A Personal Connection

Noriyoshi Katō. Shinetsu Trail & Noriyoshi Katō: Interview Book.  Image used with permission from the Shinetsu Trail Club.

My family’s home in northern Georgia is a twenty-minute drive to Springer Mountain, the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. Our personal connection to the Shinetsu Trail is through Katō Noriyoshi, whom my parents met by being involved in a 2002 documentary produced by NHK, the Japanese national broadcasting company, about the AT.

Katō told my parents of his interest in using the AT as a model for the Shinetsu Trail, as well as his plans to thru-hike the AT once he secured sponsors for the book he planned about the trail. They stayed in touch; the following fall, Katō and the four other individuals from the Shinetsu Trail Club made a weeklong visit to consult with regional AT organizations on how to create and manage a long-distance hiking trail.

Katō returned to thru-hike the AT in 2005. As his first “trail angels,” my family sent Katō packages of food and gear to post offices near the trail as he made his way northward over the next several months. Although I grew up going on hikes with my family on the AT and had seen thru-hikers stay in my town before beginning their trek in the spring, I was curious about how and why someone like Katō would travel all the way from Japan, where my mother is from, to hike the trail. My childhood memories of Katō made me want to know more about his influence in Japan and the development of long trails there.

Before Katō passed away in 2013 from ALS, conversations about his vision for creating the Shinetsu Trail were compiled in this interview book.

In this photopraph of the Shinetsu Trail Club visit to Georgia from 2002, Katō is in the middle with a cap; my parents, Sayuri and Joe Adams, are on the right side; and I am holding the bunny. Toward the left from Katō: Konuma Mitsuo (Shinetsu Trail Club director), Watanabe Ryouka (wife of Watanabe Takamitsu), and Kimura Hiroshi (Mori-no-Ie manager).