On Trails

CHAPTER 5

THE MODERN hiking trail is an uncanny thing. We hikers generally assume it is an ancient, earthborn creation—as old as dirt. But in truth, hiking was invented by nature-starved urbanites in the last three hundred years, and trails have sprouted new shapes to fulfill their hunger. To properly understand the nature of a hiking trail, one must trace the origins of that yearning, back through those early hikers to their ancestors, who set off the chain of innovations and calamities that would gradually distance humans from the planet that birthed them.

I once asked a young Cherokee woman named Yolanda Saunooke, who works at the Tribal Historic Preservation Office of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, if she knew any hikers. She thought for a moment and then replied that she and her friends had spent much of their childhoods running around in the woods. “I don’t know if that’s considered hiking—playing on your own land, considering that it’s mountainous . . .” she said. That phrase, “on your own land,” snagged in the tissue of my brain. Could one go hiking on one’s own land? If so, what differentiates a hike from a very long walk?

I asked some of my fellow hikers, and they all agreed that hiking on one’s own land would be rather like camping in one’s backyard, a kind of pantomime of the real experience. A true hike requires wilderness—­land outside of one’s (or anyone’s) land.I The land must meet certain additional conditions: it must be both remote and reachable; it must be devoid of enemies or bandits, but also free of too many tourists or technology; and, most important, it must be deemed worth exploring—which is to say, people must first have learned how to derive worth from it, be it aesthetic or aerobic. This collision of circumstances only occurred in the modern era, when the mechanical creep of industrialism both gave us greater access to the wild and rendered it a vanishing, cherished commodity.

It is no mere coincidence, then, that the English verb to hike, meaning “to walk for pleasure in open country,” dates back just two hundred years, nor that hiking, used as a gerund, only appeared in the twentieth century. Prior to that shift, the meaning of the word hike fell somewhere between “to sneak” and “to schlep.” The command to “take a hike!” (as in, “scram!”) is a remnant of this older meaning. The history of how we transitioned from the one sense of the word to the other is, in some sense, the story of how modern people, and our trails, grew to finally embrace that strange thing we call wilderness.

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In all the weeks I spent in Cherokee country, I only met one Cherokee hiker: Gilliam Jackson, the (aforementioned) administrator of the Cherokee-language Kituwah Academy. Lamar Marshall had put us in touch, saying that Jackson was renowned for “going on some of the most killer marches through the Smoky Mountains that you ever heard of.” This proved to be no great exaggeration. Jackson told me he had hiked as many as forty-eight miles in a single day, and he estimated that he walked a thousand miles a year.

When I met him, he was planning to embark on a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail to celebrate his retirement. If he was successful, he believed he would be the first full-blooded Cherokee to thru-hike the whole trail.II

I once asked Jackson why so few Cherokees hike. He thought this over for a moment, then replied, “I think that life has always been such a struggle on the reservation, that just survival was the biggie.” Jackson had grown up in a small cabin—just “a box”—at the foot of the Snowbird Mountains, forty miles west of the reservation. His ancestors had managed to avoid the Removal by hiding in those mountains. Jackson was the third oldest of seven siblings: William, Lou, Shirley, Jacob, Ethel, and Esther. The whole family slept in the same room, with half the children in bed with one parent, and the other half in bed with the other. (Jackson joked that he had no idea how his parents ever found time to make more babies.) He and his siblings ran around the forest barefoot all summer. Every afternoon, it was his chore to collect firewood for the stove. His mother supplemented their meals of beans and bread with food they gathered from the woods: stewed venison or squirrel, mushrooms, and wild greens like sochan, ramps, poke, and branch lettuce. At night, they would glob pinesap onto the end of sticks and ignite them to use as torches. “Probably from the day I was born I’ve always been in the woods,” he said.

In his teens, Jackson began exploring the trails in his area, borrowing his uncle’s truck to embark on long hikes, equipped with only a wool blanket and some food pilfered from the pantry in his rucksack. He didn’t remember what made him start hiking at a time when most other Cherokees didn’t; he just enjoyed being out on the trail. In college, he met a group of outdoorsy white friends, and his hiking trips grew longer and longer. He eventually ran seven marathons, won a national whitewater canoeing competition, and helped found an adventure camp for at-risk Cherokee teens, which ran for twenty years before the funding dried up.

Every time I traveled back to the mountains of North Carolina, I would set aside a day to take a hike with Jackson. I loved walking with him. He hiked at a fast clip, but he paused frequently to point out plants I might have otherwise overlooked: wild iris, Indian pipe, coral mushrooms, and an odd flower called a pipsissewa, which resembled a doleful white eyeball staring at its own roots. He broke off a leaf from a sourwood tree for me to taste, and he yanked out a sassafras root, which smelled strongly of root beer. On one hike, he spotted a hen-of-the-woods mushroom, which resembled the brain of a whale: huge, gray, and labyrinthine. He carefully cut it out, took it home, soaked it in salt water to draw the insects out, and then pan-fried it in butter.

While we hiked, we often talked about the Appalachian Trail. He had countless questions for me about the logistics of a thru-hike. I warned him that opinions differed wildly, but I nevertheless had a few pieces of ironclad advice: pack light, eat healthy, and hike from south to north. (Starting out from craggy Mount Katahdin and finishing on the rolling green hills of Georgia, I opined, is like hiking from Mount Doom back to the Shire: pure anticlimax.) Finally, I advised him to arrange for some friends to meet him at various points along the trail. When you get into the middle stretches of a thru-hike, after the initial fizz has faded and before the end begins to assert its gravitational pull; when the trees leaf out and you begin to hallucinate that you are being squeezed through a giant green intestinal track; when your hips scab over and your feet swell to Flintstonian proportions; when you push hard to escape a state like Pennsylvania only to reach a state like New Jersey; when you inevitably lose sight of the purpose of the whole lunatic enterprise and just want to go home—it helps to have a few friends to cheer you along.

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Two years after we first met, Jackson announced on his Facebook page that he would be leaving for Springer Mountain that March to begin his long-awaited thru-hike. I wrote to congratulate him, and to ask him if he would like me to accompany him for a stretch.

In June, on the day we had arranged to meet up, I stepped down off the bus in Hanover, New Hampshire, amid a cold rain. Jackson was waiting for me beneath the eaves of a nearby university building, looking like what he was: a man in his mid-sixties who had just walked seventeen hundred miles. Almost thirty pounds lighter than when I last saw him, he had grown cowl-eyed, concave in the cheeks. He was wearing mud-soaked low-top hiking shoes, synthetic cargo shorts, a zip-neck merino shirt with a hole in the elbow (chewed through, he said, by a mouse), and a battered baseball cap decorated with pins he’d collected along the trail. All of it was bubbled in a clear plastic poncho. Thrice in the next three hours, he revisited the details of how he had received a complimentary lunch at a pizzeria that day. That outsized gratitude for free food was the clearest sign of all that he had become a thru-hiker.

He retrieved his cell phone, which was charging at an electrical outlet on the wall, and I stole a garbage bag out of an empty trashcan to double-waterproof my sleeping bag, having already slipped back into the thru-hiker’s habit of unapologetic scavenging. Jackson asked me what my trail name had been when I’d thru-hiked back in 2009. I told him it was “Spaceman.” He said he had given himself the name “Doyi,” which is the Cherokee word for “outside.” The name conjured fond memories of his two-year-old grandson, Jakob, who also loved the outdoors. When Jakob was being fussy about getting dressed, all Jackson has to say was “Doyi,” and the boy would come running.

From that moment on, I was Spaceman, and Jackson was Doyi.

We set out through the inundated streets. Before we even reached the trail, our shoes were squelching. Doyi told me this had been a wet year—one of those, like the year I thru-hiked, where the trail inexplicably grows sullen, and for each day spent atop sunny mountaintops, two are spent in a damp catacomb of trees. “I’m tired,” Doyi confessed. “Tired of putting on wet socks, wet shoes.”

After some searching, we found the trail, which led us around an athletic field and then drew us up into the darkened forest. Starting out, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up with his pace. I was feeling out of shape, my feet city-soft, while Doyi had been averaging twenty miles a day, an impressive pace, especially for a man his age.

However, even before the first mile had passed, it became clear that the combination of prolonged malnutrition and overexertion had sapped Doyi of his former strength; he panted on the uphills and cringed on the downhills, favoring his right knee. Walking behind him, I stared at his calves, which were hairless and lean. His body was visibly consuming itself. At one point, while climbing a moderately steep rise, he turned back to look at me and asked, between huffs, “How come you’re not breathing hard?”

After an hour, a group of other thru-hikers caught up and trotted past us with the light gait of spooked deer. Each of them was white and young, with a long brown beard, thin legs, and a tidy backpack protected by a raincover: the prototypical American thru-hiker. Among their ranks, Doyi stood out; he had darker skin, had no beard, was older by decades, and was carrying a great deal more stuff.

The clouds soon ceased raining on the canopy above, but that did not stop the canopy from raining on us. It grew quiet and warm. The ground, carpeted with brown leaves and orange pine needles, released a comforting aroma. Above, thrushes sang. A barred owl said, “oo—oo—oo-ooo.”

Beside the trail ran an old gray stone fence and above it lurked a pair of obese white pines, their branches weirdly splayed. Both the fence and the trees were easily overlooked, but they were clues pointing to a former era of near-total deforestation. While clearing the forest, New England farmers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries often spared a handful of large trees on the periphery of their property to provide shade for their livestock. As lone survivors, the spared trees luxuriated in sunlight and spread their crowns broadly. Some, like these two, were then infested with weevils, which deformed their limbs. (Trees like these were nicknamed ‘wolf trees,’ apparently because they greedily consumed sunlight that might benefit younger trees, as wolves devour livestock.)

Stone fences, too, were a sign that this forest had once been farmland. Large flat stones, turned up by the plow, provided a cheap, plentiful, and long-lasting building material. However, since they were painstaking to construct, stone fences only gained widespread popularity in the nineteenth century, when most of the durable hardwoods had already become prohibitively expensive. In New Hampshire—for a long time the most heavily lumbered state in the country—miles of stone fences rose as the trees fell.

Beginning in the 1920s, though, with the decline of small-scale farms and the continued rise of industrialism (and, subsequently, conservationism), much of the forest began to grow back; today, ninety percent of New Hampshire is again covered by trees. Those forests remain haunted by stone fences and wolf trees, reminders of an era when wilderness almost vanished from the region altogether.

Some hikers feel that these remnants of agriculture diminish our experience of the wild; they would prefer to walk through an old-growth forest, the older the better. But while little can surpass the grandeur and ecological complexity of a primordial forest, there is also something undeniably exhilarating about the sight of a sapling sending its shoots through the cracks in an old stone fence. It offers proof that a wild space can claw its way back against the seemingly inevitable flow of agro-industrial progress. “The creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible,” declared Aldo Leopold in 1949. But the forests of New England prove this is not always so. Walking through them—wolf trees, walls, and all—one starts to realize that the only thing more beautiful than an ancient wilderness is a new one.

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To understand how the Appalachian Trail came to exist, it is impor-­tant to know the origin of that stone fence and those deformed trees. Somewhat paradoxically, clearing fields was the first step to preserving forests. This strange transformation—from struggling to conquer the wilderness to fighting to preserve it—began before European settlers even arrived in North America.

Europeans colonized the Americas for three interlocking reasons: to send over large numbers of people, thus easing the pressures of their own overcrowded and polluted homelands; to extract and ship home previously unimagined amounts of wealth; and to tame a land they perceived as wild, wicked, and wasteful. One of their chief justifications for seizing ever-larger tracts of Native land was, somewhat ironically, that the indigenous population had failed to “improve” the land through agriculture, thereby forfeiting their rights to ownership—an argument that conveniently overlooked the fact that Native Americans had been meticulously optimizing the land to their needs for millennia.

Archaeological research suggests that the first human inhabitants of North America, including the ancestors of the Cherokee, arrived by foot, likely crossing a land bridge spanning the Bering Strait more than twenty thousand years ago. They traveled south through cool grasslands (skirting a massive glacial ice sheet, which covered most of modern-day Canada), moving from encampment to encampment, hunting gargantuan, slow-moving herbivores—mammoths, mastodons, giant bison, bear-sized beavers—with relative ease. As they moved, they learned the landscape, memorizing its plants and animals, familiarizing themselves with its weather (not just the seasonal month-to-month cycles, but also year-to-year and decade-to-decade). They likely made some irreversible changes—some archaeological evidence suggests that the Paleo-Indians were partly responsible for the extinction of many species of megafauna—but they eventually found a lifestyle that fit the contours of the land, a mixture of hunting, gathering, and (increasingly, as they moved south) farming.

The tribes of the Northeast kept their population density low and roamed widely. Their lands were open, unfenced. They burned off the forest underbrush to provide habitat to deer, elk, and bison. They planted their corn with beans and squash to shade the soil and replenish its nutrients. Land and culture intermeshed; as opposed to following a calendar filled with the names of dead emperors (Julius, Augustus), arcane rites (Februa), and superannuated gods (Janus, Mars), they named their months after ecological cycles: the time when salmon leap upstream, when geese molt, when eggs are laid, when bears hibernate, or when corn must be planted.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans arrived on this continent bearing a radically different land ethic. The first colonists to reach America stepped down from their ships like extraterrestrials upon a so-called “new world.” The god of these pale aliens had told them that life on earth was created for their use, and had instructed them to “fill the earth and subdue it.” A land that was not being aggressively farmed, grazed, logged, or mined was deemed a “waste.” Ownership was defined by transformation. The native people, with their shared land rights and their slow, subtle process of ecosystem engineering (too slow and subtle, it turned out, for Europeans to recognize), appeared to own no more land than any other woodland creature. “Their land is spacious and void,” commented one Puritan minister, “and they are few and do but run over the grass, as do also the foxes and wild beasts.”

The first English colonizers to reach this continent behaved like teenagers wandering into a quiet mansion. After searching for any plunderable goods (gold, lumber, fur), they set about rearranging the place. They cleared forests and fenced fields for English-style farming, built English-style homes, mills, and churches, and they bestowed English place names (often harking back to English places, like Hampshire). They recognized the land’s bounty and grandeur, but they largely ignored the work the indigenous people had put into making it that way; having come from a place where most of the large trees had been razed, they wondered at the towering forests, without realizing they were coaxed upward by Native hands; they exulted at the profusion of wild deer without realizing that they were the result of tactical brush fires and careful hunting. Unlike the Native Americans, British farmers quickly depleted the soil; then they began hauling fish by the millions from the rivers and sea to use as fertilizer (which resulted in what one traveler called an “almost intolerable fetor”). With rifles, they hunted deer and elk almost to a vanishing point. Using iron saws, they cut down trees in enormous quantities, setting aside the larger pines to build the masts of their ships, which in turn allowed yet more people to cross the vast ocean.

Back home, England was in a dismal state. Ironically, it was the fence and the tree saw that had helped lead to this decline. During the late seventeenth century, at the same time that King Charles was selling off the royal forests to wealthy landowners, aristocrats began a process known as “enclosure”—the fencing off of once commonly held farm and grazing lands. Enclosure boosted agricultural yields but thrust thousands of peasants and laborers into a state of homelessness; in the century between 1530 and 1630, it is estimated that about half the rural peasantry were forced from their land. These new exiles flocked to cities, and then later, overseas, the ties to their ancestral land having been finally, fully severed.

At the same time, the cost of firewood in England skyrocketed, leading people to heat their homes with a cheap fuel known as sea coal. As a result, England’s overcrowded cities became mired in what one writer at the time called a “Hellish and dismall Cloud.” Roger Williams, the founder of what would become the state of Rhode Island, recounted that “Natives” (likely either members of the Narragansett or Wampanoag tribes) often asked him, “Why come the Englishmen hither?” The theory the Native Americans put forward was that the English had burned up all the good firewood back home, and so had crossed the ocean in search of more. They weren’t far off from the truth.

The colonizers brought with them a complex form of trade we now call capitalism—the creation, exchange, and accumulation of abstract monetary value. Things and actions could be converted into money, which could be traded for other things and actions—a felled forest could become a pouch full of coins, which could become a year’s supply of grain. This ingenious system allowed for near-global networks of trade. Ships were built, resources were gathered up and sold, and empires rose. People’s perception of land began to subtly shift. The land was no longer merely a realm of habitation and a source of life. It was a commodity, whose value could and would be maximized.

The native population of North America was no stranger to trade. Long before the arrival of Europeans, the continent had been covered in vast networks of trading paths, through which flowed an enormous variety of earthly riches: salt, conch shells, feathers, flint, pigments, skins, furs, silver, copper, and pearls. With the invention of capital, though, vastly more objects could be traded in the virtual form of money—or more specifically, via strings of shells known as wampumpeag, which the colonizers popularized as a kind of universal currency. Suddenly, the continent’s seemingly endless resources were opened up to the vast hunger of Europe. The foreigners’ outsized craving for certain animal products—beaver pelts, deerskins, buffalo robes—drove up their price, spurring Native Americans (using European rifles and traps) to begin killing wildlife at an unprecedented rate. As the local ecosystem became less and less integral to their survival, Native peoples’ impetus to carefully manage it lessened as well; if a tribe killed off all of the area’s turkey or buffalo or deer, they could always buy chicken or beef from town. Some tribal communities abandoned the inland forests to reside full-time on the coast, where they stockpiled the shells necessary for making wampumpeag.

Slowly, the Native American land ethic began to fade. At the same time, many tribes were converted to Christianity, which further erased their previously reciprocal relationship to plants and animals. This cultural shift, coupled with aggressive military campaigns, dishonest treaties, and an influx of virulent diseases, resulted in what the environmental historian William Cronon described as a catastrophic mix of “economic and ecological imperialism.” A vicious cycle formed: as Native peoples’ land base shrank and their traditional food sources became scarce, the pressure mounted to convert to a more European lifestyle, which in turn consumed more land and resources. At the same time, Europeans began to fetishize the vanishing Native population in uniquely European terms, framing them as “noble savages,” “children of Eden,” and, later, as what Shepard Krech III calls “ecological Indians”: perfectly harmonious inhabitants of the wilderness, physical and spiritual embodiments of everything many Europeans feared they were mowing over.

As more Native people were either killed off or assimilated, English people continued flooding in. The new world grew to resemble the old one; the countryside was increasingly covered with fenced-off fields of English crops and pastures of English grasses (as well as English weeds), which were populated with English cows, English sheep, and English pigs. The lowlands filled up with farms; the forests swarmed with lumberjacks; the oceans were raked with nets. Unprofitable spaces were converted into profitable ones: swamps were drained, drylands irrigated, predators exterminated. Farms became plantations. Workshops became factories. Metals were mined, oil drilled. Everywhere, wealth began to burst forth from the earth. From this systematic reaping of natural treasures—often harvested by slave labor—the colonies would grow into a nation of near-unrivaled wealth, the capital of the capitalist world.

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One place where economic value was not immediately found was in the remote mountain ranges. In fact, the history of mountain climbing in the United States can be told as the story of people seeking new and ever more rarified forms of value to extract from the mountains. First came the treasure-hunters, looking for precious jewels and metals. They came home empty-handed, and the mountains were again left alone. Next, in waves, came scientists in search of knowledge, artists and writers in pursuit of beauty, tourists seeking rough pleasures, pedestrians seeking glowing health, and finally, modern outdoor enthusiasts, in pursuit of some ineffable combination of all these things.

A hundred miles north of where Doyi and I walked lay Mount Washington, the highest mountain in the Northeast, whose crest had been touched by each of these waves. White people have been climbing the “White Hill” almost as long as they have been on the continent. The first recorded ascent took place in 1642, a mere two decades after the landing at Plymouth Rock. The climb was led by an illiterate immigrant named Darby Field, whose intentions remain largely unknown. It can be assumed, however, that he did not climb it for sheer pleasure, for almost without exception, the colonists regarded mountains as either a nuisance or a horror.

Many indigenous people of the Northeast (unlike some tribes to the south and west) also avoided mountaintops, believing they were the abodes of powerful spirits. Within an animist cultural framework, this was a wholly sensible belief: What else but a mad spirit could reside in such otherworldly places? According to the toponymist Philippe Charland, long before Europeans dubbed the region’s highest peak Mount Washington, the Abenaki called it Kôdaakwajo, or “Hidden Mountain,” because its summit was so often lost in clouds. Presumably, some curious Abenakis had at some point traveled up into that misty realm and never come back down, while others had returned only to describe horrors: freak storms, shredding winds, blinding snow. (Scientists would, in fact, later record the highest wind speed on earth—excluding hurricanes or tornadoes—atop the peak.) Why would one risk going there?

The scholar Nicholas Howe has theorized that Field’s true mission in climbing the peak was to show the local Abenaki Indians that white men were not subject to the same natural laws as Native Americans. The siege was, in other words, a form of psychological warfare.

With snow still on the mountaintops, Field left his home near the coast one day—accompanied by several unidentified Native guides—and followed the Saco River to the base of the White Hill. There, he discovered a village of two hundred Native Americans of an unspecified tribe. He tried to procure a mountain guide, but they refused. All but one or two of his original companions would also eventually abandon the expedition. Undaunted, Field pushed on to the summit, where, according to one account, he sat in fear for five hours, “the clouds passing under him makinge a terrible noyse against the mountains.” On those cold, clear heights, he found glittering gems in the rock, which he believed to be diamonds. He returned to the summit a month later with a group of white settlers, who brought back samples of the crystals, only to discover that they were mere quartz and mica.

For the next one hundred and fifty years, no one else recorded having climbed the White Hill. In the meantime, interest in the mountains was growing among a small cadre of scientists and theologians, who regarded mountains as a potential source of new data and knowledge. The mountain was next climbed by a team of scientists in 1784, led by a clergyman-botanist named Manasseh Cutler and a clergyman-historian named Jeremy Belknap. Soon after, the peak received its presidential moniker (possibly from Belknap), and its reputation began to grow as the most “majestic” mountain in the new nation.

By the 1790s, a rough wagon road—following, as always, an old Native trail—was opened through a notch in the White Mountain chain along the western flank of Mount Washington. As it was gradually widened and improved, the road provided the most direct route from southern New England to northwest New Hampshire and Maine—“a great artery,” wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne, “through which the life-blood of internal commerce continually throbbed.”

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, a young woodsman named Abel Crawford decided to open an inn alongside that road and began guiding curious adventurers up the mountain, where they could enjoy a sublime panorama of the surrounding mountains. To facilitate the trip to the summit, Abel and his son Ethan cut trails. The first of these, called the Crawford Path, might well be the oldest continuously used hiking trail in the country. It is a slow, circuitous path, winding slowly back and forth up across the mountain “as if reluctant to approach too directly into such an august presence,” wrote Laura and Guy Waterman in Forest and Crag, their authoritative history of hiking in the Northeast.III At first, the path was faint—one early hiker described it as “obscure, often determined only by marked trees, some of which ‘Old Crawford’ alone could discover”—but over time it became clear and wide. More than a century later, the last leg of this path would become part of the Appalachian Trail.

A new curiosity and admiration for the mountains was taking hold, and Mount Washington loomed prominently. The peak was climbed by Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau (twice). They all seemed to recognize some twinkling of the divine in it. Hawthorne found it “majestic, and even awful”—not horrible, but full of awe. Thoreau, writing to a friend who had recently climbed the peak, wrote, “You must have been enriched by your solitary walk over the mountains. I suppose that I feel the same awe when on their summits that many do on entering a church.”

By the 1830s, the barren mountains were being valued for the same reasons they had once been reviled: their terrific heights, their unpredictable weather, and perhaps most of all, their remoteness from the lowland clutter of civilization. Like storm clouds, slowly, and then all at once, around the mountaintop an aesthetic appreciation had coalesced. “It became almost an obligatory mark of a vigorous public man of New England in those years that he had made the ascent of Mount Washington,” wrote the Watermans. The sentiment seems to have originated among city dwellers, for whom mountains were exotic. The people who lived at the base of the peaks—who were necessarily fixated on extracting economic and subsistence value from the land—were unlikely to ever climb them. One farmer at the base of Mount Washington told the pastor Thomas Starr King that he wished the mountains were flat.

Many urban tourists were eager to see the mountains, but were unable or unwilling to walk up them. So, in 1840, the Crawfords widened their path to make it fit for horses; Abel, then seventy-four, was the first man to ride on horseback all the way to the summit. By the 1850s, all five paths up Mount Washington had been converted into horse paths. A decade later, a carriage path had been cleared, and around the same time, another path cut by the Crawfords was used to lay out the tracks of a cog railway. It became possible to travel from the back alleys of Boston to the top of Mount Washington without taking more than a few steps. One prominent writer recommended that his readers catch a train to Gorham, take a wagon “through primeval forests” to the Glen House Hotel, and then ascend the mountain on a pony. “That is de rigeur,” he insisted. With newfound ease and expediency, as many as five thousand people reached the summit of Mount Washington each year.

In the early days, if one of their clients had wanted to spend the night on the mountainside, the Crawfords would have built a pole-and-bark shelter for them, and inside, they would have fashioned a bed of fragrant balsam boughs. By the 1850s, to accommodate the new flood of tourists, two stone-walled hotels—aptly named the Tip-Top House and the Summit House—were built directly on top of the peak. On mountaintops throughout the Northeast, similar buildings—hotels, huts, concession stands, even a small newspaper office—were popping up like mushrooms. Meanwhile, vast vacation resorts sprawled across the valleys; one hotel, built in the Catskills, boasted a thousand rooms. Guests were known to spend whole summers at these “grand hotels,” taking short day trips out into the mountains to amuse themselves. Walking paths tendriled out around the hotels, many of them equipped with wooden ladders, scenic overlooks, and designated resting areas.

The Civil War brought a decades-long drought to mountain tourism. But around the turn of the century, the arrival of the automobile granted people easy access to previously unreachable mountains, and the public’s interest in hiking revived. A slew of hiking clubs formed to maintain old trails and build new ones. Meanwhile, for those disinclined to walk, a series of road improvements made it possible to drive right to the crest of Mount Washington. Like anywhere cars and tourists converge, a large souvenir shop and a cafeteria opened up to cater to the crowds. To this day, atop that storied peak, drivers can be found proudly purchasing bumper stickers that read: “This Car Climbed Mt. Washington.”

When I reached the summit of Mount Washington on my own thru-hike, it struck me as a kind of suburban horror. As I neared the summit, a red-and-white radio antenna rose into view, followed in time by a stone tower, a cog railroad, a cafeteria, and a crowded parking lot. It was a clear, warm Saturday in July, and the peak writhed with tourists. After four months of walking over more or less barren peaks, it felt like I had stumbled into an outdoor mall.

Almost four hundred years earlier, Darby Field had deemed Mount Washington a barren wasteland, devoid of economic value. In the intervening centuries, the peak’s barrenness had served as a beacon for hikers, offering a rare island of wilderness in a sea of tamed fields. As one hiker wrote in 1882, “The climber here tastes the full enjoyment of an encounter with untamed nature.” It was a perverse fate, then, that the mountain’s untamed allure would be precisely what led to its own taming.

Little did I know that, but for a few flukes of history and a widespread shift in popular sentiment, many of the other peaks I had crossed on the Appalachian Trail could have looked the same.

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A few hundred miles north of Mount Washington stands its wild twin, Mount Katahdin. At the outset of the American experiment, the two were not dissimilar. Like Washington, indigenous people living near the base of Katahdin reportedly never climbed it, for fear of a winged thunder spirit named Pamola. Both mountains would one day be recognized as the tallest in their respective states: indeed, the Penobscot name for Katahdin means “the greatest mountain.” From similar beginnings, though, the two parted ways soon after colonists arrived. While the slopes of Mount Washington experienced ever-growing waves of visitors, Katahdin, walled off by miles of the gloomy North Woods, remained unclimbed. It was finally crested by an eleven-man team of government surveyors in 1804, more than a century and a half after Mount Washington.

In 1846, Thoreau made a failed bid to climb Katahdin. He and two companions made their way to its base by canoe, guided by an old Native American man named Louis Neptune, who advised Thoreau to leave a bottle of rum on top of the mountain to appease the mountain spirit. On their climb, Thoreau and his companions followed moose trails and scrambled cross-country. In one harrowing instance, while crawling over the flattened tops of the black spruce trees that had grown up between the mountain’s massive boulders, Thoreau looked down to find that below him, in the crevices, lay the sleeping forms of bears. (“Certainly the most treacherous and porous country I ever traveled,” he wryly observed.)

The party became lost in fog and never made it to the summit. But on his descent, passing through an area called the Burnt Lands, Thoreau—who had spent almost his entire life in bucolic Concord, where a surplus of farms and fences had rendered the landscape “tame and cheap”—suddenly realized he had stumbled upon a wholly wild place. He found the Burnt Lands savage, awful, and unspeakably beautiful. Here, he sensed, was the universal bedrock underlying the artifices of humankind. Recalling the experience, he wrote:

This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandseled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor wasteland . . . Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific . . . rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact!

How, one must wonder, had a human being—indeed, a whole generation of human beings—become so abstracted from the land (the solid earth! the actual world!) as to warrant such an epiphany? The answer, as we’ve seen, stretches back through our ancestral past: through agriculture, which obviated the hunter-gatherer’s need to walk, study, and interact with whole ecosystems; through writing, which replaced the landscape as an archive of communal knowledge; through monotheism, which vanquished the animist spirits and erased their earthly shrines; through urbanization, which concentrated people in built environments; and through a snug pairing of mechanical technology and animal husbandry, which allowed people to travel over the earth at blurring speeds. Euro-Americans had been working for millennia to forget what an unpeopled planet looked like. To see it afresh came as a shock.

Ever since Thoreau’s revelation, a steady trickle of hikers has flowed toward Katahdin in search of the same ineffable experience. It gained a reputation as the antithesis to mountains like Washington, where, according to one account, “large flocks of hitherto ‘un-mountain-fähig’, both male and female, streamed up the mountains like a transplanted tea party.” But despite its growing popularity, Katahdin resisted all attempts to tame it. During the height of the summit house craze of the 1850s, Maine politicians, envious of the commercial success of Mount Washington, chartered a road to be built over Katahdin. A crew was sent out to survey a path, but they returned with a route so absurdly steep that no carriage could climb it, and the project was soon abandoned. Even into the 1890s, while trail-builders on Mount Washington were rearranging boulders to construct paths so smooth they reportedly could be walked blindfolded, the paths on Katahdin remained, in the Watermans’ words, “the roughest of cuts through the north woods.”

The longer Katahdin resisted attempts to tame it, the Watermans wrote, the more it attracted “pilgrims” who enjoyed its wild character—­and who, moreover, would fight to keep it that way. In 1920, an eccentric millionaire named Percival Baxter climbed Katahdin via the vertiginous Knife’s Edge route. Greatly impressed, he vowed to ensure that the land would remain “forever wild.” The following year, as governor of the state, he fought to have the area recognized as a state park. When the state legislature refused, he began buying the land with his own fortune, eventually acquiring two hundred thousand acres, which was later designated as a state park. From the outset, Baxter insisted that “Everything in connection with the Park must be left simple and natural and must remain as nearly as possible as it was when only the Indians and the animals roamed at will through these areas.”

Ten years later, there was a push by Baxter’s political nemesis, Owen Brewster, to make the area look more like the White Mountains, by building new motor roads (now feasible, thanks to technological advances) along with a large lodge and a series of smaller cabins. Baxter successfully fought them back, and the park remained stubbornly inaccessible. The park’s wildness, in other words, was not given. It was made.

It may sound strange (even sacrilegious) to some, but in a very real way, wilderness is a human creation. We create it in the same sense that we create trails; we do not create the soil or the plants, the geology or the topology (although we can, and do, shift these things). Instead, we delineate the place, by defining its boundaries, its meaning, and its use. The history of Katahdin is emblematic of the wilderness as a whole, which has always been the direct result of human ingenuity, foresight, and restraint.

“Civilization,” wrote the historian Roderick Nash, “invented wilderness.” According to his account, the wilderness was born at the dawn of agro-pastoralism, when we began cleaving the world into the binary categories of wild and tame, natural and cultivated. Words for wilderness are notably absent among the languages of hunter-­gatherer peoples. (“Only to the white man,” wrote Luther Standing Bear, “was nature a wilderness.”) From the vantage point of a farmer, the wilderness was a strange, barren land, full of poisonous plants and deadly animals, antithetical to the warmth and security of home. To these land-tamers, wilderness became synonymous with confusion, wickedness, and suffering. William Bradford, the governor of the Plymouth Colony, was representative of this mindset when he deemed the uncolonized countryside “a hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men.”

For centuries after the rise of agriculture, we erected fences to keep our cultivated land safe from whatever lurked in the darkness. But the realm of cultivation continued to spread, insatiably, until it at last began to endanger the wilderness, rather than the other way around. Then we began fencing in the wild, to keep it safe from us. For obvious reasons, this shift came much earlier on the isle of Britain—­which began walling off its forests a thousand years ago—than it did on the seemingly endless American continent.

Amid the coal-fired fug of industrialism, people began to recognize that the unchecked spread of civilization could be toxic, and the wilderness, by comparison, came to represent cleanliness and health. Quite suddenly, the symbolic polarity of the word wilderness was reversed: it went from being wicked to being holy. That switch allowed a new set of moral attitudes toward the nonhuman world to take hold. Even a man as wilderness-averse as Aldous Huxley came to understand that “a man misses something by not establishing a participative and living relationship with the non-human world of animals and plants, landscapes and stars and seasons. By failing to be, vicariously, the not-self, he fails to be completely himself.”

This is the most succinct definition of the wilderness I have found: the not-self. There, in the one place we have not remolded in our image, a very deep and ancient form of wisdom can be found. “At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman,” wrote Albert Camus. We glimpse this inhuman heart only once the rosy lens of familiarity has fallen away. Then, Camus wrote, we realize that the world is “foreign and irreducible to us”—a sensation acutely familiar to both Thoreau and Huxley. “These hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them,” he wrote. “The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia.” We over-civilized humans cherish wilderness because it both fosters and embodies that sense of not-self—it is a brazenly naked land, where a person, in mingled fear and awe, verging on nonsense, can cry out: Contact!

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Doyi and I followed the Appalachian Trail northward. We climbed up and over a bulge called Moose Mountain, falling into an easy rhythm. The trail bore a string of deep moose prints and a pile of olivey pellets, but no moose. The view from the summit was the same as from the window of a cloud-socked airplane. On the downhill side, the wind shouldered through the trees, shaking down leaves and water. We were glad to reach the lean-to—a wooden shelter, ubiquitous on the trail, shaped like a heavily italicized letter L.IV Someone had strung up a tarp over the entrance to keep out the wind and rain.

“Hello? Anybody in there?” Doyi called.

“Doyi!” voices cheered, in unison.

Inside it was dark, steamy, sour-smelling. The thru-hikers were all burrowed in their sleeping bags, some leaned upright against the back wall, others supine. Headlamps blazed coldly from the center of their foreheads. Doyi introduced me to them, from right to left: Gingko, an albinic young German man with an ice-white beard and startling blue eyes; Socks, a cheerful, dark-haired young woman, so named after her resemblance to Sacajawea, though she was Korean-­American; Catch-Me-If-You-Can, a Korean-American man in his forties, quiet, high-cheek-boned, forever smiling, and renowned for his speed; and Tree Frog, a young white man with bushy brown hair, who often told strangers along the trail he was employed as a butler, because he had learned it was more interesting to lie about being a butler than to tell them the truth about being an engineer. Doyi had known some of them for months and others only a few days, but he had an easy rapport with all of them. As we dropped our packs inside the shelter, he asked them to please scooch over and make room for us. Distracted, they were slow in moving, so he joked, “Don’t worry, you don’t have to do it right away. Anytime in the next ten seconds would be fine.” They laughed, and then moved over.

Doyi and I changed clothes, got in our sleeping bags, and prepared dinner. Tree Frog said that as he hiked he had been practicing the Cherokee words that Doyi had taught him: “shit” (di ga si), “shit!” (e ha), “water” (ama), and Osda Nigada, which means, roughly, “It’s all good.” Osda Nigada! had become a kind of rallying cry for the rain-drenched hikers, and soon became their unofficial name for themselves: Team Osda Nigada.

As I sat over my Coke-can stove cooking a pot of soba noodles, I found myself slipping back into the headspace of a thru-hiker. Tree Frog generously offered me and Doyi two muffins he’d carried up from town. They were sticky and dense; we both scraped the muffin paper clean with our teeth. (Nothing tastes better, the old thru-hiker adage says, than food you haven’t had to carry.) The gift prompted Doyi to teach the group a new Cherokee phrase: “Gv Ge Yu A,” which means “I love you,” except, Doyi said, that it cannot be used casually; it can only be spoken when one truly means it.

Tree Frog was bent over his journal, scribbling down the day’s events. He was working on a book about his mother’s attempt to thru-­hike the AT, which was halted by cancer, and his subsequent quest to scatter her ashes atop Mount Katahdin. In exchange for the muffin, I offered him my dimpled copy of the latest New Yorker, the fiction issue. He politely waved me off. “Sounds heavy,” he said. He meant the weight of the paper, not the subject matter.

They talked primarily about time and food; when they would reach certain mountains or towns or states; what they were eating, had eaten, would eat, would like to eat. The interior life of a thru-hiker this far into a long hike is a mixture of waning adventure-lust, intensifying hunger, mild impatience, and calm, single-pointed focus. The pull of Katahdin drew them inexorably along the same trail, at roughly the same pace, like marbles in a downward groove. They had recently agreed to try to summit Katahdin as a group, even if that meant slowing down to accommodate the slower members. After consulting his guidebook that night, Tree Frog suggested that they should try to finish by July 7. Doyi smiled at the thought of that golden, mirrored numeral—7/7—a sacred number for the Cherokees. It had the glow of fate.

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What makes a trail wild? Is it the people who built it, the people who walk it, or the land around it? The answer is a combination of all three. In large part, the Appalachian Trail gained its wild reputation from the iconic wildernesses it managed to string together: not just Katahdin, but also the Great Smokies, the Blue Ridge, the Cumberlands, the Greens, the Whites, the Bigelows, the 100 Mile Wilderness. Thanks to a massive land acquisition project led by the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, the gaps between those wilderness areas were later filled in. Today, the trail is surrounded by an almost uninterrupted, thousand-foot-wide belt of protected land—what is sometimes referred to as “the longest, skinniest part of America’s national park system.”

Those lands, though, would never have been protected if likeminded hikers and activists hadn’t fought for their protection. The AT—like any trail—is the creation of multitudes: walkers, trail-­builders, conservationists, administrators, donors, and government officials. Before all of them, however, the trail was born from the imagination of a single man—a forester, wilderness advocate, and utopian dreamer named Benton MacKaye. Even today, the trail bears the imprint of his brilliant and idiosyncratic mind.

The idea for the Appalachian Trail reportedly first occurred to MacKaye while hiking through the Green Mountains of Vermont in 1900, at the age of twenty-one. He and a friend had climbed a tree atop Stratton Mountain to admire the view, and, dizzy with a “planetary feeling,” as he later described it, MacKaye suddenly envisioned a single trail stringing together the entire Appalachian range from north to south. Two years later, while working at a summer camp in New Hampshire, he mentioned the idea to his boss, who replied that it sounded like “a damn fool scheme.”

History would prove otherwise. In fact, at that precise moment, disparate forces were aligning to allow something as audacious as a two-thousand-mile-long hiking trail to one day exist. In newspapers and books from the turn of the century, America was increasingly being seen as a land of worsening health, degenerating morals, and rampant money grubbing. Boys were growing too weak, while girls were “overheated, overdressed, and over-entertained.” These fears stemmed in part from a rapid and unprecedented surge in urbanization; Manhattan, for instance, housed more people in 1900 than it does today. Time spent outdoors, in the “fresh air”—a newly popular phrase—was seen as a curative for society’s ills. Locomotives (and soon, automobiles) made trips to the mountains easier and faster. Summer camps sprang up throughout the Northeast. (The summer camp I attended, Pine Island, was founded in 1902.) The turn of the century also marked the birth of the scouting movement. In 1902, a nature writer named Ernest Thompson Seton founded a club for boys called the League of the Woodcraft Indians, which later inspired Robert Baden-Powell to form the Boy and Girl Scouts. “This is a time,” wrote Seton in 1907, “when the whole nation is turning toward the outdoor life.”

Meanwhile, the federal government—at the urging of hiking-­cum-conservation groups like the Appalachian Mountain Club and the Sierra Club—had begun setting aside huge tracts of public land. This process began in 1864, when Abraham Lincoln, following the advice of Frederick Law Olmsted, signed a bill setting aside the Yosemite valley and a nearby grove of giant sequoia trees as public land. Olmsted, the famed designer of Central Park—which he insisted remain open to all, “the poor and the rich, the young and the old, the vicious and the virtuous”—warned Lincoln that, if the Yosemite valley fell into private hands, it could end up as a walled garden for the sole enjoyment of the rich, like many parks in England. By signing the Yosemite Grant Act, Lincoln set a key precedent for the creation of the national park system. The conservationist movement began to reach a new peak in 1901, when Theodore Roosevelt, a lifelong outdoorsman, assumed the presidency. His first address to Congress called for the creation of a series of national forests. By the end of his presidency in 1909, he would set aside one hundred fifty national forests, fifty-one federal bird reserves, and five national parks. All told, he protected roughly 230 million acres of public land.

Meanwhile, a new conception of trails was spreading. Trail designers began to reconsider the isolated clusters of trails that had once surrounded the most popular hiking destinations and discovered ways to connect those clusters into cohesive networks. Soon, there arose the notion of a “through trail”—a trail that would keep going. In 1910, James P. Taylor, a schoolmaster who enjoyed taking his students on long hikes, proposed the construction of a single trail connecting all of the tallest mountains in Vermont. He called it “The Long Trail.”

Into this intellectual environment stepped MacKaye. He graduated from Harvard a few months before Roosevelt’s inauguration, and shortly after earned his master’s degree from the Harvard School of Forestry. In the following decades, he took a series of forestry and planning jobs, which gave him a better sense of how people can transform landscapes (and vice versa). During one such project, in 1912, he conducted an influential study on the effects of rainwater runoff in the White Mountains, which proved that deforestation contributes to flooding. Partly as a result of his study, the White Mountains were later designated a national forest.

Over the course of twenty years, MacKaye grew from a gangly young forestry student into a bespectacled, dark-haired, hawk-faced intellectual, with a pipe permanently clenched between his teeth. All the while, his idea for what he called “an Appalachian Trail” grew along with him. In 1921, he lost his wife, Betty—a suffragist and peace advocate—when she drowned herself in Manhattan’s East River. Grieving, MacKaye holed up in a friend’s farmhouse in New Jersey, where he paused his forestry work long enough to put his idea for the Appalachian Trail down on paper. What emerged was more than a mere trail. The innocuous title he gave to his now-historic proposal—“An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning”—belied its radical vision. In fact, he saw the trail as nothing less than a remedy to the worst ills of urbanization, capitalism, militarism, and industrialism—what he called “the problem of living.”

MacKaye’s thoughts on how to transform our society were strongly shaped by a five-hundred-page philosophical treatise called The Economy of Happiness, authored by his brother James. Drawing on the works of Bentham, Malthus, Darwin, Spencer, and Marx, James MacKaye sought to devise a rigorous response to the ugliest aspects of industrialism. Rather than a society of independent actors each seeking to maximize profit—which unintentionally resulted in a “vast and increasing surplus of misery”—he envisioned a steady-state economy managed by a technocratic elite, who strove to maximize the “output of happiness.” Anticipating the inevitable question of how a government could possibly measure a nation’s happiness, the book was littered with equations and graphs attempting to quantify well-being. (The biographer Larry Anderson quipped that it was, ironically, “possibly the most humorless and austere tract ever devoted to the subject of happiness.”)

Most significantly, MacKaye’s brother taught him that the key to solving societal problems was to change systems, not human nature. As MacKaye became an increasingly prominent voice in the conservation movement, he seldom wrote about greed or excess. He chose instead to focus on environments—how they can weaken us, or how they can be altered to strengthen us. Having spent much of his childhood in New York City (which he loathed), he chose to attack the ills of modernity through its most obvious manifestation: the de-natured, overpopulated, hyper-competitive metropolis.

From the outset, the overarching goal of Benton’s work was to circumvent the sense of alienation that had been growing among Euro-­Americans for centuries. The crucial first step, he concluded, was to secure a space outside the reach of the metropolis—“a sanctuary and a refuge from the scramble of every-day worldly commercial life”—in which people could learn to live anew. He applauded the rise of the national parks, but lamented the fact that they were all so far away; at the time, of the seventeen national parks, only one was east of the Mississippi River. Meanwhile, he wrote, a continuous green belt of wild land, the Appalachian range, lay “within a day’s ride from centers containing more than half the population of the United States.”

Along the trail, MacKaye wanted to build not just a string of rustic shelters, but also nonprofit wilderness camps, collective farms, and health retreats where the citizens of America’s industrial centers could escape for fresh air.V The source of modern malaise, he believed, was that civilized people were no longer equipped to survive in nature. They had forgotten how to raise food, how to build things, how to travel on foot. They were entirely dependent on the economy for their survival, which led them to be overworked and unhappy. People needed to get “back to the land,” MacKaye wrote.

Some elements of the proposal eventually proved surprisingly prescient. As he had envisioned, a series of rustic shelters were built along its full length, each no more than a day’s hike apart. He insisted that the trail should be maintained by volunteers, not paid workers, because for volunteers “ ‘work’ is really ‘play.’ ” And, as he astutely argued, constructing a two-thousand-mile trail was less daunting than one might think, because it need not be constructed ex nihilo. Instead, trail-builders could simply stitch together a string of existing trails, including the Long Trail, one hundred fifty miles of which would later be folded into the Appalachian Trail.

In 1927, MacKaye was invited to articulate his vision to the New England Trail Conference. The paper he delivered, entitled “Outdoor Culture: The Philosophy of Through Trails,” was not quite what they had anticipated. In fiery tones, MacKaye laid out the full breadth of his plan for a connected corridor of wilderness work camps. Drawing from the example of ancient Rome, his dialectic positioned the decadent metropolis against the barbarian hinterlands. He railed against the “lollipopedness” of jazz-loving, picnic-eating city dwellers, and he contrasted these human “jellyfish” with the strong, tough, wilderness-­savvy proletariat his trail would attract.

“And now I come straight to the point of the philosophy of through trails,” MacKaye concluded. “It is to organize a Barbarian invasion. It is a counter movement to the Metropolitan invasion . . . As the Civilizees are working outward from the urban centers, we Barbarians must be working downward from the mountain tops.”

In the end, the genteel East Coast trail-building community blanched at the more utopian elements of MacKaye’s vision. But work on the trail itself began in earnest. The task of actually constructing the trail, which MacKaye showed little interest in, fell largely on the shoulders of a Maine native named Myron Avery, a husky, weather-­beaten pragmatist with the bearing of a football halfback. Under his leadership, the trail was completed in 1937, by linking together a chain of logging roads, old hiking paths, and hundreds of miles of fresh-cut trail. But the bulk of MacKaye’s vision had been pared away. Gone were the camps, the farms, and the sanitariums. The many-limbed idea streamlined, until it emerged as a single, sinuous trail through the woods.

MacKaye eventually grew to accept the trail’s new, narrower mission: to provide a “path of endless expeditions” through the wilderness. By 1971, when an interviewer asked him to state the Appalachian Trail’s “ultimate purpose,” MacKaye, then ninety-two and nearly blind, had whittled down his answer to Zen simplicity:

1. to walk;

2. to see; and

3. to see what you see!

Nevertheless, intentions have echoes. The trail’s radical origins began to manifest themselves in unforeseen ways in the decades that followed, most notably in the community of hikers who, in ever-­increasing waves since the end of the Second World War, undertook pilgrimages from one end to the other in search of their own answers to the problem of living. Nomadic, hirsute, and reeking, they were, and remain, the very image of MacKaye’s barbarians. Come July, one can spot them lining a highway in southern New Hampshire, thumbing rides in the rain; roaming like wolves through the mammoth, icily lit grocery stores of Virginia; and shacking up, three to a bed, in a motel in Pennsylvania. Once in a while, one might even catch them in Times Square, having ridden the afternoon train in from Bear Mountain, looking at once shell-shocked and childishly delighted at the flood of light and sound. As one former thru-hiker told me, “Most people live in civilization and visit the woods. But when you’re thru-hiking, you’re living out in the woods and visiting civilization.”

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Snug and dry in the lean-to, Team Osda Nigada nestled down to sleep. I plugged my ears with wax to keep out the sound of snoring and the pock of the rain on the tin roof. Around ten P.M., long after sunset, the bright star of a headlamp appeared inside the lean-to. It hovered insistently above me. I unplugged my ears. “Hey,” a voice said. “Sorry. Can you please move over? I don’t have a tent.” Grumpily, we rearranged our things to accommodate the dripping newcomer, until we were pressed shoulder-to-shoulder.

Just after sunrise, people began rustling around. Nothing had dried out overnight, despite being hung up on a clothesline. When the thru-hikers wrung out their wool socks, they produced something resembling milk coffee. Nobody took the time to cook breakfast; an energy bar, a few handfuls of trail mix, or a heaping scoop of peanut butter sufficed.

The daylight revealed the late-night arrival to be a south bounder (or a SoBo, in trail parlance)—one who was hiking south from Katahdin to Springer Mountain. In the Northern states, the SoBos were easy to spot, since unlike NoBos, they hadn’t had time to grow a long beard, and because they tended to be loners. This one was no exception. He told us he had started only thirteen days ago from Katahdin. (The night before, Tree Frog had calculated that it would take them at least twenty-four days to reach Katahdin.)

Doyi did some quick mental math. “You hiked four hundred thirty miles in thirteen days?”

“Yep,” was all the SoBo said, before he lightly lifted his backpack and stepped out of the shelter.

The other thru-hikers were quiet for a little while.

“He’s scootin’,” Doyi said.

“Doing thirty-mile days through Maine and New Hampshire?” Tree Frog said. “Wow.”

One by one, the thru-hikers put on their wet boots and, with a sharp breath, as if plunging into cold water, stepped out of the shelter and into the clouds. I was the last one to depart. There was no sun. Plants drooped, as if hungover from the night before; a pink orchid wept.

Eager to catch up, I raced over the mountain and down the other side. At the bottom I crossed a road and entered a field of high grass, where I was startled to find a pink plastic flamingo and a handmade sign depicting a cheerful old man holding a pink ice-cream cone. The sign read: “BILL ACKERLY / HIS ICECREAM BRINGS ALL THE HIKERS TO THE YARD / HIS WATER TASTES BETTER THAN YOURS / DAMN RIGHT, HIS CROQUET GAME IS BETTER THAN YOURS / IT’S ALL FREE, YEAH THERE IS NO CHARGE!!” I followed a little side trail to find a blue house with white trim, festooned with Tibetan prayer flags. In the backyard, a pristine croquet court had been hacked out of the high grass. Doyi sat on the porch, talking with Ackerly, who got up to shake my hand. Ackerly had a long face topped with vanishing gray hair, large glasses, and a moony smile.

He asked my name. I told him.

“Spaceman?” he said, dreamily. “Like all of this beautiful space . . .”

We sat for a long while on Ackerly’s porch, talking about Tibet (where he had visited), the works of Homer (which he had studied), and other thru-hikers (whom he had been feeding, for free, every summer for over a decade—a practice hikers call “trail magic”).

Somehow, our conversation turned to Doyi and his Cherokee heritage.

“We need to honor this man here,” Ackerly said, gesturing to Doyi. “He is our ancestor. His people were here first. You know, people always say Christopher Columbus was here first, but he wasn’t.”

“He was lost,” Doyi said.

“That’s right. Columbus was a terrible man.”

Doyi nodded, gravely.

“Well, anyway,” Ackerly added, “in the grand scheme of things, we’re all children.”

As we hoisted our packs and prepared to leave, Ackerly gave each of us a hug. Back on the trail, I asked Doyi if he found it odd that Ackerly had referred to him as “our ancestor.” He brushed it off. “There are a lot of good people on this earth,” he said. “What I’ve enjoyed most about this hike is meeting people like Bill.” He was continually awestruck by the goodness the trail brought out in people. One day, when his knee was really hurting, a fellow thru-hiker had offered to carry his pack for him. Doyi passed on the offer, but he was moved nonetheless—a stranger was willing to practically double his own suffering to alleviate Doyi’s. “That’s the real trail magic, to me,” he said. “People helping people.”

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A trail that is never used fades from existence. But in the postwar era, as hiking became increasingly popular among Americans, a new danger emerged: trails were suddenly in danger of over-use. By the 1970s, it was often said they were being “loved to death.” Unprecedented numbers of hikers were storming the mountains wearing heavy lug-soled boots nicknamed “waffle stompers,” churning up soil, which then eroded or turned to mud. The most popular trails suffered the worst damage, since more than half of all hikers used only ten percent of the trails. In the Smokies, where trails were also open to horse traffic, some of the trails were worn down chest-deep, whereas up north, where the soil is rockier, others widened to forty feet.

In response, trail-builders had started designing so-called sustainable trails, which carefully minimized erosion, avoided sensitive plant life, and prevented the contamination of nearby water sources. By the 1990s, modern hiking trails—which had already contorted themselves to reach places no other trail in history would have previously bothered going—began to take on a whole new shape and internal logic. They could no longer simply focus on reaching wild spaces; they now needed to ensure that they didn’t snuff out that wild quality for future walkers.

Managing people and managing water, it turns out, are the twin challenges of designing a sustainable trail. Unfortunately for trail-builders, those two needs are not always aligned. For example, trail-builders like to install stone steps leading up steep hillsides, because steps provide a durable walking surface for hikers and break up the flow of water, which slows erosion. However, hikers tend to dislike steps, because they look unnatural and often require more work to climb. So hikers will often try to climb up the hillside bordering the staircases, which gutters rainwater and worsens erosion. This forces trail-builders to install menacingly jagged rocks, called gargoyles, on either side of the staircase.

Something similar happens on switchbacks, the long curvy turns that trail-builders create to lessen the trail’s incline and slow erosion. If hikers can see from one turn to the next, they will almost inevitably create a shortcut. Among trail-builders, it is axiomatic that when hikers get tired, hikers get selfish. Many trail-builders find this tendency immensely frustrating. “I always say that this whole ‘hiker management’ thing would be a lot easier if we just got rid of the hikers,” joked Morgan Sommerville, a former trail crew leader.

When a shortcut forms, the trail-builder’s first impulse is typically to simply block it off, but that doesn’t always work. In this regard, hikers behave remarkably like water; eventually, they will drip through almost any obstacle to follow the line of least resistance. Recently, Sommerville told me, to deter hikers from taking an old, degraded fall-line trail up to a mountain bald called Max Patch, a team of trail-builders had installed a large sign in the middle of the old trail pointing hikers in the direction of the new one. For good measure, on either side of the sign, they planted a row of rhododendrons. “That lasted about two or three months,” Sommerville chuckled. “People just picked the most vulnerable-looking rhododendron, eliminated it, and kept going up there. I went there in October, and there was just a constant line of people walking straight up the hill. At that point, the signs asking people not to go that way had also been removed by . . . whomever.”

A professional trail-builder named Todd Branham once told me that he too would resort to dropping a pile of branches or a big rock in a place where people would be tempted to create a shortcut. “But if the trail is well-designed,” he said, “I won’t have to do that, because people will want to stay on the trail. They’ll be having so much dang fun they won’t want to get off the trail.”

The central task of the trail-builder is to navigate an age-old dilemma: to convince people to do what they should do (to best serve the long-term collective good), rather than what their basest instincts tell them to do (to best serve themselves in the short run). As I learned while shepherding, the easiest way to bend a group’s trajectory is to accommodate their desires. That was Branham’s credo, too. For example, if people can hear a waterfall but don’t have a trail leading to it, he said, they will just create their own crude trail. Impromptu trails like these are notoriously difficult to get rid of, because other hikers will inevitably be drawn to them. Instead, a smart trail-builder will aim to find the most sustainable route to that waterfall in advance and then guide hikers there. That way, the trail can both preserve the integrity of the land and fulfill the hikers’ desires.

To know all the potential routes a trail could take, a trail-builder must have a wide-ranging knowledge of the surrounding landscape. The first step to building a sustainable trail is to study a map of the region and gather a rough idea of where the best route might lie. Next, the trail-builder scouts out the route on foot. I watched Branham one day while he went through this process in a patch of woods in Brevard, North Carolina. He began by walking the proposed route of the trail, feeling out the angle of ascent and the quality of the soil. He tried multiple iterations of each line, searching for the most graceful approach. (Watching him pace up and down the hillside, I was reminded of how ants will try out multiple routes before settling on the best one. He was doing the same thing, only far in advance.) Then, using a roll of orange plastic tape, he “flagged” each section of the trail by tying little orange strips to overhanging branches at eye level. Every time he tied on a new flag, he glanced back to see how it lined up with the preceding one. As he did this, Branham tried to envision which trees would need to be cut down. He compared this process to playing chess. “You gotta always be thinking seven moves ahead. You’re looking at these trees, and you’re thinking, These will be gone. These will be gone. I can weave around this one . . .”

It struck me that this kind of trail-building was unlike anything else in the animal kingdom: Instead of sketching out a rough line, which would be improved by subsequent walkers, modern trail-­builders attempt to find the sleekest route in advance—so that subsequent walkers will never have a reason to diverge from it. In this sense, a hiking trail shares more in common with a modern highway than it does with an ancient Cherokee footpath.

The construction of a trail can appear strangely unnatural, too. Most of the time, trail work involves using a primitive tool called a Pulaski (an axe-adze hybrid) to cut out a narrow, flat trail bed from a hillside, but as a professional trail-builder who spent most of his time working alone on private land, Branham opted for a 2,500-pound machine called a skidsteer, which he used to move soil around until he had achieved the correct grade. Once the trail was finished, he used a leaf blower to cover the trail with plant litter, then, to compact the surface, he would sometimes ride back and forth a few times on his ’87 Yamaha BW350 dirt bike.

On a wilderness trail like the AT, the goal of trail-building is, somewhat paradoxically, to artificially create something natural. I witnessed this process up close one summer, while volunteering on a trail-building crew called Konnarock. Here I helped to construct a stone wall, known as “cribbing,” to buttress a section of trail across a particularly steep hillside. The wall took three days of backbreaking labor to complete. (“Building a crib wall is like doing a jigsaw puzzle,” one of the veteran trail-builders in my crew joked. “Except all the pieces weigh five hundred pounds. And they’re all missing.”) Once it was finished, we covered the top with dirt and leaves, so that future hikers would scarcely know it was there. This, explained our crew leader, Kathryn Herndon, was the ultimate aim of trail-­building: meticulous construction, artfully concealed. One famous trail-builder in Maine, named Lester Kenway, was known to carefully fill in every hole he drilled in a rock face, so that hikers climbing one of his rock staircases could be fooled into thinking some benevolent god had simply dropped the rocks in that arrangement. “The ultimate compliment paid to a trail crew,” wrote Woody Hesselbarth, “is to say, ‘It doesn’t look like you had to do much work to get through here.’ ”

Benton MacKaye once said, “The Appalachian Trail as originally conceived is not merely a footpath through the wilderness but a footpath of the wilderness.” The same can be said of all wilderness trails: They are both a conduit and a symbolic representation of the wild. Trail-building handbooks invariably stress the importance of maintaining the trail’s “primitive character.” This is more than a matter of mere aesthetics. There is a crucial difference between a trail that “lies lightly on the land,” as trail-builders like to say, and a wide footpath lined with handrails and park benches: the former allows us to experience the complexity and roughness of the world beyond us, while the latter gives us the impression that the world was put here for us.

Herein lies the delicate task of the trail-builder: to capture a sense of the wild, to bring order to an experience that is by definition disordered. It is akin to catching a butterfly with one’s bare hands. Cup too gently and the butterfly will flutter away, but clap too hard and the butterfly will cease to be.

+

At the top of Smarts Mountain stood a lone fire tower, rising high above the trees. Doyi and I dropped our packs and climbed up the spiraling steel spine of a staircase. At the top, I lifted a heavy wooden trapdoor and we crawled inside. The interior was empty, dusty, enclosed by broken windows. Down below, in every direction, green waves rolled toward the horizon.

Doyi took off his shoes, releasing a swampy, dead smell. “Man, these things are rotten,” he said. We both hung our socks out the window to dry, while we sat on the wooden floor and ate dried fruit. Doyi sat with his legs outstretched and crossed at the ankles. His feet were a horror. White, wrinkled, and blistered, they would have looked at home on the body of a dead grunt. The toenails on both big toes were plum colored, and his pinkie toenails had already fallen off. He began pointing out others that would soon go: “I’m gonna lose this toenail, this toenail, this toenail, and probably this one,” he said. “My feet have never hurt this bad before,” he said. “Ever.”

Five years earlier, on my thru-hike, I had sat in that exact spot, atop the same fire tower, for an entire afternoon, unable to summon the strength to leave. To pass the time, I lay on the floor and listened to a little yellow pocket radio I had purchased to ward off loneliness, but which rarely got clear reception. My body was failing under me. After almost four months on the Appalachian Trail, with only a month left to go, I was a sorry sight. There was scant insulation left on my frame—fat, muscle, or otherwise—with the exception of my legs, where equine muscles flickered and pulsed. I was always wet and cold, and I seemed to have caught some kind of flu back in Vermont. At night: shivers, followed by fever sweats that stunk of ammonia, and then worse shivers. In the morning: more miles to walk. Always, more miles.

Then, without warning, I bumped into my friend Snuggles, whom I hadn’t seen in months. I found her fetused in her sleeping bag on the floor of a damp lean-to; she had been there for three days, lost in a sunless funk. Shortly after we joined up, we ran across another friend of ours named Hi-C. And at last, just as the three of us were entering the White Mountains, the months-long spell of rain broke. The following weeks were sunny, idyllic. Reenergized by good weather and good company, all three of us reached the top of Katahdin one warm morning that August.

I told Doyi this story as we sat atop the fire tower, but it was of no comfort to him. No matter what I said, he still had to put his wet boots back on.

We climbed down the fire tower. I stopped to refill my water bottles from a thin spring that slunk along over the rocky ground. Doyi hiked off ahead, saying I would surely catch up with him. For a long time, though, I didn’t. The rain had stopped and the sun again warmed the plants. I savored the spicy air. As I walked, I saw the trail with new eyes; I noticed how water flowed off it, where it pooled, where hikers had tiptoed outside of the trail bed, widening it. At one point during my time working with the Konnarock crew, Herndon told me that being a trail-builder had permanently altered the way she saw trails. “It always takes a few miles, when I go backpacking, to stop analyzing problems and mentally building staircases,” she said. “It’s hard to stop looking for that stuff, once you’ve trained your brain to analyze it.”

When I caught up to Doyi, he was almost hobbling, his large, green pack swaying from side to side with each step. We descended the mountain at a jerky pace, rather than in the rolling gait—faster and more fluid than a walk but not quite a jog—that thru-hikers tend to adopt.

Doyi talked more about his feet, and home, and missing his grandson. We arrived at the Hexacube Shelter around six. Inside were Doyi’s friends, who chatted boisterously as they cooked dinner. Socks had fashioned a balaclava into a fake beard and was doing an impression of a male thru-hiker. The others were toppled over with laughter.

Doyi remained quiet. He cooked two dinners and ate them, back to back, with the air of a man beyond the condolences of food. When the conversation died down, he waited a beat, then said:

“Guys, there’s something I have to tell you. I’m thinking about getting off the trail.”

They all spoke at once, in disbelief.

“I’m just feeling so weak,” Doyi explained. “Climbing up here, I almost fell backwards at one point.”

There was a pained pause. Gingko was the first to speak. He too was often dizzy, he said, and his bones hurt. Socks said she had considered quitting once after taking two days off in Virginia, and again in Massachusetts when the mosquitoes were torturing her. Tree Frog began asking Doyi a series of gently probing questions to find out what the source of the problem might be. He asked him what he regularly ate (buffalo jerky, dried fruit, mac and cheese, oatmeal) and in what quantities (not nearly enough). Tree Frog suggested that Doyi buy food that was more calorically dense—a good rule of thumb was that any food worth carrying should have one hundred calories for every ounce it weighs, he said. Each of the hikers began suggesting foods that fit this criteria: peanut butter, olive oil, summer sausage.

They began fishing items out of their backpacks and handing them to Doyi. Tree Frog gave him some trail mix and a packet of electrolyte powder. Gingko chipped in a candy bar. With a solemn air, Catch-Me carried over a black package of ginseng—the real stuff, he said, very expensive—and a small bag of pink rock salt. Someone offered Doyi a jar of peanut butter, but he politely waved it off. He said he already had one, and lifted up a sixteen-ounce jar.

“How long has that lasted you?” Tree Frog asked.

“About two weeks,” Doyi said.

“I eat one of those in two days,” Tree Frog said. He suggested Doyi keep the jar on top of his pack, and anytime he stopped, for any reason, to stop and eat a spoonful. After a few minutes more of this, I pointed out that by the time these guys were done with him, they’d have to change his trail name from Doyi to Doughy. Doyi laughed. His gloom had lifted slightly.

Next, Doyi’s friends started going through his pack and suggesting things he could leave behind: a trowel (meant for digging cat holes, but generally extraneous, since any old stick works almost as well), a large bottle of tick repellant (too big), a Nalgene water bottle (too heavy), a water filter (could be replaced with two tiny bottles of chlorine dioxide solution), a blue tarp (could be swapped for a piece of Tyvek home wrap, or ditched altogether), a knee brace he never used, spare clothes, spare shoes. Tree Frog even offered to send his tent home so he and Doyi could split the weight of Doyi’s two-man tent. This was a generous offer, because logistically, it would lash the two of them together for the rest of the trip, hell or high water.

Watching Doyi’s fellow thru-hikers come to his aid, it occurred to me how remarkably humane a space the AT has become, compared to most wilderness footpaths. Some hikers deride the AT as a mere “social trail,” as opposed to the wilder, lonelier trails out west. But I imagine Benton MacKaye would have borne that label proudly. His original intention was not just to give people an escape from urban environments; he wanted to set aside a space where people could unite around the common effort of living outdoors, a place where “cooperation replaces antagonism, trust replaces suspicion, [and] emulation replaces competition.” The trail that eventually grew out of that vision wasn’t utopia, exactly, but it was a start.

“If you want to finish, we’ll do whatever we have to in order to get you there,” Tree Frog said.

Doyi thought a moment. He made a small, pained smile.

“I do,” he said, firmly.

“We’ll get you there,” Tree Frog said.

Doyi thanked him.

Tree Frog shrugged. “Nigada Osda,” he said.

At the time, I mistook that phrase for the group’s rallying cry: Osda Nigada, “It’s all good.” In fact, Doyi later told me, some weeks after returning home from the windy summit of Katahdin, what Tree Frog had said was another Cherokee phrase: Nigada Osda. “Everybody is good.”

I. It is important to note here that the notion of the American wilderness being unowned is also a relatively modern European belief. Of course the American wilderness once was owned—at least, in the usufruct sense—by Native peoples. As described in Mark David Spence’s Dispossessing the Wilderness, prior to the Civil War, many Euro-Americans conceived of the American West as an “Indian wilderness”—a concept that was possible only because Native Americans were considered natural (i.e., not fully human) beings. However, as the conservation movement gained momentum in the late nineteenth century, the Native Americans’ active management of the land (through hunting, gathering, small-scale agriculture, and the strategic use of fire) was seen as ruining the “pristine” and “primordial” qualities that conservationists had grown to cherish. William Cronon aptly captured the irony of this shift: “The myth of the wilderness as ‘virgin,’ uninhabited land had always been especially cruel when seen from the perspective of the Indians who had once called that land home. Now they were forced to move elsewhere, with the result that tourists could safely enjoy the illusion that they were seeing their nation in its pristine, original state, in the new morning of God’s own creation.”

II. I checked with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, which keeps detailed records of all the thru-hikers who registered their hikes, and they told me that out of the fourteen thousand total thru-hikers, thirteen had self-identified as American Indian, and two as Cherokee. However, there was no way to know whether those people were one-half Native American, one-quarter, one-sixty-fourth, or only Native at heart.

III. The Watermans’ statement was somewhat coy. Abel and Ethan most likely cut the path in a gradual fashion because they knew that it would one day need to suit both skittish horses and wilting urbanites.

IV. The shape of these structures, properly called Adirondack lean-tos, was inspired by the kinds of impromptu bark shelters that mountain guides like the Crawfords once built for their clients.

V. It is surely no coincidence that MacKaye, having just lost his wife to what was then called “nervous depression,” stressed the importance of wilderness in maintaining mental health. A note of mad hope can be detected as he writes, “Most sanitariums now established are perfectly useless to those afflicted with mental disease—the most terrible, usually, of any disease. Many of these sufferers could be cured. But not merely by ‘treatment.’ They need acres not medicine. Thousands of acres of this mountain land should be devoted to them with whole communities planned and equipped for their cure.”