We had been walking for about half an hour when another hiker-a fit-looking middle-aged guy-came along from the other direction. We asked him if he had seen a girl named Mary Ellen in a red jacket with kind of a loud voice.

He made an expression of possible recognition and said: “Does she-I’m not being rude here or anything-but does she do this a lot?” and he pinched his nose and made a series of horrible honking noises.

We nodded vigorously.

“Yeah, I stayed with her and two other guys in Plumorchard Gap Shelter last night.” He gave us a dubious, sideways look. “She a friend of yours?”

“Oh, no,” we said, disavowing her entirely, as any sensible person would. “She just sort of latched on to us for a couple of days.”

He nodded in understanding, then grinned. “She’s a piece of work, isn’t she?”

We grinned, too. “Was it bad?” I said.

He made a look that showed genuine pain, then abruptly, as if putting two and two together, said, “So you must be the guys she was talking about.”

“Really?” Katz said. “What’d she say?”

“Oh, nothing,” he said, but he was suppressing a small smile in that way that makes you say: “What?”

“Nothing. It was nothing.” But he was smiling.

“What?”

He wavered. “Oh, all right. She said you guys were a couple of overweight wimps who didn’t know the first thing about hiking and that she was tired of carrying you.”

“She said that?” Katz said, scandalized.

“Actually I think she called you pussies.”

“She called us pussies?” Katz said. “Now I will kill her.”

“Well, I don’t suppose you’ll have any trouble finding people to hold her down for you,” the man said absently, scanning the sky, and added: “Supposed to snow.”

I made a crestfallen noise. This was the last thing we wanted. “Really? Bad?”

He nodded. “Six to eight inches. More on the higher elevations.” He lifted his eyebrows stoically, agreeing with my dismayed expression. Snow wasn’t just discouraging, it was dangerous.

He let the prospect hang there for a moment, then said, “Well, better keep moving.” I nodded in understanding, for that was what we did in these hills. I watched him go, then turned to Katz, who was shaking his head.

“Imagine her saying that after all we did for her,” he said, then noticed me staring at him, and said in a kind of squirmy way, “What?” and then, more squirmily, “What?”

“Don’t you ever, ever, spoil a piece of pie for me again. Do you understand?”

He winced. “Yeah, all right. Jeez,” he said and trudged on, muttering.

Two days later we heard that Mary Ellen had dropped out with blisters after trying to do thirty-five miles in two days. Big mistake.

Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.

Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It’s quite wonderful, really.

You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, “far removed from the seats of strife,” as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge.

There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It’s where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is one boundless singularity. Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless circle. In a way, it would hardly matter.

At times, you become almost certain that you slabbed this hillside three days ago, crossed this stream yesterday, clambered over this fallen tree at least twice today already. But most of the time you don’t think. No point. Instead, you exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, your brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below. Walking for hours and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing. At the end of the day you don’t think, “Hey, I did sixteen miles today,” any more than you think, “Hey, I took eight-thousand breaths today.” It’s just what you do.

And so we walked, hour upon hour, over rollercoaster hills, along kinife-edge ridges and over grassy balds, through depthless ranks of oak, ash, chinkapin, and pine. The skies grew sullen and the air chillier, but it wasn’t until the third day that the snow came. It began in the morning as thinly scattered flecks, hardly noticeable. But then the wind rose, then rose again, until it was blowing with an end-of-the-world fury that seemed to have even the trees in a panic, and with it came snow, great flying masses of it. By midday we found ourselves plodding into a stinging, cold, hard-blowing storm. Soon after, we came to a narrow ledge of path along a wall of rock called Big Butt Mountain.

Even in ideal circumstances the path around Big Butt would have required delicacy and care. It was like a window ledge on a skyscraper, no more than fourteen or sixteen inches wide, and crumbling in places, with a sharp drop on one side of perhaps eighty feet, and long, looming stretches of vertical granite on the other. Once or twice I nudged foot-sized rocks over the side and watched with faint horror as they crashed and tumbled to improbably remote resting places. The trail was cobbled with rocks and threaded with wandering tree roots against which we constantly stubbed and stumbled, and veneered everywhere with polished ice under a thin layer of powdery snow. At exasperatingly frequent intervals, the path was broken by steep, thickly bouldered streams, frozen solid and ribbed with blue ice, which could only be negotiated in a crablike crouch. And all the time, as we crept along on this absurdly narrow, dangerous perch, we were half-blinded by flying snow and jostled by gusts of wind, which roared through the dancing trees and shook us by our packs. This wasn’t a blizzard; it was a tempest. We proceeded with painstaking deliberativeness, placing each foot solidly before lifting the one behind. Even so, twice Katz made horrified, heartfelt, comic-book noises (“AIEEEEE!” and “EEEARGH!”) as his footing went, and I turned to find him hugging a tree, feet skating, his expression bug-eyed and fearful.

It was deeply unnerving. It took us over two hours to cover six-tenths of a mile of trail. By the time we reached solid ground at a place called Bearpen Gap, the snow was four or five inches deep and accumulating fast. The whole world was white, filled with dime-sized snowflakes that fell at a slant before being caught by the wind and hurled in a variety of directions. We couldn’t see more than fifteen or twenty feet ahead, often not even that.

The trail crossed a logging road, then led straight up Albert Mountain, a bouldered summit 5,250 feet above sea level, where the winds were so wild and angry that they hit the mountain with an actual wallop sound and forced us to shout to hear each other. We started up and hastily retreated. Hiking packs leave you with no recognizable center of gravity at the best of times; here we were literally being blown over. Confounded, we stood at the bottom of the summit and looked at each other. This was really quite grave. We were caught between a mountain we couldn’t climb and a ledge we had no intention of trying to renegotiate. Our only apparent option was to pitch our tents-if we could in this wind-crawl in, and hope for the best. I don’t wish to reach for melodrama, but people have died in less trying circumstances.