Logistics of Thru-Hiking

Bill Bryson talked a lot about what he and Katz went through while actually hiking on the Appalachian Trail—the long days, the harsh conditions, the monotony, and the occasional beautiful view that makes everything seem a little bit okay—but he doesn’t talk about the specifics that make thru-hiking a long trail so different from a regular backpacking trip. Thru-hikers need to plan for months in advance for the kinds of food they want, mailing packages to themselves, or hitchhiking rides into small towns and figuring out ways to buy a week’s worth of non-perishable foods from a gas station that will miraculously fit into an unyielding 10 liter bear canister. This is without thinking about gear: the narrator does have a very amusing section about his experiences at a gear store purchasing everything he needed for the Appalachian Trail, but I didn’t think that it did justice to the immense amount of thought and planning that goes into carrying everything you need to survive in harsh conditions for 40 weeks in a single backpack, carrying all of the essentials and not an ounce more. As much as he described in detail the experience of taking physical steps on the trail, thru-hiking is so, so much more than that.

A Walk in the Woods and Wild are both very successful, popular books about hiking long trails in the United States that have recently been made into films. These stories are inspiring tales of people stepping out of their comfort zone to try something new, adventurous, exciting, and possibly dangerous. There are a lot of readers that decided to hike one of these trails in response to reading or watching these stories: when Wild was published in 2012, the number of PCT permits issued spiked from 300 to 2,400. It is impossible to know how many of these hopeful hikers actually reach the northern end of the trail, or how many of those did not skip sections, but the Pacific Crest Trail Association estimates that most of the new hikers are not doing it in a way that will get them to the end. There are reports of new hikers carrying laundry detergent and blow dryers on their 2,600 mile hike from Mexico to Canada. Cheryl Strayed, the author of Wild, even started a campaign with the PCTA called “Reasonably Wild” to encourage people inspired by her book to hike the trail only if they are truly prepared.

I really enjoyed A Walk in the Woods because of Bryson’s brutal honesty in he and Katz’s successes and failures in attempting an AT hike. They were unprepared and had hiccups, and that was completely admitted in the novel, and it ultimately didn’t matter because they had an adventure and had fun along the way. The logistics were not described in a lot of detail, but I don’t think that was the point.