEPT a journal while she hiked, Payne “vaguely” thought someday she might put all of her experiences down on paper. She first tried to write the book in 2019, just a few months after finishing the trail and moving to Boulder, Colo. (Today she works as a communications specialist for the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado.)
“But the experience was still too emotional and raw for me — I had absolutely loved the experience and I was still grieving it,” she said.
She shelved the book idea, and didn’t know if she’d take it up again. But in the fall of 2022, she felt a new urge to tackle the project.
“I was overcome with the desire to finally follow through with the book, and I was so inspired that I didn’t stop writing — it’s all I did in my free time outside of work — until I finished it,” she said, while noting that editing it to the final version was a much longer process.
“It was all about timing,” she said. “It felt so hard and emotional to try to write it the first time. But years later, when the mood struck and the timing was right, it was easy.”
“Where the Rhododendrons Bloom: A Thru-Hiking Adventure on the Appalachian Trail,” will be available in ebook and paperback on Feb. 8 on Amazon and Kindle: https://amazon.com/author/audreypayne. Payne also has a hiking YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/audreyadventures.
