Every history of the Appalachian Trail tells the story from the top down, focusing on who proposed the trail, who built it, who maintain it, and on a few of the most famous hikers. A Hiker's History of Appalachian Trail tells the trail's history from the ground up, or more accurately, from the boots up. Several million hikers each year set foot on the trail for a few hours, a few days, or perhaps a few weeks. The trail was created for them, yet their role in its history is largely ignored. Working with trail shelter logbooks, hiker accounts submitted to trail clubs, newspaper and magazine stories about the experiences of casual hikers, Mills Kelly reveals what it was like to hike the trail from the late 1920s until the 2020s. What did those hikers eat? What kind of gear did they carry? Why did they go hiking in the first place? What was their relationship to the natural world they found along the trail? What was it like to hike as a woman, as a person of color, as someone with a disability? And how did all those things change over the 100 years of the trail's history?

À propos de l'auteur

Kelly, Mills

Mills Kelly is a historian of the Appalachian Trail and a professor of history at George Mason University. He first set foot on the Appalachian Trail in 1971 as a Boy Scout hiking in Shenandoah National Park and has had a love affair with the trail ever since. He is also the volunteer archivist for the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club in Vienna, Virginia, which is where he first came into contact with the story of Virginia's lost segment of the AT. His podcast, The Green Tunnel , charts the history of the trail from its founding to the present.