CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Jeff Alt promises not to be as hungry this time as he was on a previous trip through West Virginia.

It was 1998. Alt was hiking the 2,159-mile Appalachian Trail at the time, and he stopped at a Harpers Ferry buffet to eat. As he walked back from the food line for the umpteenth time, with a hot fudge sundae stacked three times as high as it should have been, he heard a woman exclaim, “That’s it! I’m going to walk that Appalachian Trail so I can eat like that!”

Alt will visit Charleston’s Taylor Books on Dec. 12 to sign copies of the book he wrote about the 147-day hike from Springer Mountain, Ga., to Mount Katahdin, Maine. The book, “A Walk for Sunshine,” is now in its third edition.

“This latest edition includes a ‘life lessons’ epilogue,” Alt explained. “Ten years after the experience, I looked back to see how many of the lessons I learned on the trail had stuck with me. It made me do some serious reflection.”

The book gets its title from the Sunshine Children’s Home in Maumee, Ohio. Alt’s brother Aaron, who suffers from cerebral palsy and mental retardation, lives there. Alt undertook his epic hike to raise money for the facility.

Along the way, he battled blistered feet, 10-foot snowdrifts, minus-20 temperatures, a hair-raising brush with a suspected serial killer and a charge from an irate bear.

“I was 30 years old when I hiked the trail,” he said. “I’m 42 now, and I can still taste the dust kicked up by my trekking poles. Not a day goes by that I don’t revisit my trip. It realigned my entire life.”

Alt didn’t originally plan to write a book about his experience; as he describes it, “It just happened.”

“Like a lot of [people who hike the trail from end to end without stopping], I kept a journal,” he said. “Every time I stopped for supplies, I mailed my journal pages home to my stepfather. When I finished the hike, he presented me with the finished journal.

“Then I started speaking to groups about the hike. I always had more stories than I could share in an hour-long lecture. People said I needed to write a book, so I took the collected journal notes and wrote the book.”

Alt said the most difficult part of his hike came soon after it began, as he reached the southern limits of the Smoky Mountains.

“I had started a month earlier than most hikers because 1998 was an El Niño year and the weather was supposed to be warmer. At one point the temperature, with wind chill, reached 20 below zero. On Clingman’s Dome in Tennessee, the snowdrifts were 10 feet deep. I sprained an ankle sliding around in the snow.”

A two-day rest in nearby Gatlinburg helped Alt recover enough to continue. He said the journey’s most rewarding moments occurred when he simply took the time to think.

“All you’re doing is hiking, eating and sleeping,” he explained. “Once your mind jells on that concept, you realize you have a lot of time to think. It was great to be able to think a lot about my life, about the people you love, and to notice things in the woods you would never have notice before.”

Despite having so much time to think – or perhaps because of it – Alt never once thought about quitting.

“My spirits never waned because I was walking for a cause way bigger than myself,” he said. “Just knowing that one guy in the woods was making a difference for such a worthy cause helped push me over the mountains.”

Alt’s hike raised $16,000 for the Sunshine Children’s Home. Since then, he has spearheaded a yearly 5-kilometer public walk to benefit the facility. “We had more than 400 people participating this year. We raised around $20,000. The total to date is up to nearly $180,000,” he said.

Copies of Alt’s books will be available at Taylor Books. The book signing is scheduled for 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

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