This morning I received the following response from Dennis Blanchard, author of Three Hundred Zeroes, about a blog I posted on my website. He makes some salient points. Appalachian Trail books are a cottage industry, probably because we mortal feel compelled-or perhaps cursed–to tell about our lifetime adventures. But the more you read these books, the more you realize how different each person’s experience is. Other than it being...

It’s that time of the year again. Yes, the forests are dormant and it’s almost morbidly cold outside. But in just a couple months, America’s great trail of the masses, the Appalachian Trail, will begin entertaining the 4,000,000 humans who will trek on it at some point or another this year. Out of this four million, approximately 2,000 hikers set out each spring with the objective of walking the trail’s 2,180 mile...

The popular Appalachian Trail narrative, Skywalker–Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail, by Bill Walker, will be available for a free download on Amazon Kindle on Monday and Tuesday, January 21-22. This narrative of Bill Walker’s 2005 thru-hike has sold steadily since being published four years ago. Walker had developed a virtual obsession that he was going to thru-hike the 2,175 mile Appalachian Trail in one hiking season. This...

“What books do you recommend that I read?” I’m often asked by people contemplating a thru-hike of the famed Appalachian Trail. Objectively, it’s  a good question. But it’s a bit ironic that they ask me. For two reasons. To begin with, I wrote a narrative on the Appalachian Trail called Skywalker–Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail. And as we all know, authors are notoriously poor judges of their own...

Amazon Prime members can upload Skywalker–Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail for free. This book is a narrative of Bill Walker´s thru-hike of the 2,180 mile Appalachian Trail. Walker had developed a virtual obsession with thru-hiking this national scenic trail after reading A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson. This was in spite of never having spent a single night outdoors. He set off in the spring of 2005, full of hopes and fears....

Hikers are serious people. No, they aren’t serious in the Mitt Romney, Donald Trump, or Bill Gates way. They have a different focus. It’s a broader one–theGreat Outdoors. Hikers, pilgrims, and of course, outdoorsmen and outdoorswomen don’t like to be confined inside for too long. Their central nervous system thrums at a higher pitch when engaged deep within wilderness, scaling peaks, or perhaps even slogging dutifully...