Learn more about the AT
Organizations
The Appalachian Trail Conservancy is the heart, soul, and brains of the AT, the nonprofit that coordinates the trail’s construction and management. They have all the information you need.
The AT is also a unit of the National Park Service, which controls much of the land the trail passes through.
The Appalachian Trail Museum, in Pennsylvania’s Pine Grove Furnace State Park, is well worth a visit, and their AT Hall of Fame highlights the contributions of the most prominent people in the trail’s history.
Appalachian Trail Histories is an online public history project with a wealth of interesting background on the trail and its development over time.
Books
Brian King, The Appalachian Trail: Celebrating America’s Hiking Trail, Rizzoli, 2012. This coffee-table book, published by the ATC, provides an excellent history of the trail, hundreds of gorgeous images, a brief and gracious foreword by Bill Bryson, and a nice 3-foot-long poster map of the entire trail.
Sarah Mittlefehldt, Tangled Roots: The Appalachian Trail and American Environmental Politics, University of Washington Press, 2013. A scholarly history that investigates the AT as a model of public-private cooperation, researched in part by the author’s thru-hiking the trail. (Certainly not the easiest way to write a dissertation, but I’m guessing a pretty rewarding one.) Foreword by the eminent historian of environment William Cronon.
Larry Anderson, Benton MacKaye: Conservationist, Planner, and Creator of the Appalachian Trail, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. MacKaye is a fascinating and complex character, and Anderson’s book is the authoritative portrait. Deeply researched, appreciatively written, it provides a fond but by no means uncritical look at MacKaye, for whom the AT was just one of several major contributions to 20th-century American environmentalism. This is a great source on the trail’s founding and earliest years, but also puts the AT in a broader context.
Laura and Guy Waterman, Forest and Crag: A History of Hiking, Trail Blazing, and Adventure in the Northeast Mountains, Appalachian Mountain Club Books, 1989. The Watermans richly portray the New York and New England hiking scenes that provided the AT’s essential early building blocks.
Jeffrey Ryan, Blazing Ahead: Benton MacKaye, Myron Avery, and the Rivalry That Built the Appalachian Trail, Appalachian Mountain Club Books, 2017. The portrait of Myron Avery here is the most thorough I have encountered, capturing the fiercely abrasive personality that shepherded the AT to completion in the 1930s.
Silas Chamberlin, On the Trail: A History of American Hiking, Yale University Press, 2016. Provides an interesting thesis about the evolution of hiking from a collectively produced activity to a more privately consumed one.
Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration, Simon and Schuster, 2016. This book is difficult to categorize, which is what makes it so valuable. It is not directly about the AT itself, though Moor’s thru-hike kicked off his interest in the subject. On the backbone of a series of travel essays, Moor explores trails as biological creations, and literary ones; sources of wisdom and reflections of it.