The Appalachian Trail Kickoff at Amicalola Falls, Georgia saw a record turnout this weekend. First, let me say thank you to Lauretta Dean for doing such a boffo job at arranging the whole weekend, as well as inviting me to speak. But much more importantly, this event–which is just a few years old–has now become one of the marquee events in the hiking community, along with Trail Days in Damascus, Virginia (May 17-19) and the Pacific...

You may have seen my tweets and posts relating to ‘Beware the Ides of March’. I was referring to those thru-hiker candidates on the Appalachian Trail who begin in March. To be sure, this has its advantages. If you’re a hiker of modest strength, this gives you an extra month to make it all the way to Mount Katahdin in northern Maine. But the perils of bad–even dangerous–weather loom. Yesterday a hiker was rescued off...

“I can’t believe it,” I have often exclaimed to friends. I sell two or three times as many units on Kindle as I do paperbacks. For a technophobe like myself, that is amazing. But heck, the logic of e-books is overwhelming. The customer pays approximately 30% of the price, the author makes more, and so does poor Jeff Bezos of Amazon. Win-win-win. And the customer gets it right away. I have yet to see any statistics on an...

. Snow LSnow levels on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) are one of the key variables of a thru-hike on the Pacific Crest Trail. All winter, potential thru-hikers follow various websites trying to get an indication of how much snow there is the current year compared to normal. Well, I have some good news: the California Department of Water Resources reports that snow levels are running about 80% of normal amounts. That is very good news for all but...

“America’s hiking trails cast the widest possible net in terms of its participants,” I wrote in Skywalker–Highs and Lows on the Pacific Crest Trail. An astounding, but true, statistic is that between 3,000,000 and 4,000, 000 hikers per year step foot on the Appalachian Trail, for hikes of varying length and duration. That is all indeed good news. For the most part, the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails are widely...