A Walk in the Woods

March 16, 2010

I finished A Walk in the Woods. I didn't have high expectations for this one since I noticed it in a gift shop at the Biltmore Estate, but it exceeded my expectations. The book is about the author's attempt to hike the entire Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine and is full of mini-stories about the woods like this one:

On the afternoon of July 5th, 1983, three adult supervisors and a group of kids set up camp, cooked dinner, and had an encounter with nature.

About midnight, a black bear came prowling around the margins of the camp, spied the food bag, and brought it down by climbing one of the trees and breaking a branch. He plundered the food and departed, but an hour later he was back, this time entering the camp itself, drawn by the lingering smell of cooked meat in the campers' clothes and hair, in their sleeping bags and tent fabric. It was to be a long night for the party. Three times between midnight and 3:30 am the bear came to the camp.

Imagine, if you will, lying in the dark alone in a little tent, nothing but a few microns of trembling nylon between you and the chill night air, listening to a 400-pound bear moving around your campsite. Imagine what it must have been like for poor little David Anderson, aged twelve, when at 3:30 am, on the third foray, his tent was abruptly rent with the swipe of a claw, and the bear, driven to distraction by the rich, unfixable, everywhere aroma of hamburger, bit hard into a flinching limb and dragged him shouting and flailing through the camp and into the woods. In the few moments it took for his fellow campers to unzip themselves, poor little David Anderson was dead.

Mmmm... makes me wanna go camping.

There's also quite a bit of interesting geology in the book. I'll go four stars at Amazon.