Bill Bryson · 1998 · overland

Bill Bryson's 1998 account of setting out to walk the Appalachian Trail with his hopelessly unfit friend Stephen Katz - and not doing it. They walked 870 miles of 2,190 and drove or hitched the rest, and the book is much funnier and better for it. This map shows the walking and the skipping as different lines.

1. 1
   Springer Mountain

   The southern terminus in Georgia, March 1996, and two middle-aged men with far too much in their packs - Katz jettisoning most of his provisions over a cliff on the first day, including the coffee filters and the rice.

2. 2
   The Great Smokies

   Rain, fog, no view at all from Clingmans Dome, and the Birch Spring shelter - eight days of stumbling up and down mountains in the mud, with a woman called Mary Ellen explaining everything to them at length.

3. 3
   Newfound Gap

   Where the continuous walk ends. They come down off the ridge, hitch into Gatlinburg, and work out over dinner that they are never going to reach Maine on foot - having covered about 500 miles of the trail.

4. 4
   Gatlinburg

   A town of mini-golf and fudge shops that Bryson takes several pages to demolish - and where they hire a car and drive north, skipping more than two hundred miles of the trail without much discussion.

5. 5
   Roanoke

   They rejoin the trail in the Blue Ridge, on the reasonable grounds that Virginia is flatter than Tennessee - and walk north through easier country with the pressure of finishing taken off them.

6. 6
   Shenandoah

   The long green tunnel, and the best walking either of them does together - and just north of the park Katz gives up for the summer and goes back to a construction job in Des Moines.

7. 7
   Harpers Ferry

   Alone now, Bryson takes to what he calls hiking by car: driving to a trailhead, walking a stretch, and sleeping in a motel - and finding, within days, that it is not the same thing at all.

8. 8
   The Delaware Water Gap

   Pennsylvania and New Jersey by day-hike, with the boot-shredding rocks and a detour to the underground mine fire at Centralia - the section of the book with the most history in it and the least walking.

9. 9
   Mount Washington

   New England in day trips out of his own house in New Hampshire: Stratton Mountain, Adams, and the worst weather in America recorded on a summit he drives most of the way up.

10. 10
    Caratunk

    Katz comes back in August and they take on Maine - and before the Hundred-Mile Wilderness even starts there are thirty-eight miles to walk just to reach the beginning of it.

11. 11
    Monson

    The last town, and the falling-out: Katz, who has not had a drink in years, has been drinking - and they go into the wilderness anyway, with a hundred miles of bog and blowdown ahead.

12. 12
    The logging road

    They get separated, Bryson spends a day and a night looking for him, and they walk out to a logging road and stop - which is where the book ends, a hundred and fifty miles short of the mountain.

13. 13
    Mount Katahdin

    The northern terminus, which neither of them reaches. I regret that I didn't do Katahdin, Bryson writes, though I will, I promise you, I will - and this is the only stop on the map they never stood on.