A Walk in the Woods

Bryson briefly discusses some of the most famous people who have successfully completed the end-to-end AT trek, including Earl V. Shaffer, who in 1948 became the first to accomplish it; Ward Leonard, who completed the trail in 60 days in the 1980s; and Bill Irwin, a man with blindness, who completed it with a service dog. Then, Bryson returns to the narrative and rationalizes his and Katz’s decision to skip a portion of the AT by noting that they’d already walked half a million steps and that “it didn’t seem altogether essential to do the other 4.5 million to get the idea of the thing” (163). During their cab ride from Gatlinburg to Knoxville and rental car journey to Virginia, they experience the mind-numbing transition from being in a forest for so long to being back in the crass urban world.

Bryson discusses botanical history at length, noting how botanists from Europe plunged deep into the forests of North America to discover and cultivate new plants. He notes that aside from Indigenous Americans, the first people to venture deep into the woods “weren’t looking for prehistoric creatures or passages to the West or new lands to settle.