Admitted, I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. All I had done was read Bill Bryson’s bestseller, A Walk in the Woods. Nonetheless, I spent at least four months of almost full-time planning to thru-hike the 2,181 mile Appalachian Trail. I had never even spent the night outdoors. Of course many thru-hiker wannabes will have backpacking experience under their belt. Why does it take so long? Actually some of that time was physical...

Bill Walker, author of the popular Skywalker hiking books series, is offering his popular Pacific Crest Trail book, Skywalker–Highs and Lows on the Pacific Crest Trail, for free upload on Amazon Kindle and other handheld devices, this Friday and Saturday, November 7 and 8, 2014. Walker is also the author of Skywalker–Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail, The Best Way–El Camino de Santiago, and Getting High–The...

Amazon Prime members: It’s the first of the month again. Could I suggest a hiking book that you can upload on Amazon Kindle for free? Why? If you are like me, you select your reading material looking for something that could be life changing in some way, shape, or form. Outdoor narratives have the potential to carry the reader far and wide, giving a perspective–perhaps even fortitude–one theretofore lacked. Bill Walker is the...

Bill Walker, author of the Skywalker series of hiking books, is offering his popular Appalachian Trail book, Skywalker–Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail, for free upload on Amazon Kindle this weekend, October 25-26 only. This is the story of his thru-hike of the 2,180 mile Appalachian Trail which runs from Georgia to northern Maine through fourteen states. Walker is also the author of Skywalker–Highs and Lows on the Pacific...

“A trail of the masses.” Now that’s a loaded term. And the Pacific Crest Trail–isn’t the Appalachian Trail (AT) America’s ‘trail of the masses’? Yes, the AT is. However that doesn’t mean the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) can’t be one also. The good news is that it rapidly is. Of course part of it has to do with the phenomenal success of Cheryl Strayed’s PCT memoir, Wild–From...

Folks, let’s hope for no more drama. Last year three hikers were rescued by helicopter, and another outright cheated death by developing an escape plan from an early blast of snow in the northern Cascades, which PCT (Pacific Crest Trail) hikers traverse to complete the trail at the Canadian border. How about this year? There has already been one helicopter rescue for injury. And the Dinsmore hostel located in Skykomish–about 175...