The blind hiker who was found near the Appalachian Trail in May after wandering lost for nearly a week says the experience hasn’t kept him away from the outdoors.

The last time locals saw Ken Knight, he was being wheeled into Lynchburg General Hospital after his discovery.

Knight, 42, of Ann Arbor, Mich., was hiking the Appalachian Trail through Amherst County toward the Peaks of Otter when he lost his way on April 26. Although he was traveling with a group and is an experienced hiker, he became separated from the others and wasn’t reported missing for two more days.

As he puts it on his blog, “It’s also worth noting that I’m legally blind.”

He was found on May 2. After a series of small signal fires went unnoticed, he lit a larger one and was eventually led out of the woods by volunteers from the Big Island Fire Department.

“Life goes on,” Knight said in a mid-December telephone interview. “Certainly, you learn things about yourself, but that’s going to be true for anybody. I don’t know if I’d call it a profound life-changing experience.”

The lessons learned aren’t anything he cares to make public, he said, nor are they likely to be applicable to others.

“What you find about yourself is for you,” he said.

On his blog, awanderingknight.blogspot.com, he wrote that the experience shook his self-confidence. By August, though, he was hiking in the Sierra Nevada. He posted videos this month from hikes in the mountains around Tucson, Ariz.

“There is a part of me that would like to come back down there and find out where I screwed up,” he said. “I have a pretty good notion where that is.”

He said he has no immediate plans to return to Virginia, though.

He hopes his next big adventure will be the Great Outdoor Challenge in Scotland. Knight had been conditioning for the 2009 event when he became lost. He missed it while recuperating in Michigan.

He’s also shown a sense of humor about his lost week, posting a link to a video titled “Milk Carton Ken” on YouTube. The video features a “have you seen me?” ad on the side of the carton with Knight’s name and photo.

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