Hiking & Walking

Dustin and Angela Ballard hiked the Pacific Crest Trail as a test of their relationship. The blisters are real. The love is tested. The trail, as always, is the thing that matters most — 2,650 miles of proving that two people can walk through something enormous and come out the other side together.

Erin McKittrick and her husband traveled 4,000 miles from Seattle to the Aleutian Islands by human power — hiking, packrafting, and skiing through some of the wildest country in North America. A young couple's journey through a landscape most people will never see.

Bill Bryson is not a hiker. That's what makes this book work. His attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail with his old friend Stephen Katz is equal parts comedy, natural history, and honest reckoning with the American wilderness. Bryson is funny in a way that never undermines the seriousness of the landscape he's walking through.

Best known for fearless novels and essays on colonial legacies and social classes, West Indies-born Jamaica Kincaid was rumored to be a contender for the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. Thus, a travel memoir on Himalayan flora might seem an odd fit, but Kincaid has long loved the outdoors, especially gardening, geology, and classic stories of mountaineering. Among Flowers is her account of venturing to Nepal’s Kanchenjunga with a botanist friend on a seed-gathering trek, and her descriptions of night skies and thirty-foot rhododendrons evoke wonder and awe, like all good odyssey tales. Yet she also writes honestly, at times disruptively, about the trials and tribulations of knee pain and rustic latrines, as well as on the serious threats of Maoist rebels. As a narrator, Kincaid is often overwhelmed and oh so real, forgoing the well-trodden path of grandiose expedition writing. Among Flowers is an immersive journey into the essence of travel itself through the eyes of one of America’s finest cultural observers.

Anna Brones's outdoor cookbook — recipes designed for campfires, trail stoves, and backcountry kitchens. Practical, unpretentious, and organized by the kind of trip you're taking.

Kerouac's novel about mountain climbing, Buddhism, and the search for meaning in postwar America is looser and warmer than On the Road. Based on his friendship with Gary Snyder (thinly disguised as Japhy Ryder), it captures a moment when wilderness and spiritual practice converged in the American imagination.

Ben Montgomery tells the story of Emma Gatewood, who in 1955, at age 67, became the first woman to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail — in sneakers, with a homemade bag. She did it twice more. The story behind the legend is tougher than the legend.

Kathleen Meyer's backcountry sanitation guide — practical, funny, and more necessary than any other book on this list. Somebody had to write it. Meyer wrote it well.

Gail Storey's memoir of hiking the PCT with her husband — a journey she undertook not out of love for hiking but out of love for the man doing it. Funny, honest about misery, and ultimately a book about what marriage looks like at 7,000 feet.

Nan Shepherd's poems about the mountains she wrote about in The Living Mountain. Slighter than the prose, but animated by the same intensity of attention.

The story of Chris McCandless, a young man who gave away his savings, abandoned his car, and walked into the Alaska backcountry with a bag of rice and a .22 caliber rifle. Krakauer traces McCandless's journey from suburban Virginia to the Stampede Trail with a mix of admiration and dread, and in doing so raises the question every outdoor person has had to answer: where's the line between freedom and recklessness?

Cindy Ross's account of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in the early 1980s — before the trail was famous, before Strayed, before anyone had written a bestseller about it. An honest, unpolished account of walking a long way.

Donn Fendler was twelve years old when he got separated from his Boy Scout troop on Mount Katahdin in 1939 and spent nine days lost in the Maine wilderness. His account, written as a boy, has the plainspoken terror of someone too young to embellish.

Walking and floating the entire Colorado River from its Rocky Mountain headwaters to the Sea of Cortez — a journey almost no one has done, through some of the most contested water in the West.

The first complete traverse of Comb Ridge in southern Utah — 100 miles of sandstone monocline, packed with Ancestral Puebloan ruins. Archaeology on foot, in one of the most remote landscapes in the Lower 48.

Hiking the CDT with children — 3,100 miles from Mexico to Canada as a family. The logistics alone are staggering. The story is about what happens to a family when the trail becomes home.

In 2013, Mills embeds with Expedition Denali, a group of Black mountaineers aiming to plant their crampons on the summit of the team’s namesake peak. Peppering their story with those of other Black adventurers, he makes the case that beyond those glacier-strewn Alaskan slopes, there’s a much bigger mountain to climb—one that hopefully bridges a racial gap in both outdoor participation and representation to create a more equitable and just outdoors for all.

The backpacking bible — updated and expanded, covering every piece of gear, every technique, every consideration for walking in the wilderness. Fletcher invented the genre of the long walk, and this book is the manual.

A photographic account of a PCT thru-hike — the landscapes rendered in large-format images that capture the scale of walking from Mexico to Canada.

A cookbook for people who cook outside — campfires, portable stoves, Dutch ovens. 120 recipes organized by meal and method, designed for actual wilderness conditions.

Long-distance trails and walks around the world, curated and photographed. The paths less traveled — not the famous thru-hikes but the ones you've never heard of.

British author Robert Macfarlane, who wrote the introduction to the 2011 edition of this classic, is no slouch for words, but he struggled to label The Living Mountain, calling it a “formidably difficult book to describe.” He comes close when he offers “field-note, memoir, natural history, and philosophical meditation,” but what Nan Shepherd’s tidy book really is is a love letter to her beloved Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland. Her observations are as sharp the first fall frost, her words as clear as a high mountain stream. The “light is luminous without being fierce, penetrating to immense distances with an effortless intensity,” she writes. John Muir raptured over the Sierra, but Shepherd writes of the Cairngorms with mentholated coolness, and hers is the superior effort, at least when it comes to knowing the “essential nature” that she was seeking from the very first page.

Seven prisoners escaped a Soviet labor camp in Siberia and walked 4,000 miles to India. Through the Gobi Desert, over the Himalaya, on foot. The authenticity has been questioned. The story is extraordinary regardless.

The first person to hike the entire length of the Grand Canyon — rim to rim, through the inner gorge. Fletcher did it alone in 1963, and his account invented the genre of the long contemplative walk.

Walking the ancient paths of Britain, Palestine, Spain, and the Himalaya. Each path is a palimpsest — layers of footsteps, centuries deep. Macfarlane at his most lyrical, following routes that were old before roads existed.

Lest you think Cheryl Strayed holds some sort of monopoly on waxing poetic about the Pacific Crest Trail, this anthology will disavow you of that notion. A mix of historical interludes, short stories by esteemed nature writers like Mary Austin and Barry Lopez, and journal-esque musings from regular ol’ hikerfolk, this collection proves that while a trail can be defined as a simple dirt path between Points A and B, its truer meaning can be found within the people who choose to walk its length.

An anthology of writing about the northern half of the PCT — the essays, fiction, and natural history tied to the trail's Oregon and Washington sections.

Walking across Afghanistan in the winter of 2002, alone, just after the fall of the Taliban. Stewart carried a walking stick and a letter from a warlord. The villages, the hospitality, the danger — all rendered with the clarity of someone who understood he might not make it.

A study of endurance athletes — ultra-runners, thru-hikers, long-distance swimmers — and the psychology of pushing past what the body says is possible.

Fletcher's collected shorter writing — the man who walked through time, walked through the Grand Canyon, and made the long walk a literary form.

A 4,000-mile human-powered journey from the Pacific Northwest to the Arctic, by bike, ski, foot, and packraft. Van Hemert is a biologist, and the journey is also an act of attention to the ecosystems she crosses.

Fletcher's first long walk — from the Mexican border to Mount Whitney, through the desert and up into the Sierra. The book that proved a man could walk a thousand miles and write about it without boring you.

It took Heather “Anish” Anderson 60 days, 17 hours, and 12 minutes to set a speed record on the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail in 2013, but the physical and emotional reckoning that followed lasted quite a bit longer. Her chronicle of that incredible feat and its fallout offers a glimpse into not only what it takes to earn a Fastest Known Time on one of the world’s most famous trails, but also what it can take out of you in the process.

My dad, a law-abiding rural county detective, always surprised me with his frequent humming of “Signs” by Five Man Electrical Band: “Hey! What gives you the right? To put up a fence to keep me out or to keep Mother Nature in.” Yet while the urge to roam freely might be universal, the U.S. is veering sharply toward a fenced-in future. Ken Ilgunas earned a following with his 2013 Walden on Wheels, and thank goodness he’s back with This Land is Your Land: part polemic, part travel story across America, and part primer on the history of land use laws. The Swedes call it allemansrätten and in Great Britain it’s the “right to roam”—an average citizen’s license to wander on publicly or privately owned land. How often do you encounter “No Trespassing” signs while camping, hiking, or just walking around the block? Before Americans need a membership card to get outside, everyone who moves should read this book.

A PCT thru-hike told without the usual transformation narrative. The trail is beautiful and boring and painful and transcendent, and Quinn writes about all of it with the honesty of someone who doesn't need the hike to have a moral.

A thru-hike along the wildlife corridor from Yellowstone to the Yukon — following the path that grizzlies, wolves, and caribou need to survive. Conservation biology on foot.

Crossing the Gobi Desert on foot at age 63 — 1,600 miles of sand, wind, and extreme temperature. Thayer is the kind of person who makes you reconsider what's possible.

The Oregon Desert Trail on foot — sagebrush, ranches, and the rural communities of the high desert. A walk through a landscape most Americans have only seen from a car.

The Camino from beginning to end — blisters, cathedrals, fellow pilgrims, and the slow transformation that a thousand miles of walking can produce.

McKibben walks from his home in Vermont to his other home in the Adirondacks, through a landscape where conservation and community are working. The optimistic McKibben — rarer than the angry one, and just as persuasive.

Photography from America's great trails — the PCT, the AT, the CDT, and the trails nobody's heard of. Honan has walked more miles than most people drive.

Long-distance trails around the world, photographed and mapped. The global version of the hiking life.

While there’s no telling how many long-distance hiking dreams have sprung from its wake, Strayed’s memoir detailing the heartbreaking circumstances that inspired her now-famous ramble along the Pacific Crest Trail (and a Hollywood movie, to boot) is less a love letter to the backcountry than it is an ode to a more internal sort of adventure. Turns out you really can find yourself out there, if you’re willing to trade some sweat equity for the revelation.