It's a little hard to follow, but do I understand this correctly? 5 days and about 40 miles into this journey, a group ends up calling for help, and the SAR gets involved??
I'd be most interested in the TR on this. I remember from Bill Bryson's book on the AT:
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Every year, about 1,200 hikers set off from Springer, most of them intending to go all the way to Katahdin. No more than 10 percent actually make it. Half don't make it past central Virginia, less than a third of the way. A quarter get no farther than North Carolina, the next state after Georgia. As many as 20 percent drop out the first week. Wisson had seen it all.
"Last year, I dropped a guy from Florida off at the trailhead," he told us as we tooled north through darkening pine forests toward the rugged hills of north Georgia. "Three days later he calls me from the pay phone at Woody Gap -- that's the first pay phone you come to. Says he wants to go home, that the trail wasn't what he expected it to be. So I drive him back to the airport. Two days after that he's back in Atlanta. Says his wife made him come back because he'd spent all this money on equipment and she wasn't going to let him quit so easy. So I drop him off at the trailhead. Three days later he phones from Woody Gap again. He wants to go to the airport. 'Well, what about your wife?' I says. And he says, 'This time I'm not going home.'"
"So why did he quit so soon?" I asked.
"He said it wasn't what he expected it to be. They all say that. Just last week I had three ladies from California -- middle-aged gals, real nice, kind of giggly but, you know, nice -- I dropped them off and they were in real high spirits. About four hours later they called and said they wanted to go home. They'd come all the way from California, you understand, spent God knows how much on airfares and equipment -- I mean, they had the nicest stuff you ever saw, all brand new and top of the range -- and they'd walked maybe a mile and a half before quitting. Said it wasn't what they expected."
"What do they expect?"
"Who knows? Escalators maybe. It's hills and rocks and woods and a trail. You don't got to do a whole lot of scientific research to work that out. But you'd be amazed how many people quit. Then again, I had a guy, oh, about six weeks ago, who shoulda quit and didn't. He was coming off the trail. He'd walked from Maine on his own. It took him eight months, longer than it takes most people, and I don't think he'd seen anybody for the last several weeks. When he came off he was just a trembling wreck. I had his wife with me. She'd come to meet him, and he just fell into her arms and started weeping."
