Blazer

Serious hikers take months to walk the 3,500km Appalachian Trail. ALEXANDRA CARLTON sees the highlights of America’s most famous trail in comfort – and in a week.

In the glorious rhetoric that once characterised American leaders, Lyndon B. Johnson made an impassioned plea to Congress on 8 February 1965 to preserve the nation’s wild places. It was a time of rapid urbanisation across the United States, and the President feared his countrymen’s souls would wither as they moved en masse from the country to sprawling cities. “Association with beauty can enlarge man’s imagination and revive his spirit,” he told the gathered lawmakers. “Ugliness can demean the people who live among it. What a citizen sees every day is his America. If it is attractive it adds to the quality of his life. If it is ugly it can degrade his existence.”

This was the elegant preamble to a presidential decree to preserve America’s natural beauty for the enrichment of its citizens. Johnson proposed the creation of a national network of hiking trails and the preservation of existing ones. “The forgotten outdoorsmen of today are those who like to walk, hike, ride horseback or bicycle,” he said. “For them we must have trails as well as highways.”

The National Trails System Act was passed three years after his historic speech. In 1965 the nation had 141,600 kilometres of hiking trails; 50 years later, that distance had more than doubled to 311,408 kilometres. These include the Continental Divide Trail, which bisects the nation from Mexico to Canada; the Pacific Crest Trail on the West Coast, celebrated in Cheryl Strayed’s bestselling book, Wild; and the mighty Appalachian Trail, stretching 3,524 kilometres along the spine of the Appalachian Mountains through 14 states, from Georgia to Maine.