Featured Image: Me standing on the edge of Overlook Mountain in the Catskills, Fall 2020. Photo Credit to my good friend Mark.

The Great Web

So full disclosure here, I am a huge history nerd. I got my college degree in history, focusing on what is basically trail history for my thesis. So this piece may be a little out there, but it ties together why I love history, backpacking, and what I think the benefits of doing some reading ahead of time are for a thruhiker. Don’t worry, I’m going back to basics with a gear list either this week or next. In the mean time, stick around and hopefully I can give some of my enthusiasm for this over to you!

Wanderers on the Edge of the World

Back in 2020 when preparing for my Appalachian Trail thruhike, my training was made up of weekend trips into the Catskills. One of my favorite hikes in the area was and is Overlook Mountain. If you’re located around Southern New York, make sure to take a trip there at some point. Just outside of Woodstock, it’s a long enough hike for a bit of a challenge, but the majority of the trail is on an old road bed so you don’t have to worry about any scrambling or hard to follow trails like in other parts of the Cats. The reward at the top is the ruins of a gilded age hotel, a fire tower, and amazing views over the Hudson Valley.

Me in the ruins of the Overlook Hotel, Fall 2020. Ignore the fact that I’m wearing jeans and Vans.

The really special thing about Overlook is that it lies on the southern rim of the mountains, and if you catch it on the right day you can watch as the clouds literally form off the mountains below you. In late 2020, me and a good friend got lucky to catch one of these days. At the top of the mountain, we took some pictures looking out over the clouds before heading down. I really liked mine, and used it as my profile picture for the past few years.

Same as the featured picture, just a little easier to see!

Grand Coincidence

Upon sharing the above picture with our friends, one of them pointed out that it reminded him of “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog”, a painting by Caspar David Friedrich. At the time, I didn’t think much of it other than “Huh, that’s cool.” Recently however, said painting came to a special exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, and I did some more reading on it. What I found out connected several different aspects that made both the original painting and my picture much richer.

Friedrich’s Painting. You may recognize it from being a common cover image for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or from Minecraft if you’re younger. Picture taken by me at the Metropolitan Museum earlier this month.

Painting Context

I’m not trying to write a whole history paper for you here so I’ll give the short version. Just keep in mind that I’m generalizing a fair amount here. Friedrich was part of the Romantic art movement. Essentially, he focused on the feeling behind his paintings rather than pure realism. His work mostly focused on capturing landscapes of his homeland, Germany. Germany at the time was a disunited set of states rather than the one nation that we know in the modern day. As part of the push to unite the country, some Germans in favor of unification began to push the idea of “Heimat” or homeland, essentially saying that common landscape or nature was a unique aspect of their nation that Germans could unite around. Friedrich and other romantics work depicting a spiritual aspect to that landscape became a key component in Heimat.

Across the Pond

Following German unification, Heimat as a concept inspired many public beautification projects including larger trails systems to be created. In the early 1900s, an American named James Taylor encountered one of these trails while visiting the country, specifically what is known today as the Westweg. Taylor, apparently inspired by the grassroots maintenance of this trail, brought the idea home to the States. He would spend the rest of his life pushing for a similar trail in Vermont, the Long Trail.

The Long Trail would in turn go on to become the model for, if not directly inspiring, America’s own long distance hiking trails. These kinds of strange connections pop up all over history. This is the kind of thing that makes reading about trails enrich the experience when you hike them. A common thread links pictures we take for Instagram and paintings produced 200 years earlier.

I like to think of history as a whole as a big tapestry, or spider’s web. Each thread in the whole helps make a beautiful image, but is deeply interesting in it’s own right. When you follow these threads, you find connections between people, places and things you’d never see from a quick glance. I always encourage people to read history like a story anyways, but for thruhikers the rewards can be really awesome. This all came from one photo and a quick comment in a group chat that my friend didn’t even remember. Imagine what else you can find between the lines!

A Few Notes

By habit, I have to tell you the sources I’m pulling from here. Friedrich’s connection to Heimat comes mostly from additional materials I read at the recent Met exhibition. James Taylor’s connection to the concept comes from Philip D’Anieri’s excellent The Appalachian Trail: A Biography. It’s a great book that I highly recommend reading or listening to. I will say that it focuses mostly on the historical context of the AT and not so much on the actual history of the trail’s building or thruhiking, so don’t go in expecting that.

I’m less than a month out from starting the PCT, and this was inspired both by my recent visit to the Friedrich exhibition but also the fact that I’m currently diving into some historical research around that trail. I’m far less familiar with it than the AT but it’s been amazing to dive into so far. If anyone has any specific books I should check out please let me know!