A Walk in the Woods

The longest continuous footpath in the world, the Appalachian Trail streches along the East Coast of the United States, from Georgia to Maine, through some of the most arresting and                                                        celebrated landscapes in America.

In the company of his friend Stephan Katz (last seen in the best selling Neither Here Nor There), 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 mountain wilderness filled with bears, moose, bobcats, rattlesnakes, poisonous plants, disease-bearing ticks, the occasional chuckling muderer and-perhaps most alarming of all- people whose favourite                          pastime is discussing the relative merits of the external-framed backpack.

Facing savage weather, merciless insects, unreiliable maps and a fickle companion whose profoundest widh was to go to a motel and watch The X-Files, Bryson gamely struggled through                      the wilderness to achieve a lifetime's ambition- not to die outdoors.