Legendary hiker Gene Espy dies at 98

He carried a 45-pound backpack and a walking stick he had carved as a Boy Scout.  

Gene Espy started his historic 2,050-mile journey on May 31, 1951, at Mount Oglethorpe in north Georgia, one month after his 24th birthday. He walked across 14 states.  

By the time he reached Mount Katahdin in Maine four months later, he was sporting a 123-day-old beard, had lost 28 pounds, worn out three pairs of hiking boots and killed 15 rattlesnakes.

The longtime Macon resident became only the second “thru-hiker” to complete the Appalachian Trail, the longest continuous and marked footpath in the world. When he completed his walk, he knelt and thanked God.

Espy died on Aug. 22 in Alpharetta, where he and his wife, Eugenia, had gone to live with their daughter, Jane Gilsinger, six years ago.

He was 98.

“He kept going right up until the end,’’ Gilsinger said. “He was alert and sitting in a chair the day before he died. When he was in the hospital, he kept talking about getting out into the woods and going camping. He loved the trail.’’

Eugenia Espy said her husband had been in declining health for several years, and had fallen a few weeks ago, but had not been ill. 

“He didn’t have an illness,’’ she said. “He didn’t have diabetes, cancer or have a heart attack. At his age, he just wore out.’’

Funeral services will be Saturday, Sept. 6, at 11 a.m. at Highland Hills Baptist Church on Briarcliff Road across from the home where the Espys lived in Macon.

There will be a visitation at 10 a.m. at the church, and a reception will follow.  Burial will be private on Thursday, Sept. 4, in Espy’s hometown of
Cordele.

As a young man, Espy was always looking for his next adventure. He was the first Boy Scout in Cordele to achieve the rank of Eagle Scout. He taught himself to water ski on a pair of homemade skis at Lake Blackshear by watching newsreels at the movie theater.  When he was 16, he took a 740-mile bicycle trek through three states. He navigated a 125-mile stretch of the Ocmulgee River in a homemade sailboat.

When he was a student at Georgia Tech, Espy drove a motorcycle up the sloped side to the top of Stone Mountain – the largest piece of exposed granite in North America. He once hitchhiked to St. Louis and back in two days just to prove it could be done.  

His fascination with the Appalachian Trail came from his seventh-grade teacher. He later hiked for a week in the Great Smoky Mountains, which whetted his appetite even more.

He got off to a late start for the hiking season when he had to wait for his 18-year-old hiking companion to graduate from high school. After one day on the trail, the young man quit and returned home, leaving Espy to go it alone.

He was a trailblazer in every sense of the word.  The trail in the 1950s was often crude, overgrown and poorly marked.  It was very much a work in progress. After requesting maps from the National Park Service in Washington, D.C., Espy was asked to take notes and make revisions along the way. 

He averaged 16.5 miles each day, including as many as 34 miles in one stretch.  Espy would stop in towns along the trail and buy postcards to send to his family.

He was dating Eugenia, who lived in nearby Warwick. They married three years after he finished the hike and celebrated their 71st anniversary in July.

Espy did not seek notoriety after his hike. He did not consider it all that remarkable. He and Eugenia moved to Macon in 1960, where he worked at the Naval Ordnance Plant and was an aerospace engineer at Robins Air Force Base.

He became a legend in the hiking world. In 2008, he wrote his autobiography, “The Trail of My Life.” His book has been displayed everywhere from the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., to L.L. Bean in Freeport, Maine.

In Macon, he often spoke to school groups and scout troops about his hike and desire to seek “God in nature.’’

Espy was among those who cut the ribbon for the dedication of the visitor’s center at Amicalola Falls in 2023.  A commemorative plaque honoring him was placed where a section of the trail crosses the Richard Russell Scenic Highway between Helen and Blairsville. 

There is a carved bust of Espy at the Appalachian Trail Hall of Fame at Pine Grove Furnace State Park in Pennsylvania, which is near the midpoint of the trail. Espy was one of six men inducted into the inaugural Hall of Fame class in 2011. The late Earl Shaffer, who was credited with finishing in August 1948, six years before Espy, was among those inducted posthumously.

Although the  Appalachian Trail Conservancy recognizes Shaffer as the pioneer of the AT, some trail historians have claimed that Espy actually might have been the first thru-hiker. Shaffer reportedly bypassed about 170 miles of the trail by taking shortcuts on country roads and traveling for short distances as a
hitchhiker. 

The soft-spoken Espy once said, “hiking the trail meant more to me than just about anything I’ve ever done.’’