The first stage of their journey ends in Front Royal, Virginia, where the men part ways but plan to return in the summer to hike Maine's Hundred Mile Wilderness. They proceed to encounter unidentitified animals in their camps and rude, drunken shelter mates. They happily settle back into walking until Waynesboro, where Katz makes a date with a married woman and spends the rest of his time there hiding from her gun-toting husband. They take a cab to Knoxville, rent a car and drive to Roanoke, Virginia. There, they decide to skip over the rest of the Smokies. They make it to the famed Clingman's Dome, the highest point on the Appalachian Trail, and decide to take a holiday in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, a tourist trap with motels, shops and fast food. A few weeks into their trip they encounter a late snow that nearly strands them, but they push on after spending a few dull days in bunkhouses and motel rooms watching television.Ī few days later they reach the Great Smokey Mountains, a more strenuous hike than the mountains of Georgia. They meet many different types of hikers, including students, senior citizens, Boy Scouts and the air headed Mary Ellen, who attaches herself to them for several days. They are middle-aged, out of shape and carrying forty-pound packs on their backs over miles of hills that seem not to end, but after a few days they begin to settle into the trail. They set off in early March on a day of record cold and immediately discover what they have gotten themselves into. Their trek starts at Amicalola Falls, a seven-mile hike from the Appalachian Trail's southern starting point, Springer Mountain.

Stephen Katz is an old school friend, who climbs off the plane with a large stomach and a duffel bag of Snickers. He has a companion who is as comically unprepared for the trek as he is.

His plan is to hike the entire 2,200-mile trail in one season, starting at Springer Mountain in Georgia and ending at Mt. With no real outdoors experience or knowledge of the trail's difficulty, he walks into a sporting goods store in his hometown of Hanover, New Hampshire, and spends a small fortune on the necessary gear, most of which is a mystery to him.

In the grand tradition of the travel memoir, writer Bill Bryson tells the story of his trek through the wilderness along the Appalachian Trail.

A walk in the woods book sparknotes