About the book:
In 1973 I hiked the two thousand-mile Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine with my wife, Jerrianne, and daughter, Kyra, who was ten years old at the time. I wrote a book about the adventure which was published as Walking North.
I’ve walked another two thousand miles in the intervening thirty years on many different hiking and backpacking trips. This book tells of some of those journeys, either because the place I went was interesting or because something interesting happened there. For the most part, I hiked alone. I’ve sometimes thought this was because I went such bizarre places no one wanted to go along. But friends and family do hike with me on occasion and some of those trips are included here, too.
The epilog of Walking North reviews an important understanding I gained on the AT: that I was not a guest or visitor in the woods, but I belonged there as much as the trees and rocks and grass and flowers and creatures that lived there. It was my home as much as theirs.
Then I looked a step beyond that realization and wrote: “I can't help but think that insight was just an introduction and that some wider vision lies beyond it.” I’ve been seeking that wider vision since then. These stories are a record of my progress and of the conclusion I’ve reached. Whether the result is profound or not, it was good to go looking and discovering for myself.
Nine of the adventures in this book took place in Alaska, two in Canada and Alaska, and the others in California, Arizona, New Hampshire and Maine, Texas and New Mexico. They add up to a little over five hundred miles of wilderness trail. You may have hiked some of these places; others you may want to try. There’s a couple I’d suggest you avoid.
Though these stories were not written in the sequence they appear, it’s the order in which they happened, the first in 1980 and the last in 2003. Not all are hiking adventures on popular manicured trails. There’s some caving, rafting, wandering lost in unforgiving wilderness, and (gasp) even driving as well. Combined, they tell the rest of what I have to tell.
Note: I'm still working on Taking the Long Way Home so it's some time away from publication . You can read a chapter on the next page.