A Different Kind of Appalachian Trail History

Guest blog post by Mills Kelly

Mills Kelly is an author, historian and podcaster. He taught history at George Mason University for many years, hosted a podcast about the history of the Appalachian Trail, called “The Green Tunnel”, and is the author of several books. His most recent book, “A Hiker’s History of the Appalachian Trail” will be published on October, 7th, 2025. Mills was a featured guest in season two of Common Land.

Every year something like four million people set foot on the Appalachian Trail, most of them for just a few hours, some for a few days or weeks, and a tiny few for an entire hiking season. Eight years ago I started work on my new book (A Hiker’s History of the Appalachian Trail) that would tell the story of everyone who has hiked on the AT in the past 100 years.

Of course, that’s impossible.

We know a lot about the thru hikers (and those who made the attempt but didn’t make it all the way), because some fraction of them feel compelled to tell their story. Those thru hikers have generated an entire media ecosystem around their time on trail—YouTube channels, Instagram feeds, podcasts, Facebook groups and pages and countless magazine articles, blogs and other rivers of text telling the story of “my hike.”

But what about the unknown millions who have followed a much smaller number of the white blazes since the trail began in the 1920s? How could I possibly learn their stories? After all, they didn’t write books or create social media feeds about the two-hour loop hike they did with their friends or family.

Fortunately for me, the Appalachian Trail has many archives devoted to its history. Unfortunately for me, they are scattered up and down the length of the trail and many of them are not exactly what you might think of when you read the word “archive.” Even the archive of Appalachian Trail Conservancy was more than a bit of a mess when I first started working there in 2016. [Image] I’m happy to report that the ATC collection has migrated to George Mason University’s Special Collections, so it is in much better shape now.

But other archives I’ve worked in consisted of a few large plastic tubs kept in someone’s basement, three file cabinets in the employee rec center at Eastman Chemical, and a storage unit in an unheated old factory building in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

They aren’t all that quirky, of course. Some are quite well-organized and housed in proper archival facilities. But many aren’t, so finding anything useful about the average hiker’s experience on the trail was often a real challenge. 

Those archives—well-organized or not—offer researchers like me an incredible wealth of material about the experiences of average hikers. For example, from the 1920s until at least the 1980s, many hikers felt compelled to write their local trail club or the ATC to offer a written report of their hike on the trail, whether it was a day hike or a backpacking trip. Many of those letters included photographs that were also an invaluable resource for me. 

The most important source I found, however, was one I already knew well from my own hikes. Since the 1930s, the various trail-maintaining clubs have been placing register books in the more than 250 trail shelters strung out along the length of the AT. Those shelter registers have been saved very haphazardly by the clubs and the ATC, but many hundreds, possibly several thousand (I haven’t counted) of them survive in various archives and they were just sitting there waiting for me to start reading.

And read them I did.

The more I read, the more I began to understand the reasons why hikers have headed out onto the AT since the 1930s and what they experienced once they did. I’m sure there is a more systematic way to organize all those register entries, but I wasn’t trying to create a dataset. I just wanted to meet the hikers where they were, listen to their stories, catch glimpses of their lives, and see what emerged from all that text.

One thing that became clear to me as I read, to the degree that anything in the historical record can be clear, is that Appalachian Trail hikers who aren’t on an epic journey have gone and still go to the trail for the very reasons Benton MacKaye first hoped they would when he first proposed the trail in 1921.

They want exercise. They want fresh air. They want to engage in what the Japanese call “forest bathing.” They wanted and still want to get away from the noise, the pollution, the stress, the phone calls and eventually the e-mails, the text messages, the traffic and, most importantly, the frenetic pace of life in America and, increasingly, around the world. For most hikers, walking on a mountain trail forces you to slow down, whether you want to or not. Only the most athletic can keep up a brisk pace on a steeply sloping mountain path, and in my experience, even the most athletic hikers tend to slow down after a while for the simple reason that they want to look around to see that bird calling from a tree up above, to pause to look at the pinkish-purple wild gardenias blooming in casual profusion where the sun breaks through to the forest floor, to sit for just a minute on a rock beside a rushing stream and just stare at the water as it gurgles past or to stop and watch as a mother deer and her two fauns stroll across the trail up ahead.

These are the experiences hikers have been going in search of on the Appalachian Trail for the past one hundred years, and their joy in being in wild places bubbles up from their letters and their register entries:

“We walked for an hour under some of the largest and most beautiful oak trees I’ve ever seen.”

“It rained on us for the entire day, but we still had fun. The forest is so beautiful.”

“The shelter has Skinks! Even ones with red heads!”

“I saw a bobcat!!!”

For most Appalachian Trail hikers, their revelatory moments, their emotional connections to wild places, last only for a few minutes or a few hours. For others, who return to the trail again and again for respite, for quiet and for peace, those experiences begin to aggregate, to take root within them, to create new spaces for renewal, for joy, for wonder. Benton MacKaye wanted the Appalachian Trail to be a place where people could “solve the problems of living.” To a far greater degree than he ever imagined, the Appalachian Trail has become that place.

-Mills Kelly