Best Hiking Memoirs to Prepare for the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail
Author: Mark Abell
Youtube: OutdoorGearGuy, PCGamingHelp
I listened to 29.5 hours of audiobooks to get acquainted with these hiker memoirs from Bill Bryson, Cheryl Strayed, and Earl Shaffer. If you’d like to listen to these, I recommend eitther buying through Audible, or requesting a purchase from your local library, and listening on Libby or Hoopla.
My impression is that overall, useful factual information to prepare you for the Appalachian Trail or Pacific Crest Trail is often presented in a dry, boring way, like Earl Schaffer. On the other hand, adventure memoirs that make the Appalachian Trail and Pacific Crest Trail seem exciting and romantic are often light on facts and skills you should master, like Cheryl Strayed. The one author who strikes the most favorable balance between providing facts, and describing his adventure on the Appalachian Trail in an engaging way is Bill Bryson.
If I were to give the authors labels to summarize their personalities, Bill Bryson is the Journalist-Researcher, Cheryl Strayed is the Rockstar-Hedonist, and Earl Shaffer is the Straight-Laced Boy Scout/Eagle Scout.
A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson(1998): a funny travel memoir. Audiobook is 10 hours, 26 min
Overall 9/10
Entertaining: 9/10
Useful for understanding the Appalachian Trail: 9/10
✅The most funny of the trio
✅Mistakes: wearing Jeans which are useless when wet
✅Started with a pack of 40 pounds, and his hiking partner Stephen Katz started with a heavier pack.
✅He is less of a purist than me. He stayed in both motels and shelters on the trail.
✅The worst thing to happen to Bryson was that he was separated from his hiking partner, Katz one night after Katz walked offtrail a few miles.
Wild by Cheryl Strayed (1995) Audiobook is 13 hours, 2 min.
Overall: 8.5/10
Entertaining: 9.5/10
Useful for understanding the Pacific Crest Trail: 7.5
✅Mistakes: carrying 70 pounds worth of gear in “Monster”, having to burn the pages of ones recreational reading in a feeble attempt to save weight
✅Strayed lost one of her hiking boots on the trail, threw the other one away, and REI sent her a replacement pair of Vasque Sundowners.
✅It’s the only hiking novel in this trio to feature a sensual sex story
✅Strayed is arguably the most incompetent outdoorsman of the three authors, with Bryson as the second most experienced, and Shaffer as the most experienced. Strayed laid down on the ground without a tent in Castle Craigs State Park in CA. Black beetles crawled all over her. She had frogs walk on her in Crater Lake, Oregon.
✅Stayed in indoor accommodations in 1. Mojave, CA, 2..Ridgecrest, CA, 3. Kennedy Meadows, CA, 4. Ashland, Oregon, 5. Ollalie Lake, Oregon 6. Cascade Locks, Oregon
✅The worst thing to happen to Strayed on the trail is that she thought she would be raped by a hunter who got lost hiking near her. Thankfully, the hunter’s friend called for him to leave before anything compromising could happen.
Walking With Spring: The Story that inspired thousands of Appalachian Trail Thru-Hikers (1948) by Earl V. Shaffer. Audiobook is 6 hours, 6 min.
Overall: 8/10
Entertaining: 6.5/10
Useful for understanding the Appalachian Trail: 9.5/10
✅If there was one title on this list that I risked not finishing, it would have been Walking With Spring. Once I got 75% finished, I could have stopped. I continued out of sheer determination, to be able to add the title to my completed books list.
✅Title is ironic, his description of his trip almost turned me off to doing the trip, according to ChaTGPT, Shaffer encountered rainy or stormy weather 25-30% of his trip. He experienced frequent rain, fog and storms in the Smoky mountains along the Tennessee-North Carolina border
✅The most geographical in this trio, with Bill Bryson’s Walk in the Woods as the second most geographical. Strayed briefly mentioned placed she passed through but didn’t provide an earth science explanation like Bryson. Shaffer refers to the Indian origins of place names, and describes how the map comes together
✅A shelter facing west is useful for hot weather but sleeps cold otherwise
✅Didn’t bring a down sleeping bag. Plastic wasn’t invented and there was no way to keep it dry.
✅Captain obvious advice: don’t sit on an anthill
✅Useful advice: wear pants only to protect against bug and snake bites and poison ivy and sunburn
✅Shaffer encourages his readers to put out their fires after they are done, not to leave fires smoldering, and warns his readers that New York State has heavy fines for the perpetrators of fires
✅The worst thing to happen to Schaffer on the trail is that he was bit by a dog in his forearm, and the dog’s owner wouldn’t take responsibility and threatened to call the police on him.
✅On the other hand, Schaffer describes a lot of kind interactions with locals and park rangers, “trail magic” before the term was popularized.
✅ Neither Bill Bryson, Cheryl Strayed or Earl Shaffer used bear canisters. The first bear canister was the Garcia Machine Bear-Resistant Container, introduced in the late 1980s. Today bear canisters are mandatory in Yosemite, the Adirondacks, some parts of the Pacific Crest Trail and parts of the Appalachian Trail.
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Comments 2
Read all three, I would recommend Hiking Thru by Paul Stutzman, one of the best AT journeies I’ve read
I would like to see a review of hiker-written memoirs, and not only because I wrote one (Last One to Katahdin Wins, Lulu books). I’ve tracked down a read several and the books themselves are interesting but so is the process. I know it would be a daunting task, but someone out there must be up to it.
At the very least, we should not promote the miserable Bryson book.