A Walk in the Woods — Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

Bill Bryson had been living in England for twenty years when he returned to the United States with his family and immediately decided to hike the Appalachian Trail — 2,200 miles of eastern American wilderness running from Springer Mountain, Georgia to Mount Katahdin, Maine. He was middle-aged, not particularly fit, and had no recent hiking experience. He invited his equally unfit friend Stephen Katz, whom he had not seen for years and who had recently completed a recovery programme. They bought gear they did not fully understand and began walking north. A Walk in the Woods is the account of what happened, which was not the through-hike they had planned.

The book succeeds on two levels that Bryson manages to hold together without strain. On the first level it is a sustained comedy of incompetence: two overweight, under-prepared middle-aged men making elementary errors in one of America’s most demanding environments. Katz smuggles Snickers bars into his pack and discards half his equipment within the first days because it is too heavy. Bryson reads bear statistics at night in his tent and regrets it. A woman they meet on the trail, Mary Ellen, is one of the great comic supporting characters in travel writing. On the second level, the book is a serious account of the Appalachian Trail itself — its history, its ecology, the policy failures that have allowed American wilderness to be systematically degraded, and the extraordinary individuals who created it in the first place.

The conservation digressions are better than digressions have any right to be. Bryson’s account of how the American chestnut — which once made up a quarter of all Appalachian forest canopy — was entirely wiped out by an imported fungal blight between 1900 and 1940 is horrifying and moving. His material on the chronic underfunding of the National Forest Service and the political pressures that allow logging companies to operate within protected areas is the kind of journalism that ought to appear in major magazines. These chapters earn their place because the Trail is not separable from the ecosystems it passes through, and understanding what those ecosystems are and how they came to be makes the walk worth taking.

Bryson and Katz eventually complete about 870 miles of the Trail’s 2,200, spread across two attempts. The honesty about this — the absence of triumphalism, the straightforward acknowledgment that they gave up — is one of the book’s best qualities. Most adventure narratives require heroic completion; A Walk in the Woods is content to be a book about two people who tried something difficult and partially succeeded, and who found that the failure was as instructive as the achievement would have been.

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Two Men and an Impossible Trail

Beneath the comedy, A Walk in the Woods is built on a simple and durable structure: a friendship strained and renewed across two thousand miles of wilderness. Bryson and Katz had drifted apart over the decades, and the Trail throws them back together in conditions that expose every fault line between them — Katz’s recklessness against Bryson’s caution, Katz’s appetites against Bryson’s restraint. The double act is the book’s comic engine, but it is also its emotional one. By the end, the partial failure of the hike has become almost beside the point; what the book is really about is two middle-aged men discovering they can still rely on one another in extremity.

The Film and the Afterlife

The book’s popularity carried it to the screen in 2015, in an adaptation starring Robert Redford as Bryson and Nick Nolte as Katz. The casting is telling: Redford had wanted to make the film for years, and the project’s long gestation speaks to the book’s staying power as a comic-but-serious meditation on aging, ambition, and the American landscape. Read alongside or independently of the film, the book retains a quality the adaptation could only partly capture — the density of its natural-history digressions, the genuine grief beneath its account of vanished American forest, and the unhurried honesty with which it admits that the two of them simply gave up before the end. That refusal of triumphalism is, finally, what distinguishes it from every adventure narrative that needs its heroes to finish.

The Grief Beneath the Comedy

The risk of a comic voice as consistent as Bryson’s is that the serious notes can be hard to find, and a fair criticism of the book is that its genuine sorrow is easy to miss between the jokes. But the sorrow is there, and it is mostly environmental. The account of the American chestnut — once a quarter of the Appalachian forest canopy, annihilated within a few decades by an imported blight — is a small elegy for a vanished world, and Bryson’s reporting on the chronic underfunding of the Forest Service and the logging permitted inside protected land carries a real and earned anger. These chapters matter because they place the comic misadventure inside something larger: a wilderness that is more fragile, more degraded, and more recently endangered than the men stumbling through it understand. The book’s lasting impression is not the laughter, finally, but the quieter recognition that the Trail leads through a landscape we are in the slow process of losing.