The Appalachian Trail exists to help escape your boss — and it's busier than ever
A new podcast explores the history of the AT.
The socialist forester who came up with the idea for the Appalachian Trail would be horrified if he knew that hikers today could check in with their boss via Slack or email from a tent.
Benton MacKaye was a conservationist and Harvard professor who thought of the idea for a single, connected trail running through the eastern U.S. exactly a century ago. Such a trail would be the ideal escape for Americans trying to solve “the problem of living,” as he called it in a 1921 essay.
Then, like now, the U.S. was recovering from a pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, brutal overseas conflicts and simmering racial unrest. Meanwhile workers were adjusting to longer hours in hectic, polluted cities, effectively being “cheated out of the bulk of this leisure” that new technologies seemed to promise.
“America was going through a major social upheaval at the time, much like it is now,” Mills Kelly, host of The Green Tunnel, a new podcast examining the history of the Appalachian Trail, told me recently. “COVID forced us all to pause, and that pause has caused a lot of people to say ‘I need to be happier and get out more in nature.’ That was all at the root of the vision for the trail at its conception.”
Today the AT runs 2,200 miles from Georgia through Maine, attracting some 3 million visitors every year. Only 3,000-or-so of those visitors are thru-hikers, who set out to complete the entire tract in a single year and attract a disproportionate amount of media attention.
The number of day hikers who camped overnight at shelters within driving range of major cities has “easily doubled” amid the pandemic, Kelly said, while more women and people of color have started exploring the AT and the outdoors, generally.
It’s a topic that’s ripe for a podcast. Episodes of The Green Tunnel (another name for the AT inspired by the tree canopies that cover much of the route) will focus on the communities that lived along the route before the trail’s construction, hiking groups’ complicated history with segregation, environmental awareness in the U.S. and some of the bitter disputes that came when the federal government used eminent domain to seize private property.
“The trail is really reflective of American society, and we’ve turned to nature to help us get through this moment,” added Kelly, who also is the director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason.
During my conversation with Kelly, I mentioned I’d recently spent some time backpacking along the trail. Rather than stumbling upon some great epiphany about life, I told him, I mostly turned my phone off and had some laughs with friends, focusing more on how to get some sleep in a tent than a stream of notifications.
Shouldn’t I have arrived at some sense of nature-inspired nirvana rather than just being scared of running into a giant black bear? Not really, as it turns out.
“Once you're in the woods for a couple hours your brain starts to slow down and you let go of all the stuff that swirls through your head,” he said. “One of the things people consistently report is that they focus on one thing at a time rather than multiple things. If you keep your phone in your back pocket or turn it off, even better, you start to hear things you haven't heard before, and you stop thinking about that appointment you need to make or sending an email.
“You can let it all go,” he said.
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