A Walk in the Woods

Bryson provides additional history about the AT, explaining that it was the vision of Benton MacKaye, an employee of the US Labor Department, who unveiled his plan for a long-distance hiking trail in 1921. MacKaye envisioned it as a “retreat from profit” (39) that would interconnect mountaintop work camps and self-owning communities. Bryson notes that while MacKaye typically gets credit for the trail, its actual creation resulted from the efforts of Washington lawyer and avid hiker Myron Avery, who took over construction of the project in 1930. Avery extended the planned 1,200-mile trail to well over 2,000 miles and, using only volunteer labor, formally completed the trail in 1937. Much of MacKaye’s initial vision of the AT was realized because it was “the largest volunteer-run undertaking on the planet” and “remains gloriously free of commercialism” (42).

In Atlanta, Bryson and Katz learn that a man named Wes Wisson provides a shuttle service to deliver hikers to Springer Mountain in North Georgia, the launching point of the AT’s southern end. They pay Wisson $60 to take them to Amicalola Falls State Park and stay the night at Amicalola Falls Lodge before