Appalachian Trail

The subject of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, which traces the trail’s origins to Benton MacKaye, who in 1921 offered the idea to Whitaker and published it in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects. The hiking path was only part of MacKaye’s grand vision: he imagined the AT as a thread connecting a network of mountaintop work camps where depleted urban workers would do “healthful toil,” alongside hostels, study centers, and eventually “self-owning” woodland villages — a “retreat from profit” that one biographer thought smacked of Bolshevism.

Bryson’s book renders the trail as a place of Solitude and deprivation, where removing yourself “so thoroughly from the conveniences of everyday life” makes the most ordinary things — processed cheese, a cold can of pop — fill you with wonder. He records the culture of “Trail Magic,” the serendipitous kindnesses that appear “when things look darkest,” and frames life on the trail as a tranquil tedium “far removed from the seats of strife.” Against the AT’s permanence (fifty-nine years old at the time of the hike, outlasting the Oregon, Santa Fe, and Lincoln highways), Bryson sets a critique of car-dependent America, where “beauty has become something you drive to” — every twenty minutes on the trail, he and Katz walked farther than the average American walks in a week.

Context: The Appalachian Trail is a roughly 2,200-mile marked hiking footpath running along the Appalachian Mountains from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine. Conceived by forester Benton MacKaye in 1921 and completed in 1937, it is maintained largely by volunteers and managed today by the National Park Service and the Appalachian Trail Conservancy.

Where this appears

• A Walk in the Woods — the trail is the book’s central subject: its founding via Benton MacKaye, the “Trail Magic” culture, the deprivation-as-wonder theme, and the AT as a foil to car-dependent America.