Release from Dawn, 57th Day of Autumn, 525 M.E. (Helios): It's a walking day and I hiked a very urban 8.7-mile Van Buren. 

To keep things interesting, I like to change the course of my walks every once in a while. Usually, I alternate between my local northwest Beltline trail and the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area, but since the government shutdown has furloughed the DOI park rangers, I don't want to put any wear and tear on the 'Hooch trails while there's no one around for maintenance and clean up (not that I litter or require someone to clean up behind me, but, you know, the principal of the thing). 

This morning I saw some news item about the opening of a new section of Atlanta's Path 400 trail. It's a 5.2-mile trail that runs through the busy, affluent Buckhead section of uptown Atlanta. The southern trailhead, Mile 0, is only 3.3 miles from my house, so I decided to give it a go. 

I walked my usual Beltline trail for the first half mile, then climbed the steep hill along Colonial Homes Drive up out of the Peachtree Creek floodplain and onto busy Peachtree Street. I walked a half mile or so north along the sidewalk on Peachtree, passing various retail districts, restaurants, and apartment buildings as traffic thundered past on the six-lane road. Eventually, I turned east for a mile along far quieter Peachtree Hills Avenue (a lot of things are called "Peachtree something" around here), passing through a leafy neighborhood of single-family homes. Another quarter mile south on Piedmont Road, another car sewer, and I was at the 0-mile marker for Path 400.

You can drop any thoughts you might have had about rugged, dirt-bike mountain trails. Path 400 is a wide, paved, multi-use trail designed for walkers and runners, bicyclists, baby strollers, dog walkers, roller-bladers, and what have you, although I had the trail pretty much to myself on this workday afternoon.  Since I had already walked 3.3 miles just to get there and had another 3.3 miles to get back, I didn't try to walk the entire 5.2-mile trail. Instead, I took it a few hundred yards to the junction with something called the South Fork Confluence Trail, which after a quarter-mile or so of concrete turned into more of the dirt-trail kind of experience one might expect. 

The Confluence Trail runs about a mile along the South Fork of Peachtree Creek, but also passes under the extremely wide Interstate I-85. This dark section of trail beneath the highway looks like the ideal spot for a homeless encampment, although I didn't see any. In fact, it was suspiciously clean, as if the authorities might have recently cleared the area and paid some contractors to clean it all up. It was still a little spooky to be honest, and although I didn't see anyone else around, it was that solitude that made me nervous - should I have run into trouble and needed help, there was no one and nothing around. Under I-85, no one can hear you scream.

After a mile, the trail ended at an apartment complex and I had to turn around and pass under the interstate again. I survived, obviously, and didn't encounter any trouble, but I don't feel any strong attraction to walk that section again.

When I got back to the Path 400 trail, I decided to check out another spur, the Creek Walk Connector. Unlike the Confluence Trail, this was a wide, paved trail like the Path 400, but it too passed under I-85 and some of its ramps. Under there, I found all the homeless encampments that had been cleared from the Confluence Trail. 

And let's be clear - the encampments weren't just under the highway or even merely near the trail, they were right on the actual trail itself. Small shelters set up right on the paved trail, constructed of cardboard boxes, supermarket carts, a few boards, random timbers, and other debris, with three to five or more people, mostly men, sitting or standing around. 

I thought about turning back but some stubborn part of me compelled me to pass through. Happily, I wasn't hassled or bothered in the least. No one asked for spare change, no one tried to rope me into a conversation, no one shouted some incomprehensible request. I nodded politely to a few folks as I passed by, but avoided direct eye contact and kept on walking. However, the encampments got bigger and more populous the further I progressed into the cave-like darkness, each one a test of my resolve not to turn back. I kept walking, though, and ultimately passed through back into the sunlight without incident, but that was probably as much good luck on my part as the good etiquette of the homeless.

On the return trip, I detoured around the encampment on a surface street rather than press my luck passing through the camps again. Another spur trail I don't see myself walking again any time soon.

In 2017, a fire started beneath that very portion of I-85 where I saw the camps today, and a 92-foot section of the highway collapsed. I drove over the fire on my way home from work mere minutes before the road collapsed, and managed to snap a picture through my windshield. 

It was widely assumed that the fires were started by those very encampment I walked through today. Three homeless men were arrested, although charges were later dropped and it was found that Georgia DOT contributed to the fire by negligently storing flammable materials under the bridge there. 

Anyway, this isn't saying anything negative about the Path 400 trail itself. All the close encounters of the homeless kind were on spur trails off of the Path 400, and of my 8.6 miles walked today, only about 400 yards were along Path 400. I'll return some time later this month, but when I get to the trailhead, I'll hike north into the bosom of Buckhead and away from those creepy spur trails snaking beneath the interstate highways.