by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Readers of American author Bill Bryson will be surprised that anyone would want to hike the gruelling Appalachian Trail in its entirety. At 3,500 mountainous kilometres, spanning 14 states from Georgia's Springer Mountain to Katahdin, Maine, the trail is the ne plus ultra of North American hiking. Bryson, author of A Walk in the Woods, an amusing personal account of his ultimately unsuccessful attempt to through-hike (i.e. walk non-stop) the trail over a summer, suggests that anyone foolhardy enough to try it deserves what they get - six months of bugs, bears, cramps, dehydration and bone-wearying exhaustion.

To 20-year-old Erica Zelfand, it sounds like a good challenge. The socially conscious Ottawa-born and Massachusetts-raised McGill student, however, isn't getting on the trail just for kicks and a dose of pain: she's raising money for Action Against Hunger, an organization operating in 40 countries providing immediate food relief and encouraging food security.

Zelfand is all too aware of the 90 per cent hiker dropout rate, but says that one inspiration for her and her hiking partner/boyfriend will be her mala, a 108-bead Tibetan prayer wheel that will be inscribed with the names of donors. It'll help her along the way, she says, "because I know people believe in me."

For the next three months she'll be training in high-altitude Colorado, to both build muscle mass and get ready for the five-and-a-half-month hike. She plans to start out from Georgia in March.

Of course, she is somewhat nervous. "Bears freak me out," she says. And what about the prospect of being a young Jewish Yankee woman tramping her way through Deliverance country? "Um, I don't really want to talk about that."

To check on Erica's progress or to donate, visit www.hikeagainsthunger.com or e-mail hikeagainsthunger@bust.com.