The big promise of the Appalachian Trail, a 2,000-mile path that picks its way along mountain ridges and through hardwood forests, from sunny Georgia to breezy Maine, is wilderness.

In a country this loud and this populated, isolation is a big draw; but you don’t always get it. In some places, joining the narrow path through the trees feels like waiting in line at a Times Square subway turnstile. Walk in winter, though, and you’ll have all the wilderness you could wish for.

I’d say, of the 4m people who take on the trail each year, 3,999,980 do it in summer. In winter, your only concern is the cold. It can be merely fridge-like during the day; at night, sleep in one of the trail’s wooden shelters and you could be settling down in something colder than the inside of an industrial meat locker. Yet with proper prepa­ration, and a little fitness, you have one of the world’s great walks to yourself.

I hiked with an old friend, Dan, carrying everything we needed for three days of wilderness in our packs. We turned off Connecticut’s Route 55 and parked a few hundred yards from where we’d worked out that the trail crossed the road. The first test of friendship came half an hour later, when we still hadn’t found exactly where that happened.

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The path is often no wider than an animal track, so it’s marked the whole way with blazes: small rectangles, 3in by 6in, cut into the trees and painted white. Unfortunately, white paint on white-barked trees doesn’t stand out well against snow.

The walk up through the woods on Ten Mile Hill wasn’t what I expected. There was snow crunching under our boots, but no sound of cars or planes, or civilisation of any kind; and views way back across where we’d driven that morning... all of which was lovely.

The problem was the temperature: I was overheating. Even though it was only 3C, we still had to stop every 10 minutes to stuff a sweat-soaked hat into a pocket or loop a fleece round a neck, until finally — my Everest-proof jacket tied around my waist, as if it were a regular anorak and we were on a sunny walk across Wimbledon Common — we reached the summit. Just how bad could this cold be?

An hour later, we followed a side trail (marked by blue blazes) out of the woods and onto a field heavy and silent with snow. At one end was our shelter, a three-sided wooden lean-to, 12ft across and 5ft wide, with a sleeping platform raised up off the ground. We heaved our packs in and, with steam rising off our backs and the hissing of our camp stove the only sound, we felt like conquerors of the wild frontier.

Then the sun dropped behind the hills. The temperature hit -5C. The sweat froze on our backs. We scrambled to put our tents up in the lean-to, cursing the fact that the only thing it actually leant to was a giant field of frigid air. Once tea had been brewed and our heat’n’eat meals consumed, and with a small wind-up radio playing Dvorak to accompany the dark, we were happy again.

There was only one thing that would get me out of my sleeping bag — and I covered the hundred yards to the privy hut in a new personal best. In these surroundings, the lock­able door and the plastic seat raised above the 3ft drop to the ground felt extremely civilised.

The next morning, our breath hung in the air and the cold had frozen our laces rigid. We ate our oats and got moving quickly, spooking a bald eagle from its tree and sending it on its way. We stopped only for lunch — 50 minutes leaning against a tree, spooning ready meals straight from their bags — but it took us a long day to cover the eight miles to our next shelter.

There’s not much that deserves the mountaineers’ term “technical” here. It’s a lot like climbing the Surrey Hills: the path is usually compacted dirt, there’s the occasional inconvenient rock to walk around and the odd stream to leap in a single bound. It’s just that, in its search for scenic beauty, the

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