A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

What's inside (9 sections)

1. An old friend answers the phone
2. Georgia clay and early rain
3. Towns, hunger, and the easy miles
4. What about the bears
5. History lessons between climbs
6. Quitting and the road to Maine
7. Where it creaks
8. Key takeaways
9. FAQ

I grabbed this one after a summer when my own hikes kept ending early. My knees hurt, my pack felt too heavy, and a friend kept sending me photos from the Shenandoah. Someone at the library said if you want to feel better about quitting, read Bryson. Broadway Books put it out in 1998, 304 pages in the edition I found, and I finished it on the couch with maps open on my phone.

The setup is simple. Bryson had just moved back to the United States after living in England for close to twenty years. He settled in Hanover, New Hampshire, looked out at woods behind his house, and realized the Appalachian Trail ran right through town. The trail goes from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine, more than two thousand miles through fourteen states. Most people who try to walk it all in one season fail. Bryson knew that. He was in his forties, soft around the middle, fond of comfort. Still the idea stuck.

He also gives you the backstory of the path itself, which I liked more than I expected. Benton MacKaye, a forester with a big idea, proposed a long mountain trail in 1921. Myron Avery and a crowd of volunteers and club crews then spent years cutting, marking, and linking it together. Bryson jumps between his own preparations and these older fights over routes, shelters, and who gets credit. He writes about the Trail Conference, the white blazes on trees, the lean tos, the way the route kept shifting as roads and parks changed. It never reads like a textbook. It reads like a guy killing time in a library before a trip he is not ready for.

An old friend answers the phone

The book takes off when Bryson starts looking for someone to walk with. His wife does not want him going alone. Friends make polite excuses. Then Stephen Katz picks up.

Katz is the old school friend from Des Moines, Iowa. Readers of Bryson's earlier memoir will remember him. Here he is older, heavier, out of work, eating poorly, sleeping badly, and completely unprepared for a long walk. He owns no gear. He has not exercised in years. He says yes anyway, mostly because he wants an adventure and a free excuse to leave Iowa for a while.

Their reunion is funny and a little tense. Katz flies east. They go to an outfitter and stare at walls of gear. Bryson buys too much at first. Katz buys odd stuff and asks blunt questions about bears and toilets and rain. The outfitter staff talk about base weight and water filters and boots versus trail runners. Bryson tries to sound knowledgeable and fails.

I laughed at the packing scenes because they felt true. They lay everything on the floor. Sleeping bags, stoves, filters, first aid kits, books, extra clothes, food for days. Then they try to lift the packs and can barely stand. They mail things home. They argue about what counts as essential. Katz wants candy and coffee and fresh shirts. Bryson wants maps and guidebooks and spare batteries. Both end up carrying too much food because hunger scares them more than hills.

There is a short practice feel to these pages. They are not athletes. They are two middle aged men trying to remember how to sleep on the ground.

Georgia clay and early rain

They start in Georgia in early spring at Springer Mountain. It rains. The trail is mud, roots, and cold puddles. The climbs feel endless even though the mountains are not high by western standards. Their legs burn. Their shoulders ache. Blisters form fast.

Bryson is good on the small miseries. Boots that felt fine in the store now pinch. Packs rub hips raw. Everything is damp. They learn to hang food bags from trees to keep mice and bears away. They learn to filter brown creek water. They learn that guidebook distances lie, at least to tired legs.

The shelters become a whole social world. These are mostly three sided wooden structures with a platform, a fire pit nearby, a privy out back, room for six or eight tired people. Some nights they sleep in shelters. Some nights they pitch tents to escape snorers. Mice run over sleeping bags. Someone always has a loud stove or a bright headlamp. Trail names get passed around. Thru hikers half their age float past with tiny packs and huge appetites.

Katz struggles right away. He wheezes uphill. He needs long rests. He jokes to cover it, then gets quiet. Bryson worries but does not always say the right thing. He pushes a little, then feels guilty. He describes Katz with a lot of jokes about weight and appetite and snoring. Some of it is affectionate. Some of it lands hard now.

They make slow progress through Georgia into North Carolina. The woods are bare, then starting to bud. Views open on ridges. Small towns mean hot showers, laundry, burgers, and resupply boxes. They eat enormous breakfasts. They buy Pop Tarts and noodles and peanut butter. They learn that town stops cost a full day even when you promise yourself it will be quick.

Around the Smokies the weather turns colder and the rules get stricter about shelters and permits. The climbs are longer. Katz falls behind more often. Bryson starts to wonder if either of them can keep this up for five months.

Towns, hunger, and the easy miles

One of the best stretches covers Virginia and the Shenandoah. By then they have stopped trying to walk every single mile in order. This is normal for many long walkers, but Bryson is open about skipping. They take rides. They miss sections. They do day loops. Purists would object. He shrugs and keeps going.

Shenandoah National Park feels like relief after the southern climbs. The trail there runs close to Skyline Drive, with gentle grades, frequent waysides, deer on lawns, blacktop crossings, and soft evening light through oaks. They can buy milkshakes and sit on walls and watch fog fill hollows. After weeks of rain and rocks, those miles feel kind.

Bryson uses the easier walking to talk. He talks about trees. Chestnut blight wiped out huge forests. Hemlocks were under attack. Acid rain thinned high spruce. He talks about the Park Service, the Forest Service, road building, logging history, and how much of the eastern woods is regrowth rather than old growth. You learn a lot without feeling lectured because he keeps tying it back to what he sees. A dead trunk here. A stone wall in woods there. A sign about bears here.

Food remains a constant theme. On trail they are always a little hungry. In town they order too much. Pancakes, eggs, bacon, then sandwiches to carry out. Katz lives for these stops. Bryson pretends to be more restrained and then eats just as much. Motel rooms smell of wet socks and bug spray. They wash clothes in sinks. They call home. They check blisters and blackened toenails and laugh because what else can you do.

Other hikers drift in and out. Young thru hikers with trail names. Section hikers out for a week. Day hikers with clean shoes and questions. A few odd and lonely figures who add color. Mary Ellen, an early companion they try to shake, is played for laughs in a way that made me wince. She is pushy and clueless on the page, and Bryson and Katz handle her badly. It is funny in the moment and less funny after.

What about the bears

Everyone asks about bears, so Bryson spends real time on them. He reads attack reports. He calls agencies. He worries at night.

Black bears live through much of the Appalachian range, especially in the Smokies and the Shenandoah. Most are shy and want your food, not you. Bryson knows this in his head. His stomach does not believe it. Every snapped twig becomes a bear. Every dark shape near the shelter becomes a bear. Katz is worse. He ties food bags with extra knots and sleeps with a knife near his pillow, which experts tell you not to do.

The comedy peaks when they buy bear precautions they barely know how to use. Bells, sprays, ropes for hangs. They argue about whether to cook near the tent. They argue about toothpaste smells. They lie awake listening to mice and convince themselves the mice weigh four hundred pounds.

Under the jokes there is solid information. How rarely bears harm people in the east. How food storage matters more than weapons. How park rules grew out of past mistakes when tourists fed bears from cars. Bryson also folds in other risks that deserve more fear than bears. Falling limbs. Bad water. Lightning on ridges. Ticks and Lyme disease. Hypothermia when a warm rain turns cold. He had me checking my own tick habits after one passage about crawling insects and rashes.

The woods themselves get close attention. He loves the spring return, warblers, trillium, mountain laurel later on. He hates the parts where the trail drops to road crossings, gas stations, and loud gaps. He keeps asking why America saved narrow corridors of green while letting so much around them get cut or paved. That question sits under the bear jokes and gives them weight.

History lessons between climbs

Bryson cannot walk past a plaque without reading it three times, and this book is full of side trips into history. Some readers will love these pauses. Some will want him back on the trail.

He covers the building of the trail in more detail as he goes north. MacKaye wanted more than a footpath. He imagined camps and communities and a retreat from industrial life. Avery wanted a marked route that people could actually walk, and he pushed crews to finish it. Their split tells you a lot about American conservation, dreamers versus organizers. Bryson sides with the walkers but respects the dream.

He also writes about logging in Maine and New Hampshire, coal and towns in Pennsylvania, the Civilian Conservation Corps stonework, the Blue Ridge Parkway, Gettysburg country farther off route. In Pennsylvania the trail crosses rocky ridges that chew boots. The rocks slow them down and sour their mood. He fills those slow miles with geology and old industry, iron furnaces, mines, rail grades.

Water gets a chapter of its own in spirit if not in title. Springs, creeks, beaver ponds, the long search for a clean sip in dry stretches. He talks about Giardia, filters, iodine, and the old habit of drinking straight from streams. He admits he drank risky water and got lucky.

A few of these lessons run long. When he is angry at the Forest Service or the Park Service, he piles on. Some of the figures he cites about timber sales and budgets were tied to the 1990s and read dated now. I skimmed a page or two on agency policy. But most of the history lands because it explains the ground under his feet. Why this shelter sits here. Why that bald has no trees. Why a town looks tired near a pretty gap.

Quitting and the road to Maine

They do not walk the whole trail. That is the open secret of the book and Bryson does not hide it.

After hundreds of miles, with sore bodies and frayed patience, they leave the trail in Virginia. Katz in particular is done. His feet hurt, his pack feels cruel, the fun has thinned out. Bryson keeps doing shorter hikes without Katz for a while, linking up with other friends, driving between sections, walking parts of Pennsylvania and New York and New England. He enjoys day hikes. He sleeps in beds. The pressure lifts.

Then, near the end of the season, they agree to try the hardest remote part together. The Hundred Mile Wilderness in Maine, a stretch of lakes, bogs, roots, and low mountains leading toward Baxter State Park and Mount Katahdin. No towns. Few roads. Real loons at night. Real cold water. Real need to carry food for many days.

Katz returns for this part, heavier and less fit than before, which Bryson notes too often. They slog through mud and mosquitoes. They ford streams. They climb Katahdin in weather that allows it. Standing on that bare summit rock feels earned even though they skipped most of the middle. Bryson admits the gap plainly. They walked about eight hundred miles in pieces, not the full two thousand plus. He does not pretend otherwise.

I respected that honesty, though part of me wanted a cleaner finish. A thru hike has a clear arc. This has a messier shape. Start with big talk, suffer, cheat a little, quit, poke around, come back for a hard taste at the end. That mess feels human. It also lets Bryson dodge the long grind that makes real thru hiker memoirs repetitive. He gets the highlights and skips the weeks of green tunnel.

The last pages sit with what the walk meant. Not a triumph. More like relief mixed with fondness. He is glad to be home, glad to have seen so much forest, glad Katz stuck it out as long as he did. He worries about the trail's future, about funding, about crowds, about careless use. He ends on the woods rather than himself, which suited the book.

Where it creaks

This is a funny book that has not aged perfectly.

The jokes about Katz make up a lot of the humor, and they repeat. Fat, slow, sweaty, loud, hungry. The first dozen times I laughed. By Pennsylvania I felt the pattern and wished Bryson had given Katz more interior life. Katz gets good lines and real moments of courage, especially in Maine, but he remains mostly a foil. A modern reader may hear cruelty where Bryson intended teasing between old friends.

Women barely exist here except as wives on the phone, waitresses, or trail oddities. Mary Ellen gets a rough ride. Bryson knows he behaved badly and says so, but the pages still use her for easy laughs. Gay hikers, Black hikers, older women hikers who now make up more of trail culture get little space. This was a book about two white men of a certain age walking in the 1990s, and it shows.

The environmental writing is strong but one sided. Bryson loves the woods and hates what people did to them, often with good cause. Still he can sound like a tourist who wants wilderness with motels nearby. He skips miles by car, then scolds road builders. He wants solitude, then complains about empty shelters. I found those contradictions likable because he owns them, but they are contradictions.

Pace sags in the middle when history takes over from walking. If you came only for Katz falling over, the pages on forestry policy will test you. I came to like those pages on second reading, but the first time I wanted more trail and less lecture.

None of that ruined it for me. The sentences move. The descriptions of rain, rocks, hunger, and relief are exact. The friendship, lopsided as it is, holds the center. When Katz waits on a rock while Bryson checks the map, or when they split a huge meal without speaking, you feel years between them. That warmth covers a lot of flaws.

If you hike, you will recognize the shelters, the mice, the white blazes, the math of miles and snacks. If you do not hike, you will still get a clear picture of why people try long trails and why most stop. Bring this on a weekend trip for the funny chapters. Read the Maine ending at home when you can look at a map. You will close it wanting to walk farther than you do, and grateful for a shower when you stop.

FAQ

Did Bryson and Katz walk the whole Appalachian Trail?

No. They walked about eight hundred miles in sections, skipped large parts by car, quit in Virginia, then returned for Maine's Hundred Mile Wilderness and Mount Katahdin.

When was A Walk in the Woods published?

Broadway Books published it in 1998. The standard edition runs 304 pages and covers Bryson's hike after his return from England.

Is the book only for hikers?

No. Hikers will recognize shelters and blisters, but the humor, trail history, and friendship carry it for general readers who enjoy travel memoirs.