On Trails.
Robert Moor is an eloquent essayist who thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2009, a rainy year. With the mountain vistas obscured by mist, Moor began pondering the connections under his feet.
Eventually he traveled the world to learn about all kinds of trails and produced a New York Times bestseller and winner of numerous prizes that the Sierra Club called “the best outdoors book of the year.”
Moor flashes back to his hikes on the AT and elsewhere, but this is not a cohesive memoir. It’s a literary exploration leavened with findings from science, history, and philosophy.
I was hoping for a deep dive into the origin of hiking trails. But Moor tells us that hiking-specific trails were invented by nature-starved city-dwellers in relatively recent times. So there isn’t a lot to say, apparently.
He seeks to understand the origin of trails through days spent following and interviewing experts in somewhat-related fields. Most of it is fascinating, though the connection to hiking trails is occasionally obscure.
The fossil and ant trails didn’t quite gel, but the long-lost Cherokee Trails of the southeast were fascinating to me. Quite unlike our modern hiking trails, those of the native Americans took direct lines up hills and along ridges, rather than switchbacking for sustainability or detouring for views.
Moor veers off to explore the origins of Interstate highways, the world wide web, and the International Appalachian Trail — more a concept than a reality at the moment.
He ends by exploring our life paths — spiritual, career, wellness — noting we shape them collectively, but that individually they shape us.
This is a brilliant book, but so diverse you may have trouble identifying or understanding a unifying theme. I appreciated Moor’s simpler insights, for example that the appeal of hiking lies in how it pares down the choices among modern civilization’s many paths:
“Every morning, the hiker’s options are reduced to two: walk or quit.”
Note: also I highly recommend Moor’s New Yorker essay on the disconnect in the most popular hiking memoirs.
Trail Memoir 