A Walk in the Woods summary

It was early March, 1996, and the author was with his old school friend Stephen Katz. They’d both grown up in Des Moines, Iowa, and had decided to tackle the Appalachian Trail together. They began in Georgia, at Amicalola Falls State Park just below Springer Mountain – the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail.

The first part of the trail carried the two companions through a wood. They weren’t to see a public highway for four days, much less anything resembling a town.

By the time Bryson and Katz set off on the trail that March, spring still hadn’t arrived. Temperatures were yet to rise, and there was barely a chirrup to be heard. The absence of the birds and insects made for one very quiet forest.

Most of the time, Bryson walked a good way ahead of Katz, who was struggling with the pace. Each was alone in his solitude. Despite the pleasingly temperate weather, fellow hikers were nowhere to be seen, and they could go for hours without coming across anyone.

It was rewarding enough to have made it through the snow, but an even greater prize was at hand. Bryson and Katz had now made it to Tennessee. 

Before them lay the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a staggering 800 square miles of forest laden with animals and plant life. The trail through the Smokies – as it’s more informally known – follows the border between Tennessee and North Carolina. It's 71 miles long and requires summiting 16 mountains, each one more than 6,000 feet high. In fact, the highest point of the entire Appalachian Trail – The Clingmans Dome mountain – is situated in the Smokies, standing an impressive 6,643 feet tall.

While the author was walking the trail, he had many an hour to observe the beauty that surrounded him. He found himself especially drawn to the trees and soon came to appreciate their wonder.

Trees can suck up incredible volumes of water to their uppermost branches and leaves. They do this by making use of three layers of living tissue: Phloem, cambium and xylem. These sit just beneath the bark, surrounding the dead, thick core of wood. Three thin layers of cells – that’s it. Incredibly, on warm days, large trees can lift hundreds of gallons of water.

The town the two companions had spied was Waynesboro, Virginia. In many ways, it’s a typical American town, built for car users despite being situated just off the Appalachian Trail. Amazingly, the author found himself greeted with disbelief when he asked for walking directions to the local Kmart. Where was his car? He wanted to buy some insect repellant and didn’t think anything of the mile or so walk in each direction.

Maybe it’s not so surprising that Bryson was met with this reaction. People generally aren’t big walkers in the US, and it turned out there were no pedestrian sidewalks on the way to Kmart.

Bryson and Katz knew they’d had a good run of it and decided to end this particular leg of their hike in Front Royal, a small town on the northern edge of the Shenandoah. They planned to meet again in Maine a few months later and continue the trail from there. But first, Bryson wanted to try a few stretches by himself in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire. His car would get him to the starting point, and he’d plan a route accordingly to get him back to his vehicle.

His first stop was Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, a site closely associated with the American Civil War of 1861-65.

More than a billion years ago, the continents we know today were just one single, large landmass. This supercontinent was known as Pangaea and the sea that encircled it was called Panthalassa.

Turbulence in the earth’s mantle caused Pangaea to break into several continents that slowly – very slowly – drifted and occasionally collided with one another. The continents have actually come together several times since their initial parting. On the third of these collisions, about 470 million years ago, the Appalachian Mountains began to be formed.

Driving back and forth between spots on the trail was all well and good, but the author wanted to get some real distance under his belt before he met up with Katz again, so Bryson had his kind wife drop him off near Stockbridge. He wanted to hike for three days through the wooded Berkshire hills of southwest Massachusetts.

The Berkshires comprise around 100,000 acres of forest. They teem with wildlife, despite hunting having reduced animal numbers a great deal over time.

By the time August rolled around, the author was ready for the next stage of the trail. He and Katz were together once again. The plan this time was to make their way through Maine. Their goal was Mount Katahdin, the northernmost point of the Appalachian Trail.

To get there, they’d have to make their way through the Hundred Mile Wilderness – by no means an easy task. The route is just shy of 100 miles long, at 99.7 miles. Along its forested length there’s barely any civilization to speak of – no houses, stores or telephone booths – just woodland almost all the way to the summit of Katahdin.