Fotografía de autor
7 Obras 159 Miembros 6 Reseñas

Sobre El Autor

Veteran hiker Adrienne Hall is the author of A Woman's Guide to Backpacking and A Journey North, the latter an account of her through-hike of the Appalachian Trail. She lives in Anchorage, Alaska.

Obras de Adrienne Hall

Etiquetado

Conocimiento común

Género
female

Miembros

Reseñas

Fairly decent account of trail life on the Appalachian Trail interspersed with some bizarre tangents that I didn't care for. Was going to give the book 2 stars until I came to the passage where they describe their dog getting shot multiple times with a shotgun (from hunters) and forcing the poor thing to hike with them the very next day. The dog luckily survives and is picked up by family shortly thereafter, but the author and her boyfriend's lack of empathy and common sense ruined the rest of the story for me.… (más)
 
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Linda_Holcomb | 5 reseñas más. | Jun 6, 2019 |
A vivid and insightful pairing of a young woman's experience hiking the Appalachian Trail with historic and meaningful information regarding the creation of the AT, its changes over the years, and the controversy surrounding its continued protection and maintenance.
 
Denunciada
GennaC | 5 reseñas más. | May 9, 2017 |
A journal of hiking the A.T.
 
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JackSweeney | 5 reseñas más. | Jan 10, 2017 |
The author’s hike along the AT was as harrowing an experience, as one would imagine it to be. She and her partner started in February, and it kept snowing heavily into May on the mountain ridges along which most of the trail lies. When it wasn’t snowing, it was often raining nonstop for days at a time. And on rare occasions when no abundant precipitation was descending upon them, they had to cross fields of sharp rocks, swamps or swollen rivers (where one hiker drowned that year), follow deeply flooded trails, or keep running to avoid being eaten alive by swarms of mosquitoes. The shelters they stayed at were usually infested with armies of mice, their sleeping bags and shoes were often wet, and their clothes tended to be wet and filthy into the bargain. Moreover, walking continuously up and down mountains takes a toll on one’s body, even if one is very fit and used to recreational hiking, as the author and her partner were. Hall writes that even early during the trip she had difficulty sleeping because she couldn’t find a position in which her hip joints didn’t hurt. By the end of it she had to take a handful of Advil every day. As she remarked to her partner, with characteristic humor, "Except that I can barely stand, I’m in the best shape of my life." Why on earth would anyone *dream* of experiencing any of this is beyond my comprehension, but, according to Hall, two thousand people try it every year, with two hundred of them succeeding, and that’s not counting those who don’t attempt to walk the entire trail, of whom there are many more.

Still, surprisingly, I didn’t find Hall’s descriptions of her hike upsetting. Nor was she complaining about the hardships, as some Amazon reviewers wrote. In fact, I thought she was remarkably upbeat about them, writing that if "fellowship with wilderness" had to include mice, so be it. She was merely honest in describing what it is really like to hike the AT. Probably that’s what I really liked about this book. She wasn’t trying to sugarcoat her experience, or to please the reader with a reassuring picture of vast, healthy forests, diverse and abundant wildlife and pleasant tiredness one feels at the end of a day well spent. Perhaps, it’s also the fact that I’ve always assumed that people who climb a mountain on their own two feet are usually in no condition to enjoy the view. Therefore, I was actually pleasantly surprised by the number of occasions when they did enjoy the view or being on the trail in general. I also knew that the only substantial wild places left in the US are places that couldn’t be used for farming or pastures: tundra, desert, swamps and mountain ridges. Therefore, it didn’t surprise me that the hiking was arduous in the extreme, or that when there was no unwanted inhospitable area through which the trail could be laid, hikers had to walk across cow pastures or corn fields or within continuous sight of car roads. Interestingly, the author mentions the attempt to reintroduce red wolves into the Smoky Mountains National Park, which failed, because there was not enough prey in the mountains to allow the wolves to raise their families. Consequently the pup survival rate was zero, and wolves kept migrating from the park down into the agricultural valleys below. As I read Hall’s account of her trip, I couldn’t help comparing hikers – or anyone who wants to enjoy land in its natural state – to wolves and most other wild animals. Both have been forced into such places that the exercise defeats the purpose: animals can’t survive and hikers can’t enjoy the experience they have craved.

And this leads me to another point Hall is being very honest about in this book. Besides describing her trip as it was and admitting that mostly she didn’t enjoy it, she addresses the precarious situation of plants and animals in the places she passed through, and the various reasons behind it. By the time she sat down to write this book, she had earned a graduate degree in the environmental science, and I particularly appreciated her discussion of the air quality problems in the eastern US, since I live here myself. I only wished that the book had been written later and offered more current information, although I highly suspect that the main issues remain unchanged. I must admit, though, that there were times when I had to set this book aside and give myself a break from it, just as Hall did from the trail, in my case because of my frustration with the people in power and their obtuse determination to pursue profits down the cliff. However, I do prefer – and even expect – to find researched background information in travel books of any type; otherwise it frankly quickly becomes boring for me to read an unending recitation of daily activities with nothing to flesh them out.

And then when I got to the end of the book, I was rewarded with reading about Percival Baxter. Baxter lived in the first half of the twentieth century. Although born into a rich family, he wanted to protect a vast tract of unspoiled Maine wilderness for people of moderate means to enjoy (and leave it as they found it – no hunting, trapping, hotels, or vehicles of any type were to be permitted there). When he found that he couldn’t do anything useful as a state legislator and later governor, he quit politics (how many politicians have you heard about who’d done that?), and worked with the land owners to gradually buy the tracts he wanted with his own money. Later he donated these lands to the state of Maine (with conditions for their preservation). Hall also mentions in passing Baxter’s other deeds, such as giving the state an island "to be used as a home for sick and underprivileged children" or providing "$625,000 to reconstruct the school for the deaf", among others, but his main endeavor was creating a state park around Katahdin that now bears his name. According to Hall, Baxter’s last words (at the age of 92) were: "Pray for me. It is not that I’m afraid of dying, it is just that I have so much left to do."

It’s certainly inspiring to read about somebody who could lead a peaceful existence, living like a king and having everybody’s goodwill, as is usually the case with rich people who don’t get into anybody’s way – but who chose to spend it in continuous difficult negotiations with property owners and politicians. I think that, in a sense, it’s similar to what Adrienne Hall has done with her hike and the resulting book. In my opinion, this book does have flaws. For instance, I find the presentation of Native Americans’ stories and beliefs by way of explanation of the difference between their treatment of nature and that of European settlers to be illogical, for in reality, in any culture, stories and beliefs come from lifestyle rather than the other way around. Native Americans generally didn’t raise animals for food and depended on the wilderness to provide them with most of their meat; European settlers did not. Hall herself mentions the change in the treatment of nature in the Old World in prehistoric times, but credits it to invasions by "patriarchal" peoples rather than a change in lifestyle; however, any such invasions would be of a fairly regional character, while the author admits that the Earth/Mother goddess religion, subsequently abandoned everywhere, used to be *very* widespread. I also didn’t appreciate Hall’s personal musings about her trip; I must say that I’m yet to read the what-I’ve-learned-from-this-experience kind of reflections in any memoirs that I’d find at all original. However, Hall did persevere through an ordeal most people wouldn’t even start and then wrote a truthful and informative book about it, instead of a presenting a rosy view of bountiful and sublime nature and tough hikers, which would have definitely sold far more copies and quite likely led to lucrative publishing contracts in the future. For this, I’m perfectly willing to forgive her some banal personal thoughts and some gaffes with ancient history.
… (más)
 
Denunciada
Ella_Jill | 5 reseñas más. | Mar 25, 2014 |

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Estadísticas

Obras
7
Miembros
159
Popularidad
#132,375
Valoración
½ 3.4
Reseñas
6
ISBNs
8
Idiomas
1

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