Posted by on 9/16/2022 to
An amazing German Shepherd seeing-eye dog named Orient and his human, Bill Irwin, were quite a pair.
Orient led his human through the Appalachian Trail, which stretches more than 2,100 miles, from Georgia to Maine. Irwin was the first blind man to make the journey.
As he walked the length of the Appalachian Trail for eight months in 1990, Bill Irwin estimated that he fell thousands of times. He cracked his ribs and suffered from hypothermia as he climbed mountains and forded rivers. Irwin did not use maps or a compass, since he was blind, and he relied solely on his guide dog, Orient.
The pair became known as “the Orient Express.”
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