Counting Steps: Riley Dunn Studies Stairs on the Appalachian Trail
All Images courtesy of Riley Dunn.
Sunlight streamed through the thin nylon of my hammock as I lay suspended between two massive oak trees. My fellow hikers and I (referred to as a “tramily”) had been lulled to sleep the night before by the pitter-patter of acorns hitting our rain flies. Now, the birds sang us good morning and the soft hues promised pleasant weather today. Time to gather water from the nearby stream. Filter the water. Eat some oatmeal and peanut butter; maybe some cowboy coffee. Dress in clothes still dirty from a fall taken last week. Pack up all items necessary for survival. Hoist packs that somehow seem heavier than they were the day before. Off we go.
Every day was hard; some days were less hard. But never for a full day did I wish I were anywhere else. I shouted from the top of mountains. I cried alone after dealing with the same blisters for 100 miles. I rejoiced at all-you-can-eat buffets in town. I snuggled in shelters with whoever was closest once the temperatures reached single digits. I did it.
A friend and fellow thru-hiker told me before I started, “you’ll ruin your life.” It’s true, my life is now ruined in the best possible way. I fully appreciate running water from a tap and a real bathroom in the middle of the night. I feel lazy if I sit still for more than an hour or two. I know how it feels to set a goal that most would deem impossible or crazy and accomplish that goal. If you’d like to ruin your life too, try going for a really long walk.
My name is Riley Dunn. I currently work for the Monterey District Trail Crew in California. I hail from Iowa, but have worked for the Rocky Mountain Field Institute in Colorado; spent nine months in Central America living off-grid in the jungle; and have received bachelor’s degrees in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Studies from Iowa State University.
In July 2019, I flew to Maine in hopes of hiking my way to Georgia. While hiking, I was awarded a scholarship for my proposal “One STEP at a Time: A Six-Month Journey to Understand, Document, and Share”.
I was going to count and document every staircase along the entire Appalachian Trail.
It sounds crazy, and though I did commit many hours to the proposal and its connections to my recently completed studies in design, I had no idea what I had gotten myself into. So first, I had to lay out the ground rules.
Definitions
Staircase: a set of steps and its surrounding walls or structure.
Step: a structure consisting of a riser and a tread.
Rules
Staircase needs to contain 5+ steps.
Must be vertical.
Clearly man-made and intentional.
The process for data collection on trail was primitive, to say the least. Using my old Galaxy S9 smartphone, I would take a photo of each staircase from the direction of travel with my location turned on as a georeference. As I walked up/down the steps I would count them in my head 1...2...3...4... etc. Once I reached the end of the staircase, I would switch my phone to video mode and state the number of steps in that staircase. Later that night, I would match the numbers I said in the videos with their corresponding photo, and I would rename each file with the number of steps for that staircase photo. Once I reached service, every few days, I would upload the photos to Google Drive and save them for future data analysis.
I ended up taking photos of 3,605 staircases and individually counting 58,705.5 steps. The longest staircase was 607 steps, the average was 16.3 steps per staircase, an overwhelming majority of the staircases were constructed of stone, and New Hampshire had the most staircases per miles of trail.
A snapshot of the GIS Data. Each dot represents a staircase mapped in the project.
A big difference that stood out for me during the project was the material change through the northern states, where the trail goes straight up the climb and straight back down, versus the southern states, where the terrain is more winding and they prefer switchbacks to stairs.
Nearly all of the staircases in Maine and New Hampshire were stone, while most of the ones in Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia were wooden. There were also some fantastically constructed staircases in popular weekend hiking locations or areas of the trail in close proximity to larger cities; for example, Bear Mountain State Park in New York. The 1000+ steps were five-foot-wide, beautifully carved slabs, with plenty of room for people to walk side by side. In comparison, other places along the trail I had to stop and ask myself “Is that a staircase or just a couple rocks that happen to look like steps?”
Originally, the project was a way for me to help finance part of my thru-hike through the scholarship and to give me a purpose-driven task to accomplish rather than simply saying I was going on a vacation in the woods for 5-6 months. However, I was forced to pay closer attention to my surroundings and the trail itself: how it changed, adapted to its surroundings, and how it was constructed. There were many days that I cursed myself– after sometimes counting over 100 staircases in a single day– for choosing this project. But it gave me my trail name, “Fitbit”, because I was always counting steps; and it also steered me into my career as a Trail Worker. I now get to be the person building the staircases that I dreaded having to count. I get to be out on a trail every day shaping people’s perceptions and experiences of the land in the same way that someone else did for me back in 2019.
Accompanying this article you will see some of my favorite staircases as well as various examples of the range of materials and craft. All the data I collected was shared with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy and is available for public download via the ArcGIS Online portal. The data is currently being used by the Maine Appalachian Trail Club as a reference for building out their trail projects.
This project was a fulfilling way for me to mesh my love of hiking and adventure with research about the design and construction of the recreational spaces we utilize. It made me more appreciative of anyone who is part of improving the outdoor experience for others. It is my hope that I’m able to continue working on trails for decades to come and that I also have time for a few more “hiking vacations in the woods.”
