There are certain smells that immediately take me back to the Appalachian Trail.
Not necessarily the smells you'd expect, either.
Spend several months hiking and your world gets smaller. You wear the same clothes. Eat the same foods. Sleep in the same gear. Walk through the same rain. And because you spend so much time around other hikers doing exactly the same thing, certain smells become incredibly recognizable.
Years later, one whiff can put you right back on trail.
1. Clean Laundry
This might be the strangest one.
Clean clothes smell incredibly strong when you haven't been around clean clothes for a while. On my way into Trail Days during my 2016 Appalachian Trail thru-hike, I started smelling something ahead of me—laundry detergent.
I assumed I was catching up to some day hikers. The smell was so noticeable that I could smell them for quite some time before I finally caught up. Except it wasn't a group of day hikers. It was my friend Google, hiking by himself. He had gotten a shower and done his laundry the night before.
One freshly laundered hiker smelled so strongly of detergent that I could basically track him down the trail. At home, clean laundry barely registers. On a thru-hike, you can smell that somebody has been to town.
2. Hiker Funk, Including the Infamous Cat-Pee Smell
There's normal hiker funk. And then there's the smell that can only be described as cat pee.
I learned about this one firsthand because a friend of mine developed a particularly impressive case of it during our thru-hike. By the time we reached Pennsylvania, my niece had given him a new nickname: "The Smelly Kid." He does not dispute this characterization.
That ammonia-like odor can have several possible causes, including sweat, dehydration, and the body metabolizing protein for energy. Whatever the exact combination happening inside a particular hiker, the resulting smell is unmistakable.
Thru-hikers become accustomed to a baseline level of stink. Everyone smells. Your shirt smells. Your backpack smells. Your sleeping bag smells. So when another thru-hiker thinks you smell unusually bad, you've really accomplished something.
3. Chicken Top Ramen
The orange package. You don't even need to see it.
After you've eaten chicken-flavored Top Ramen six times a week for several months, you know exactly what it smells like. Someone can be sitting on the other side of a shelter cooking dinner, dump that little seasoning packet into their noodles, and immediately: chicken ramen.
There are thousands of foods with more interesting aromas. But few become associated with long-distance hiking through sheer repetition quite like cheap chicken-flavored noodles. Smell it enough times while sitting on a shelter floor with 20 miles on your legs and eventually it becomes part of the Appalachian Trail.
4. An Appalachian Trail Privy
Sometimes you find the privy by following the sign. Sometimes you find it with your nose.
After enough time on the Appalachian Trail, the smell becomes instantly recognizable. You can be wandering around a shelter looking for the little side trail, catch a whiff and know exactly which direction you need to go.
During my 2016 thru-hike, the privy at Tray Mountain in Georgia was so full that the contents had formed what can only be described as an iceberg underneath the seat. It was so high that if you had put the toilet lid down, it would have touched it. There comes a point in a thru-hiker's life when you open a privy door, evaluate the situation in front of you, quietly close the door again and decide: I'm just going to dig a hole.
It's funny looking back on it, but maintaining privies along the Appalachian Trail is an enormous and mostly thankless job. Someone has to build them. Someone has to maintain them. Someone has to deal with them when thousands of hikers use them. And someone eventually has to deal with the iceberg.
So serious kudos to the volunteers and shelter maintainers who do that work year after year. Thru-hikers might joke about the privies, but they're an incredibly valuable piece of trail infrastructure. You might not appreciate a clean Appalachian Trail privy until you've opened the door to one that isn't.
5. The Forest After Rain
Rain itself doesn't really have a smell. The Appalachian Trail after rain absolutely does.
Wet leaves. Damp soil. Decaying wood. Moss. That heavy, earthy smell that seems to become stronger as soon as a summer storm moves through.
You spend enough time outside and eventually weather stops being something you watch through a window. You smell it. You feel the humidity change. You notice the temperature drop before the rain arrives. And when the rain finally stops, the forest smells different.
Of all the smells on this list, this might be the one most capable of instantly putting me back on the Appalachian Trail. Not because it's unique to the AT. Because I spent six months smelling it there.
Smell Is Part of the Trail Memory
People remember the views. McAfee Knob. The Smokies. The Whites. Katahdin. We remember shelters, hostels, trail towns and people.
But some of the strongest memories aren't attached to photographs. They're attached to things you weren't consciously trying to remember. Laundry detergent drifting down the trail. An inexplicably smelly hiking partner. A packet of chicken ramen. A privy that should probably remain closed. A wet Appalachian forest after the storm passes.
You don't think you're collecting those memories while you're hiking. Then years later, you smell something familiar. And for about two seconds, you're back on the Appalachian Trail.
There are certain smells that immediately take me back to the Appalachian Trail.
Not necessarily the smells you'd expect, either.
