Moor thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail and spent the next several years asking what a trail actually is. So the book goes from fossil traces of the first creatures to move on a seafloor, to ants laying pheromone lines and correcting each other’s errors, to elephant paths, to Cherokee routes that became highways, to the AT itself and the argument over whether it should be a wilderness corridor or a way of connecting towns, to the internet as a trail system. His thesis is that a trail is accumulated intelligence — thousands of small decisions, refined by everyone who came after.
On Trails