The Appalachian on a ridge of the White Mountains in New Hampshire/USGS, Jeffrey Marion

The Appalachian Trail: A Biography

Reviewed by John Miles

The Appalachian Trail is a fixture of outdoor life in 21st century America and is, as author Philip D’Anieri describes it, “a very narrow national park, from Maine to Georgia.” Introducing the book, he makes clear he does not intend it to be a history but rather a biography, “an attempt to render something essential about the life of this place by looking at how it developed over time.”

He succeeds brilliantly by describing the contributions of 12 people -- ten men and two women -- who were key players in the creation of the Appalachian Trails (A.T.) that we know and love and take for granted today. D’Anieri’s goal is to “describe the world of ideas that built the A.T. over the 20th . . .” This was, he can’t help but noting, a “very monochromatic world.”

D’Anieri’s approach is chronological, beginning in the 19th century with the geologist, Arnold Guyot, who contributed as much as anyone to definition of the mountains that became the site of the A.T. Guyot set out to tell the story of the “internal shape and structure of the mountain range on its own terms,” and spent decades hiking the range, measuring and describing its dimensions.

D’Anieri describes Guyot as “small and wiry, renowned for his stamina and endurance well into old age,” qualities essential to carry out the grueling fieldwork required to achieve his understanding of the range. In 1861 he published an article “On the Appalachian Mountain System” which “revealed the mountains in three complementary ways: a written description, a table of 346 elevation measurements, and a richly detailed map.” Guyot had, in effect, created the conceptual landscape for the A.T.

D’Anieri turns next to Horace Kephart, a complex character and leading contributor to the back-to-nature movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He ultimately made popularization of the outdoor life his life’s work, writing Camping and Woodcraft,” a book that was “an encyclopedic treatment of back woods technique” which “portrayed outdoor life as a kind of spiritual practice.” D’Anieri traces Kephart’s tumultuous life, his career as a librarian, his mental breakdowns, and his resurrection in the outdoor life, writing about it, and ultimately acting to protect some of it.

One of Kephart's causes was protecting what became Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a park that would eventually host a significant part of the A.T. Another of his causes late in life was the A.T., which he did not live to see completed but which his tireless advocacy of  outdoor recreation helped create.

The Appalachian Trail: A Biography

James P. Taylor entered the story in 1908 when he moved to Vermont, where he proposed and oversaw creation of the state’s Long Trail.

“The trail,” writes D’Anieri, was “a hiking path linking the Green Mountains together for the first time, opening them up to public appreciation and enjoyment.” The Long Trail would “provide a model for – and a lengthy section of – the Appalachian Trail that would follow about a decade later.”

Taylor was a passionate promoter and organizer and engaged in a “battle between inspiring idea and everyday inertia,” convincing volunteers and even a reluctant Vermont government to build parts of the trail. He organized a Green Mountain Club that would be a model for organizing local clubs along trail routes to contribute labor and other support. With the Appalachian Mountain Club, he established the New England Trail Conference. Taylor’s contribution to the A.T. was organizational, helping establish the model that would be important in creating the A.T.

Benton MacKaye, considered by many the creator the A.T., is portrayed by D’Anieri as principally its intellectual midwife. MacKaye was a visionary, a regional planner, a fount of big ideas. As America was expanding industrially, he thought about how it could do so in a planned and productive way, in a manner that would allow a balance of urban and outdoor life. He was influenced by the work of Kephart and Taylor. D’Anieri writes of MacKaye’s thinking on this:

Of course, productive and recreational uses couldn’t occupy the exact same spaces, but nature had provided the obvious solution. Lower elevations, with their natural access to the outside world, served as the sensible location for productive activity, while the higher ground, on either side of the ridgeline connecting one peak to the next, was ideally suited to recreation. With this simple framework in mind, a vast, interconnected network of recreational land revealed itself to MacKaye.

“The mountain land . . . is the main recreation ground of the Nation,” he wrote. “And the people will require, for a healthful and properly balanced life, all the mountain land that is possible to place at their disposal.” He approvingly took note of the early work of the “young and ambitious Green Mountain Club, to create a ridgeline trail the length of Vermont, and referenced the work of the Appalachian Mountain Club to link up trails with one another. If the AMC and GMC networks could be connected, “a good beginning would be made toward linking up and connecting the mountain camping grounds of New England,” he wrote. And there would be no reason to stop there.

MacKaye went on to coin the name “Appalachian Trail,” to argue for it as a wilderness zone countering the sprawling industrial world, and to widely promote the idea of the trail. He did not do much to physically build it, leaving that to others. When parts of the trail route were established, and the National Park Service thought the idea of a ridgeline route for the masses so good that it proposed to build the Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park, MacKaye thought the A.T. community should unequivocally oppose the idea because the highway would parallel and encroach upon a trail intended to get away from just such modern development. But when the community did not respond as he thought it should, he gave up the cause in disgust.

Why did the A.T. community not vigorously oppose the NPS idea?

The leadership of Myron Avery was part of the reason. Avery and others had organized a Potomac Appalachian Trail Club in 1927 and he became obsessed with getting the trail established and built. By the mid-1930s he had become “the singular and unquestioned leader of the Appalachian Trail project, in part owing to his dedication and in part because he had alienated so many of his onetime collaborators.”

Avery was not in favor of scenic roads, especially when they encroached upon the A.T. route, but he thought that since significant portions of the trail went through Shenandoah and Great Smokey Mountains national parks, maintaining good relations with the Park Service was essential.

“A negotiated, case-by-case solution was the best way forward,” D'Anieri argued. “He had no interest in turning over his meticulously built organization to the forces of righteous indignation.” Avery prevailed, and the A.T. route was relocated away from the scenic highways, with the job finally completed in 1951.

Avery may have been hard to work with in his role as chair of the Appalachian Trail Conference (ATC), but his advocacy of maintaining good relations with the National Park Service would ultimately pay dividends. After D’Anieri describes pioneering thru-hikers Earl Shaffer and Emma Gatewood, whose exploits helped raise the profile of the A.T. in the national consciousness, and explains how Gaylord Nelson successfully shepherded a National Trail Systems Act through Congress, he turns to the story of how the A.T. became part of the National Park System.

That story, as D’Anieri tells it, principally involved three key players – Dave Richie, Pam Underhill, and Dave Startzell. When Richie came on the scene with the National Park Service, its partners in the ATC were frustrated with the agency’s unwillingness to commit to the public side of what had to be a public-private partnership under the National Trails System Act.

Dave Richie convinced the Park Service to take the idea of a truly public-private partnership effort to create the A.T. seriously. In 1978, thanks in no small part to Richie’s leadership, Congress passed a “new and improved NTSA)" that authorized funds to pay for trail land, tasked the Park Service with acquiring the land, and allowed for a 500-foot corridor on either side of the trail. D’Anieri writes that “It had taken ten years and two tries to pass the necessary legislation, but beginning in 1978 the federal government was a fully invested partner in the Appalachian Trail.”

Pam Underhill worked her way up in Richie’s NPS Appalachian Trail Project office and became the lead in the Park Service land acquisition office for the trail. Her job was a tough one in many ways, and D’Anieri recounts some of the more contentious episodes she endured in the government’s effort to acquire chunks of land essential to carrying out the stipulations of the NTSA. Dave Startzell became the executive director of the Appalachian Trail Conference and worked closely with Richie to build the partnership essential to create the A.T. we know today. D’Anieri writes:

But thanks to the work that Dave Richie did in building a public-private partnership on the trail’s behalf, and the day-in, day-out work of acquiring and managing the trail corridor that Pam Underhill, Dave Startzell, and many others carried forward, the Appalachian Trail became a permanent feature of the American landscape in a way that it never was before. Such permanence certainly comes with costs – to those both inside and outside the trail community who may chafe at how the Park Service and the ATC conduct their business – but it is clear that there would be nothing like today’s AT in existence had that robust partnership not come along.

The story of the A.T. is, as D’Anieri describes it, at least one step back for every step forward, and if the federal government had not finally gotten involved, thanks to the NTSA and inspired leadership in the Park Service, the A.T. would be very different than it is today, if it existed at all.

Bill Bryson, author of the immensely popular A Walk in the Woods, is the final player in D’Anieri’s account of the A.T. story. He writes that “Bryson’s is, by orders of magnitude, the most-read book about the Appalachian Trail. For many people it is almost synonymous with the trail itself, the instant association they make when the A.T. is mentioned.”

Bryson brought the A.T. to the masses, to many who would never set foot on it but who could enjoy, with Bryson, the trail experience, despite his initial and delightfully written apprehension about bears lurking out there. Bryson was not a thru-hiker but a writer with a sense of humor who could explain to the American people, through his experience, why the A.T. is important.

D’Anieri set out to “describe the world of ideas” that built the A.T., and he succeeds wonderfully by describing the people who had those ideas and what they brought to the long effort to create the trail. One idea led to another – from Guyot to Kephart, Taylor, MacKaye, Nelson, and Richie. People of action like Avery, Shaffer and Gatewood, Underhill, Startzell, and  Bryson built on the ideas.

The story of the trail is one of fits and starts, and at many junctures along the way it seemed the A.T. might not be achieved. D’Anieri reveals how not only the leadership of those profiled in this book but the thousands of others over the decades, from Maine to Georgia and beyond, overcame the difficulties with creative and determined responses to a myriad of challenges.

D’Anieri offers many reflections for those of us interested in the A.T. and outdoor recreation today to ponder. In his introduction he writes,

As the body of the text makes clear, the invention, construction, and protection of the A.T. was a project firmly grounded in America’s white middle class, responsive to its needs and reflective of its worldview. In this respect, unfortunately, the A.T. is an accurate representation of much of American environmental history, full of the presumption that one privileged slice of society could make its own needs the nation’s, and that its own version of nature was the only authentic one.

That is the history, and he challenges us to think of what a different future for the trail, for outdoor recreation, and conceptions of nature might be? In the final chapter, when he hikes sections of the trail, he poses several other questions. One is “How does history shed light on today’s trail, and how does the contemporary trail help us understand its history?”

As people flock to the trail today, for short and through hikes, he notes the dilemma trail designers of the A.T. or any trail must consider, which is either to make it too accessible “and you take away the whole point of the trail for many of its users.” Or, on the other hand, “Make it too forbidding and you’ve excluded a broad swath of the population from the benefits the trail is meant to provide.”

Too many users damage the trail and constrain the experience many hikers seek. MacKaye once wrote that the purpose of hiking the A.T. was “(1) to walk; (2) to see; (3) to see what you see.” The walking can be done in a crowd, but can the other two conditions be achieved in that situation?

Thinkers like Kephart and MacKaye envisioned the trail as an antidote in nature to the stresses of industrial society. D’Anieri, putting on his hat as a regional planner, observes that, “Isolating the trail from the change all around it meant carving out a narrow strip of exclusion from the actual landscape, an exercise not just in preservation but illusion.” That does not, in his view, undermine the trail’s value, “But it does put the trail in a somewhat different light, in places as much about inward-facing scenery as the outward-facing experience of the world.”

This book is an absorbing read. D’Anieri presents the backstories of the key players he profiles, making the A.T. story very human. After thorough research, amply documented, he selects just the right amount of detail to explain the significance of the contributions of each player. His asides and reflections, based on his research and knowledge as an urban and regional planner, are insightful and sometimes provocative. His writing is clear, uncluttered, and easy to read.

After a lifetime of studying American environmental history, I learned a lot from D’Anieri and enjoyed myself throughout the book. This is not dry history but compelling, informative, storytelling. I’ve only hiked a couple of short portions of the A.T., but reading this book makes me appreciate it all the more, whether or not I ever set foot on it again.