Roaming the gift shop in Yellowstone National Park in search of a book to fill any idle hours I might encounter after the sun went down, I spied a paperback edition of Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, and figured that now, almost two decades after it came out, was as good a time as any to add his Appalachian Trail odyssey to my library. I wasn't disappointed.

Don't let the horrible movie of the same name starring Robert Redford and Nick Nolte dissuade you from picking up this book. It goes much deeper than the comedic offering Redford and Nolte rolled out, and just might convince you to seriously consider putting one foot before the other on this iconic footpath, even if only for a little while.

Bryson delivers the subtitle of his book: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail.

Sure, he regales us with the stumbles and foibles of his hiking buddy, Stephen Katz, and some of their experiences on the first several hundred miles display their inexperience with hiking and discomfort with the wilds. Later, their struggles through the 100 Mile Wilderness in Maine demonstrate that after all the miles they hiked they still had much to learn.

But between these episodes Bryson dives deeper, exploring the history of the trail and the natural history and American culture that hikers encounter as they try to walk from Georgia to Maine, than the movie dares to. He examines the fate of Centralia, Pennsylvania, a town largely evacuated in 1992 due to an underground coal fire burning there since 1962, gazes at a mountainside in Pennsylvania's Leigh Valley that was laid to waste and denuded by pollution from a zinc mill, and marvels at the Delaware Water Gap, which arose from the demise of the proposed Tocks Island Dam, which would have backed up the Delaware River for nearly 40 miles.

And, he points out, not that many hikers walk all the way from Georgia to Maine in one long summer.

In fact, neither Bryson or Katz hiked the entire length of the trail, instead preferring to both jump off here and there for a hot shower, warm bed, hot meal, and transportation further up the Appalachians before rejoining the trail. They even put a huge gap -- most of Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont -- in between their trail miles, which wound up being less than half the entire 2,180+-mile trail.

"Anyway, we did it," Katz said at last, looking up. He noted my quizzical expression. "Hiked Maine, I mean."

I looked at him. "Stephen, we didn't even see Mount Katahdin."

He dismissed this as a petty quibble. "Another mountain," he said. "How many do you need to see, Bryson?"

I snorted a small laugh. "Well, that's one way of looking at it."

"It's the only way of looking at it," Katz went on and quite earnestly. "As far as I'm concerned, I hiked the Appalachian Trail. I hiked it in snow and I hiked it in heat. I hiked it in the South and i hiked in the North. I hiked it till my feet bled. I hiked the Appalachian Trail, Bryson."

"We missed out on a lot of it, you know."

"Details," Katz sniffed.

I shrugged, not unhappily. "Maybe you're right."

But, as Bryson notes, not walking every single mile of the A.T. is not unusual. And many who do don't have the time to chew off the entire 2,182 miles in one four- or five-month gulp; they come back time and again to walk sections of it year after year after year. 

What A Walk in the Woods delivers is a spark of ambition, some insights into the botany, zoology, and geology found along the trail, and touches on the history of the two men -- Benton MacKaye and Myron H. Avery -- most recognized for making the trail a reality. Along the way the book's two protagonists invite us on the A.T., pretty much as a lark, and discover the wonderful respite it offers from today's hectic, demanding, life.

Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It's quite wonderful, really.