A Hiker's History of the Appalachian Trail

Every history of the Appalachian Trail tells the story from the top down, focusing on who proposed the trail, who built it, who maintain it, and on a few of the most famous hikers. A Hiker's History of Appalachian Trail tells the trail's history from the ground up, or more accurately, from the boots up.

Several million hikers each year set foot on the trail for a few hours, a few days, or perhaps a few weeks. The trail was created for them, yet their role in its history is largely ignored. Working with trail shelter logbooks, hiker accounts submitted to trail clubs, newspaper and magazine stories about the experiences of casual hikers, Mills Kelly reveals what it was like to hike the trail from the late 1920s until the 2020s.

What did those hikers eat? What kind of gear did they carry? Why did they go hiking in the first place? What was their relationship to the natural world they found along the trail? What was it like to hike as a woman, as a person of color, as someone with a disability? And how did all those things change over the 100 years of the trail's history?

Mills Kelly is a retired professor of history at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and a historian of the Appalachian Trail (AT). He began hiking on the trail as a young Boy Scout in 1971, and the trail has been part of his life ever since. Today, he is the maintainer of the Manassas Gap shelter along the trail in northern Virginia and is the volunteer archivist of the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club. He is also the host of The Green Tunnel podcast, about the history of the Appalachian Trail. He is the author of several books, including Virginia's Lost Appalachian Trail, which tells the story of the original route of the AT in Southwest Virginia.