Tl:dr (do people still say that?): a thru-hike is part of the social fabric that helps prevent destructive bullshit from happening.
It’s thru-hiking season, but holy shit, the bastards are running amok! It seems like we should be doing something, not walking off into the woods.
Narcissistic billionaires with chainsaws are gutting the federal government with impunity and (aside from an 83 year old socialist) the firmest responders among our supposed leaders are playing dead. Putting aside literally everything else, on environmental issues - which surely thru-hikers must care about - the situation is dire, infuriating, the stuff of 1960s dystopian science fiction.
His first days in office the grand psychopath issued executive orders rolling back climate change policy, pushing increased domestic oil production (Drill baby drill!), eliminating green energy goals and declaring an Orwellian “energy emergency” in order to skirt the Endangered Species Act and other restrictions to push for logging in hundreds of millions of acres of National Forest. The nihilist in chief put Tom Schultz, a logging executive and corporate lobbyist, in charge of the Forest Service. DOGE is firing NPS employees, and the core agencies that manage the American wilderness - including the long trails - have been thrown into immediate crisis.
The constellation of events only makes sense when you view it through the lens of money and power. People will argue that there’s a conservative desire to cut waste and a nationalistic push towards energy independence. But that’s just whitewash. None of it adds up. If that’s the case, why are we cutting funding for social programs and national parks and advancing tax cuts to billionaires and large corporations? If we care about energy independence, why are we scrapping green energy and EV goals? And why are they doing all of this through extra-legal means? The garbage flurry in American government only makes sense if the goal is to prop up extraction industries and sell off public resources to the highest bidder - the way these types of leaders always do, everywhere in the world. “Free markets,” right? Fuck off. If it looks like an oligarch, and quacks like an oligarch…
This stuff would’ve had The Monkey Wrench Gang heading to the woods to drain the oil from loggers’ engines, blowing up dams or pipelines or whatever they could get their hands on. How the hell are we just going to walk off into the woods at a time like this?
Don’t we need to do something?
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Listen, you don’t need anyone’s permission to continue with your thru-hike. Don’t let the bastards grind you down, and don’t let the clueless monsters keep you from living your life.
But also don’t discount the impact of a good long walk. Thru-hiking might seem, at first glance, like escapism. For some people I’m sure it is, but it doesn’t have to be. If you do it right, it’s not the worst thing you could do at a moment like this.
What is a long trail for?
A thing you should know if you’re going to hike a long trail in the 2020s is that the trails were never intended for escapism. “Recreation,” yes, but a type of recreation that was intended to transform individuals and ultimately shape society.
It’s easiest to understand this if you go back and read Thoreau, Emerson, and the New England Transcendentalists. They were the ones who formulated the philosophy that eventually led to the development of the American long trails in the 20th century.
In the mid-19th century, in order to rejuvenate progressive culture and develop a way of thinking appropriate to the American world, they combined strains of European Romanticism with Native American philosophy, Eastern Mysticism, and liberal Western Christianity into a new American school of thought - Transcendentalism. One of their core beliefs was that, if you want to find God (or “god,” depending on who you asked), go into the wilderness. For them, nature was a place for transformation. It was a place that could help the individual become their best self, and importantly, a crucible that could shape the individual into a model citizen. They saw access to wilderness as essential to individual freedom and wellbeing, and by extension, the functioning of democracy. They saw American wilderness as a key resource for our mind, body, and soul - individually and collectively. A representative quote from Thoreau’s Walden:
“Village life would stagnate if not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness.”
There’s a direct line between the Transcendentalists and the long trails, because their thinking was hugely influential on both Benton Mackaye, the father of the Appalachian Trail, and Clinton Clarke, the most important early proponent of the Pacific Crest Trail.
Mackaye spent much of his life at Shirley Center, a small village in Massachusetts just a few miles from Walden Pond, where Thoreau wrote the most enduring work of Transcendentalist literature. Like the Transcendentalists, Mackaye often spoke about access to the natural world as a crucial way to keep life in its proper perspective. It was a way to make the sort of citizens that the United States needs in order to survive.
In his seminal essay, “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning,” Mackaye imagined the trail as “a new solution to the problem of living.” It was a way to transform day to day life in civilization, by providing individuals with regular breaks in wilderness.
“Life for two weeks on the mountain top would show up many things about life during the other fifty weeks down below. The latter could be viewed as a whole - away from its heat, and sweat, and irritations. There would be a chance to catch a breath, to study the dynamic forces of nature and the possibilities of shifting to them the burdens now carried on the backs of men.”
Clinton Clarke was more pragmatic and less philosophical than Mackaye, but he endorsed similar goals for the trail in his book on the project, The Pacific Crest Trailway.
“The Pacific Crest Trailway is not a recreational project for the casual camper and hiker, it is a serious educational program for building sturdy bodies, sound minds, and active, patriotic citizenship.”
And from Jenn Livermore’s “The Pacific Crest Trail: A History of America’s Relationship with Western Wilderness”: For Clarke,
“The trail had a distinct goal of building better citizens, and a clear purpose reaching beyond simply providing wilderness as a leisure opportunity… An integral part of [Frederick Jackson] Turner’s writings was that “democracy was a forest product” and experiencing primitive wilderness experiences “fostered individualism, independence, and confidence in the common man that encouraged self-government.” These values, unique to the American experience, were what Clarke feared was at stake as wilderness disappeared. The common man could be elevated to embrace these values through contact with untamed nature, and the disappearance of wilderness marked these qualities, integral to America’s greatness, as transient. Clarke thus envisioned the trail as a necessity to preserve the roots of democracy.”
Not incidentally, Mackaye specifically pictured the trail as a bulwark against the sort of unrestrained consumptionism that’s always been pushed in some form in American culture, which is creating madness and chaos again today. From Mackaye’s “An Appalachian Trail”:
“The reposeful study of these forces [of nature] should provide a broad gauged enlightened approach to the problems of industry. Industry would come to be seen in its true perspective - as a means in life and not as an end in itself.”
(There’s debate about the leftward extent of Mackaye’s political leanings, but we do know that he dabbled in socialism as a youth, railed against “ultraconservatives,” and spoke of the trail as a “flank attack” against industrialization and unrestrained capitalism. Have a look at this article from the Appalachian Trail Conservancy.)
The founders imagined the trails as an escape from society, but they weren’t escapists. They thought the trail would be a way to gain necessary perspective during the ongoing struggle to build a better civilization. They were motivated enough to devote their lives to building them because they believed wilderness is necessary.
It’s idealism, maybe, but not avoidance.
The long trails aren’t just intended to transform you. They’re meant to transform society.
It’s good, right? We’re starting to see an argument in favor of thru-hiking during a time of social upheaval. The trails were intended as places that would build better citizens and temper unrestrained capitalism. Go, and they’ll transform you into the type of person that America needs at the moment. If you want to change your world, change yourself. If you want to change yourself, go into the wilderness. This has been an American value for centuries, and it’s a major reason that they long trails exist.
I’m not against that line of thinking, but there’s more to the story.
Like a lot of Americans, the Transcendentalists were primarily individualists. That is, when they thought about how to improve society, they focused on improving individuals. If individuals better themselves, then the society is bound to improve as a result.
This sort of individualism isn’t necessarily wrong, but it does overlook systemic factors that change society as a whole.
And along with being an avenue for individual transformation, a long trail is a systemic factor designed to create change in society as a whole.
Benton Mackaye himself intended for long trails to function in this way. Mackaye was - through his life - a systems guy. He was a regional planner by profession, and he saw the AT as a way to transform life in the Appalachian corridor by providing access to nature and recreation. In other words, it was a huge, systemic intervention designed to shape the whole of the eastern United States.
Mackaye’s vision for the AT was utopian. He believed that if the trail was built, communities would form around it, creating a balance between society and wilderness. The trail would be a viaduct providing civilization with the flow of nature it needed. If you’ve read Walden, you can see the resonance here. He was providing everyone in the vicinity of the trail with their own little patch of Appalachian nature, accessible within walking distance, so they could regularly duck between wilderness and civilization. It was the same life balance that Thoreau described during his time at Walden Pond. The trail was a way to build infrastructure in support of Transcendentalist ideals that had crept into the national consciousness.
Clarke and the developers of the PCT were inspired by Mackaye and there’s no reason to think they disagreed with this way of thinking - this idea that the trail would connect communities to a backyard of protected wilderness that would enrich the region, and the country as a whole through the locals’ regular transit into and out of the mountains.
It’s worth noting that, for many people, Mackaye’s plan worked. Go to any trail town and you’ll find values and lifestyles similar to the ones he imagined: balance between appreciation for nature and civilization, hard work and recreation. Trail corridors are some of the most liveable parts of the country.
Even though it’s an obvious point, it’s also worth noting that there have always been a large percentage of Americans who aren’t terrible, so Mackaye and Clarke weren’t alone in their thinking. The trails developed quickly in the mid-1900s because they found the support of huge numbers of American volunteers, politicians, and enthusiasts. The trails were codified into law and further engrained into the national consciousness with the National Trails System Act in 1968 because the country’s leadership agreed about the value of long trails and wilderness.
The founders’ thinking is consistent with the ideas that guided the development of national parks and wilderness areas more broadly across the US across the last 150 years. The dominant American ideas about wilderness in the earliest days were colonial. Wilderness was seen as a challenge to be conquered, teeming with beasts, enemies, and natural disasters. Colonization was about conquering the challenge that the North American wilderness presented. But the shift in thinking exemplified by Thoreau and Emerson took physical form in the infrastructure built by the National Park Service. The expansion of belief in wilderness as an essential component of human wellbeing led to its protection and management on a mass scale - competing with, and providing a corrective for, the ever-present capitalistic conception of the natural world as a resource to be conquered and exploited. The competing ideas have shaped the North American physical landscape ever since - a combination of protected areas, collectively owned wild places, developed land, and private ownership.
The modern struggle between principled idealists like you and me and shortsighted nihilists like them and theirs is nothing new in the United States. Widespread embrace of National Parks and other protected wilderness spaces is evidence of the pervasive expansion of Transcendentalist-style values around nature. “America’s Best Idea” is right. That’s why it feels like maintaining the parks and the trails is a value-driven goal, and a statement about what it means to be an American. It’s why placing a logging czar in charge of the Forest Service feels like such a betrayal.
Thru-hike as Transcendentalist pilgrimage
An interesting thing about the long trails is that the founders didn’t foresee people thru-hiking them. At least publicly, neither Mackaye nor Clarke spoke of the trails as corridors for people who wanted to spend six months walking through the wilderness. They saw the trails as multifaceted ecosystems connecting communities to untamed nature, and venues for regular recreation, but end-to-end walkers weren’t mentioned as a part of their vision.
Within a couple of decades of their existence though, a few people did begin walking the long trails from end to end. Initially these were seen as eccentric grand adventures, but across decades the interest and population of thru- and long section hikers has grown up, with a significant boom during the last 20 years. These days, thousands of people hike hundreds or thousands of miles every year on the American long trails.
While long distance hiker use is still nowhere near as significant as day or weekend use, a thru has become one of the most transformative and potentially politically significant things a person can do on a trail in the United States.
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This is a mildly controversial statement, but I think it’s true: the experience and social significance of thru-hiking can be best understood through the lens of a deeper, older tradition even than the Transcendentalists - the ancient practice of pilgrimage.
There’s a lot of debate about how to define the term “pilgrimage,” but I like Victoria Preston’s phrase in her book We Are Pilgrims where she distills the concept to its most basic essence. A pilgrimage is:
“A ritual journey to a place of shared spiritual meaning.”
For a lot of people, pilgrimage is instinctually associated with religion, but it’s a nearly universal feature of human society across time and culture. People take long trips with the intention of transformation. It happens everywhere, for a variety of reasons.
And a long distance hike on the North American long trails represents a particular sort of pilgrimage, driven by a particular set of beliefs and expectations about the potential impact of wilderness.
Working with Preston’s definition, a ritual is any intentional action whose goal is to produce an emotional outcome or mark out a particular experience as special. A thru-hike is certainly an intentional action, and I don’t know anyone who’s gone without the expectation that it would be a transformational time full of unique emotional outcomes.
About going to “a place of shared spiritual meaning” - viewed through the lens of the Transcendentalist philosophy that’s osmosed its way into the North American subconscious, “wilderness” - while not localized to any one relic, cathedral, or sacred grotto - is itself a place of shared spiritual meaning for the thousands of people who hike off into the woods every year on the long trails. For some that is connected to religion. For most it is not. For all there’s a faith in the wilderness itself, which traces all the way back to Thoreau and beyond into pre-European thought about nature in the Americas.
Like any good classic pilgrimage, thru-hiking culture wasn’t manufactured, but sprung up organically as people were attracted to the possibility of spending transitional seasons of life in the wild, sacred places that were created in the trail corridors. Like any good pilgrimage, the long trails have begun to take on a spiritual and cultural significance that can help preserve human values and ideas even through tumultuous historical drama.
Thru-hikers are rarely pretentious enough to refer to themselves as pilgrims, but if you ask me, that’s what they are. Dirtbag pilgrims, walking into the wilderness in search of transcendence and transformation.
In times like these, this matters for a variety of reasons.
What will a thru-hike do for you?
While the trails’ founding figureheads didn’t imagine thru-hiking as a likely outcome of their efforts, less than a century after the AT’s completion, these corridors - particularly the AT and PCT, but also the Continental Divide, Arizona,, and Colorado Trails - have become conduits for a mass movement of thousands of people annually. While numbers aren’t on par with the grand international pilgrimages like the Hajj, the Camino de Santiago, and the journey to the Bodh Gaya, the American long trails have become some of the world’s most significant walking experiences - especially when considered collectively.
These American pilgrimages have some of the effects that the founders intended for the trails. They create sturdy citizens with a strong sense of connection to the North American continent, and to the United States, by way of the land itself. However, for thru-hikers, the long trails also do what pilgrimage has always done. As evidenced by books like WIld by Cheryl Strayed and Victoria Bruce’s Adventures with Emilie, long trails have become places of healing and personal transformation.
Like the Hajj and the Camino, the trails have fostered the development of their own countercultures. Hiking a trail has become an experience of leaving the mainstream of society and spending a significant amount of time in a culture with different values and social norms. (Side plug: defining this counterculture was a main goal in The Dirtbag’s Guide to Life.) Hiking is a way to do your own thing and try out a different approach when life’s rulebook isn’t working anymore. If you’re damaged, the trail is a place where you can find healing. If you’re disillusioned and lost, the trail is a place that can help you find direction.
Like all good pilgrimages, hiking a long trail is guaranteed to connect you to a bigger picture. Our current political reality is a lot of things - it’s ridiculous, it’s infuriating, it’s anxiety provoking, But it’s not unprecedented, and it’s not going to be the end of us. On a long trail, you’re going to be surrounded by wilderness. You’re going to have ongoing experiences of transcendence (just like the Transcendentalists said). And you’re going to remember that even the most consequential human beings are a small part of a much larger reality. That’s not a solution to our current problems, but it is the context in which those problems exist.
In a similar way - especially if you know where long trails came from - you’re bound to develop a grounding to the better angels of our American nature. The long trails are the product of some of the most humane, communitarian streams of American thought and history. They’re a reminder that shallow shortsightedness and heartless capitalism aren’t the only ways of thinking in American tradition. (Even if toxicity constantly flows just below the surface in all human culture.) It’s a walk through a wilderness corridor, but also through a corridor of human enlightenment. The better angels of our nature have endured through civil war and worse, and they’ll endure through this.
The trails are also a reminder of the power of the collective. Walking a trail may seem like an individual effort, but every thru-hiker within relatively short order realizes that they travel along through the effort and support of thousands and thousands of volunteers, locals, supporters, and leaders both past and present. They continue to exist because of the collective effort of Americans with grander visions than fattening their own pocketbooks and stamping their own golden names on everything holy.
In a time when mainstream culture is thoroughly out of control, and the rulebook for living doesn’t seem to be working any more, the trail also provides alternate, unexpected perspective on how to live a good life. People who return from thru-hikes struggle to reintegrate back into society because they spend months living according to a different set of rules and values. Simplicity. Mutual concern. Anti-materialism. Individual responsibility. Commitment to transcendence and the natural world. It’s a moment to live a different sort of life, and if you’re intentional, those values carry over after the trail. Many of us never really go back. We step out of the stream, and never get back in it. These days, America needs this en masse.
What does pilgrimage do for society?
All of that stuff is important to you - to the individual hiker. But there’s a bigger picture at play as well. It’s important to all of us that masses of hikers continue to go and push through extended periods on the long trails. While it’s a less discussed consequence of pilgrimage, these types of long walks also have larger social roles. Very frequently they represent mass movements that are threatening for would-be conquerors and authoritarians.
There are lessons from history here.
When the British East india Company was the dominant political and economic power in India, they consistently worried about Hajj as a destabilizing influence on the population they were seeking to manage. For Muslims who went on Hajj, the message received was that there are powers that are higher than those put in place by human governments. Before Allah, all humans are equal, including would-be conquerors. While many Western Christians view Islam as a hierarchical form of religion, Hajj is a radically egalitarian experience for many, and it undermined the sense of a natural order of power that the British company men relied on to maintain control over India.
When Britain was eventually expelled from India, pilgrimage played a major role. Gandhi’s Salt Marches were organized in response to the British government monopolizing India’s salt production, and making it impossible for locals to collect or sell an abundant and formerly freely accessible resource. Gandhi and a cohort of others marched inland to salt works by the sea, to collect salt in defiance of the empire. It galvanized crowds and at least 60,000 people were arrested for supporting or participating. Like the Civil Rights marches that helped change segregationist laws in the American South, the Salt Marches were key events in demonstrating the collective power of common Indian citizens, who were ultimately able to expel the Brits and establish independence.
And during the Islamic conquests of the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages, the Camino de Santiago formed a crucial barrier that prevented expansion into the far north of Spain. The Camino Frances, between the French border in the east and Santiago in the far west, had been established as a key pilgrimage route for European Christians, and dozens of sacred sites had sprung up along the way. As Islam expanded north, the Camino was fortified and pilgrims were encouraged to continue their way along the route as a way to protect the sacred sites in Spanish Christian culture and resist conquest. It worked and for hundreds of years the thin line of Spain north of the Camino remained unconquered.
Victoria Preston writes more extensively about all of these topics in We Are Pilgrims.
Hajj, the Camino, and other major pilgrimages mobilize hundreds of thousands of pilgrims every year - millions even. While American thru-hikers don’t approach anything like those kinds of numbers, day use and the communities around the long trails do represent hundreds of thousands of people every year. While historically long trails have been viewed as “recreational” experiences, it’s not a stretch to say that the foundations of a mass movement for the protection of America’s wild place is present on the trails.
In the same way that traditional pilgrimages communicate something about the power of ‘God’ or religious institutions, the wilderness trails reinforce the idea that America’s wild places are more enduring than the government and social forces that seek to exploit and degrade them. Participating in a hike on the long trails reinforces and highlights an American tradition that’s humane and egalitarian in a context where government is shifting towards the exploitative and authoritarian. The trails reinforce the highest American values, even when they aren’t the most politically dominant.
Hiking a long trail has rarely been seen as an act of protest. However, there has been a strong historical connection between wilderness, a long walk, and activism. Henry David Thoreau is the author of Walden, Walking, and Civil Disobedience, and his brain generated all of them during his time spent living a dirtbag existence in the countryside at Walden Pond. Marches were an integral part of the Civil Rights movement in the United States and abroad. After thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, Peace Pilgrim in the ‘60s and ‘70s charted an American course for a very long walk as a way to promote humanist values. In a period where oligarchs are trying to sell off the wilderness, the thru-hike as a form of protest feels inevitable - an act of defiance against the defunding and liquidation of the sacred places that make an activity like thru-hiking possible.
And in that act of defiance, there’s another concrete impact of the thru-hike in the midst of all of this. Like the Camino de Santiago during the Islamic conquests of the Iberian, the long trails represent something enduring philosophically. They’re about “wilderness” as a place of shared spiritual significance for all of us. But just as importantly, they set out the specific areas that they pass through as sacred. Thousands of people have had transformative experiences at places like Springer Mountain, the High Sierra, the Goat Rocks Wilderness, the Wind River Range, and Katahdin. Like the Camino, the trails - and the thousands of people that walk them every year - form lines in the sand, with the potential to protect some of America’s most sacred places simply because of their existence. When “wilderness” is an amorphous philosophical concept, it’s easy to dismiss its destruction. When it’s a specific place that masses have come to love personally, it becomes clear where and what this struggle is about.
Thru-hiking and the possibility of recreation in the midst of destruction
Does this stuff matter? I don’t know. I think so.
Is it enough? No, it’s not.
You might want to go form a Monkey Wrench Gang, and I wouldn’t blame you.
But a thru-hike isn’t the worst thing you could do at the moment.
We live in a destabilized time - it feels like a ‘fuck around’ period before we ultimately find out. A reason to thru-hike in the midst of this is that it offers a potential for recreation - not frivolously, but in Mackaye’s idealistic sense. It offers the potential to re-create yourself, and ultimately help re-create society. What’s needed at the moment is a level of commitment from everyone to resist destructive forces but also work for a better world. While a thru-hike is not everything that’s needed, I do think it can be something that’s needed. It’s what the trails were intended for, and it’s what long walks through sacred places have always done. Reminding society what’s important. Grounding ourselves in transcendent places and values. Getting our own priorities straight. Maintaining perspective that this too will pass. Establishing a sturdy commitment to the better aspects of American culture and heritage. Resisting the creeping delusions of greed and consumption that lurk below the surface. Drawing a line at sacred places and the values and identity that they represent.
It’s not a solution to all of our problems, but with everything going on, it is important that some of us go ahead and walk off into the woods.
Granted, if it were me this year, I’d be hiking with my middle fingers raised and pointed towards Washington.
Check out my books The Dirtbag's Guide to Life and What Happens If You Keep Going? for more on the importance of the outdoors and travel, even in troubled times.
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