A walk in the woods

Résumé :

The longest continuous footpath in the world, the Appalachian Trail stretches along the East Coast of the United States, from Georgia to Maine, through some of the most arresting and celebrated landscapes in America. At the age of forty-four, in the company of his friend Stephen Katz, Bill Bryson set off to hike through the vast tangled woods which have been frightening sensible people for three hundred years. Ahead lay almost 2,200 miles of remote mountains wilderness filled with bears, moose, bobcats, rattlesnakes, poisonous plants, disease-bearing ticks, the ocasional chuckling murderer and - perhaps most alarming of all - people whose favourite pastime is discussing the relative merits of the external-frame bacpack. Facing savage weather, merciless insects, unreliable maps and a fickle companion whose profoundest wish was to go to a motel and watch 'The X-Files', Bryson gamly struggled through the wilderness to achieve a lifetime's ambition - not to die outdoors.