Gene Espy had always been adventurous. He explored caves, rode his bicycle 740 miles from his home in Georgia to Florida and back, and hiked through the Great Smoky Mountains for a week.
But on May 31, 1951, when he was 24, he began a new journey that was even more arduous and seemingly preposterous: hiking the length of the Appalachian Trail, some 2,000 miles, northward from Georgia to Maine, in a single, continuous trek known as a “thru-hike.”
It had been done once before, in 1948, by Earl Shaffer, a Pennsylvanian. But Mr. Espy didn’t know about Mr. Shaffer until a farmer showed him a newspaper clipping while he was already on his expedition.
“He didn’t do it to be the first,” Mr. Espy’s daughter Jane Gilsinger said in an interview. “He did it to have fun and see God in nature.”
She confirmed his death, on Aug. 22, at his home in Atlanta. He was 98.
It took Mr. Espy 123 days to complete his journey, which started at Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia and took him through 14 states along the world’s longest continuous hiking-only footpath. Back then, the Appalachian Trail was mainly rugged wilderness, with few trail markers. He walked through parts of the trail where few others had ventured.
“I’d carry a map in my hat,” he was quoted as saying in 1993 by The News and Observer of Raleigh, N.C. “Every so often, I would stop and take my hat off, pull out my map, look around and try to figure out where I was.”
He averaged about 16 miles a day, but sometimes walked more than 30 on his way to Mount Katahdin in Maine, the northern terminus of the trail, which he reached on Sept. 30, 1951.
Over those four months, the slightly built Mr. Espy lost 28 pounds and grew a thick, red beard. He bushwhacked his way through thick undergrowth. He waded through ponds built by beavers and killed about 15 rattlesnakes. He woke up one night to see that a raccoon had opened a container of dehydrated milk and was licking it as it dripped out. He slept atop a 55-foot fire tower to escape being attacked by howling wildcats.
“I never thought about giving up,” Mr. Espy told The Macon Telegraph in Georgia in 1997. “And I never really got lonely. I read my Bible. I was always busy seeing all kinds of beautiful sites, waterfalls and mountains.”
Eugene Marion Espy was born on April 14, 1927, in Cordele, Ga., in the south-central part of the state. His father, Alto, was a cotton buyer. His mother, Iona (Peterman) Espy, was a music professor at Brenau University, in Gainesville, Ga., and then taught piano and organ after marrying. She encouraged Gene to play the clarinet beginning when he was a child.
Gene was the first Boy Scout in Cordele to become an Eagle Scout. His wanderlust — and love of thrills — included bicycling to Lake Blackshear in nearby Warwick, Ga., where he would go fishing, and riding his motorcycle up the sloped side of Stone Mountain to the top.
He interrupted his education at the Georgia Institute of Technology to enlist in the Navy near the end of World War II. He then returned to the school, where he studied industrial management and engineering and earned his bachelor’s degree in 1950.
He had thought about hiking the Appalachian Trail since a seventh-grade teacher discussed it in class — it had opened in full in 1937 — and he started planning it in quiet moments at his first job, in sales training for a hardware company, which he didn’t like.
He bought a used backpack from an Army surplus store, hiking shoes from L.L. Bean, a canvas tent and a rain poncho. He carried a Boy Scout knife, cooking utensils, a miner’s carbide lamp and two canteens, one for water and the other for gasoline to fuel his tiny stove. His meals included dehydrated mashed potatoes and boiled cornmeal with sugar, raisins and powdered milk.
A photograph of Mr. Espy at the end of his hike shows him standing on a ridge of Mount Katahdin, looking very thin and toting a walking stick (from his Boy Scout days) in his right hand.
Food and supplies for his hike cost Mr. Espy about $300. When his trek ended, he hitchhiked to Boston, where he spent $100 on new clothes and a bus ticket back to Georgia.
Over the next five decades, he worked as an engineer at a foundry and machine company, an apparel manufacturer, a frozen food plant, a Naval ordinance plant and Robins Air Force Base. He retired in 1995.
He commemorated the hike in a book, “The Trail of My Life: The Gene Espy Story” (2008), and in 2011 he was inducted (with Mr. Shaffer and four others) into the charter class of the Appalachian Trail Museum’s Hall of Fame, to which he donated some of his hiking equipment. He remained active in the Georgia Appalachian Trail Club and gave workshops at Appalachian Trail Conservancy events.
“One thing that separated Gene from the other pioneer thru-hikers was that Gene remained an active, consistent part of the trail community for the rest of his life,” Larry Luxenberg, president of the museum, said in an email.
“He was a great role model for hikers,” he added, “always encouraging and a gentleman and a fascinating storyteller.”
Mr. Espy’s former home in Macon became a mecca to fans seeking his advice.
“They brought their packs to our house and asked what they would need,” his wife, Eugenia (Bass) Espy, said in an interview. “He always said they were bringing too much and would say, ‘You don’t need this, you don’t need that.’ He tried to explain that you only should carry the essentials and keep the pack as light as you can.”
She said that Mr. Espy, whom she married in 1954, was a romantic.
“He’d wake me up to tell me, ‘I love you,’” she said.
In addition to his wife and Ms. Gilsinger, he is survived by another daughter, Ellen Holliday, and two granddaughters.
Mr. Espy met Mr. Shaffer in the 1950s, and they became friends. Mr. Shaffer, whose nickname was Crazy One, was known for living in a log cabin in Idaville, Pa., five miles from the Appalachian Trail, with his cats and goats. (Mr. Shaffer died in 2002.)
One day in 1965, Mr. Espy and his daughters were hiking on the trail in Georgia.
“We heard this crashing in the woods and this scruffy man came at us,” Ms. Gilsinger recalled. “He looked at us and said, ‘Gene Espy!’ And my father said, ‘Earl Shaffer!’ He was really depleted physically, and we took him into town, got him supplies and perked him up.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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