Every history of the Appalachian Trail tells the story from the top down, focusing on who proposed the trail, who built it, who maintain it, and on a few of the most famous hikers. My new book, A Hiker’s History of Appalachian Trail, tells the trail’s history from the ground up, or more accurately, from the boots up. Several million hikers each year set foot on the trail for a few hours, a few days, or perhaps a few weeks. The trail was created for them, yet their role in its history is largely ignored. To make sense of the experiences of all AT hikers over the past 100 years, I dug through hundreds of trail shelter registers, hiker accounts submitted to trail clubs, newspaper and magazine stories about the experiences of casual hikers, photographs, old films, and many other sources. All that time in the archives of the various trail clubs and organizations managing the trail made it possible for me to tell the story of what it was like to hike the trail from the late 1920s right up to the present. What did those hikers eat 50 or 100 years ago? What kind of gear did they carry? Why did they go hiking in the first place? What was their relationship to the natural world they found along the trail? What was it like to hike as a woman, as a person of color, as someone with a disability? And how did all those things change over the 100 years of the trail’s history?
A Hiker’s History is now available for purchase. Because I’m a big fan of independent bookstores, I urge you to go to your local independent bookstore and request a copy. Or you can pre-order from Blacksburg Books (Blacksburg, VA), Royal Oak Books (Front Royal, VA), or perhaps Bound Books (York, PA). All three are women-owned shops. You can pre-order directly from my publisher. And, of course, there’s always Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
My previous book tells a story of the Appalachian Trail that is all but forgotten by hikers, but not by the residents of the southwestern Virginia counties that the trail used to cross. Virginia’s Lost Appalachian Trail is both a history of the AT and a story of the power of memory in rural communities traversed by the trail.
For more than two decades, hikers on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia walked through some of the most beautiful landscapes of the southern Appalachian Mountains. But in 1952, the Appalachian Trail Conference moved the trail more than 50 miles to the west. That change meant abandoning 300 miles of the trail’s original route and was the single largest re-routing of the AT in the trail’s long history.
Order your copy today from Arcadia Publishing or you can support your favorite independent bookstore by buying the book directly from them. If you don’t have a local store, I recommend:
- Blacksburg Books in Blacksburg
- New Dominion Bookshop in Charlottesville
- Chapters Bookshop in Galax
- And, of course, there’s always Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
