The Spirit of the Appalachian Trail: Community, Environment, and Belief on a Long-Distance Hiking Path by Susan Power Bratton (review)

On top of Springer Mountain, Georgia, the southern terminus for the Appalachian Trail, a bronze plaque identifies the United States’ preeminent longdistance hiking trail as “a footpath for those who seek fellowship with the wilderness.” Susan Power Bratton’s intriguing book, The Spirit of the Appalachian Trail: Community, Environment, and Belief on a Long-Distance Hiking Path, suggests that interaction with wild nature only begins to capture the spiritual experience of the hundreds of the trail’s annual thru-hikers and section hikers. Utilizing published trail journals, interviews with volunteers in the support network along the trail (so-called “trail angels”), personal observations, hikers’ logs and postings, and a paper survey of long-distance hikers, Bratton’s quantitative study examines how “long-distance walking might enhance spiritual wellness” (xvii). She brings into focus the dynamic relationships in which long-distance hikers engage with other people, nature, and their culturally engrained belief systems, along the 2,180-mile trail corridor from Georgia to Maine.

Comparing the Appalachian Trail thru-hike with traditional religious pilgrimages, Bratton, an environmental studies professor at Baylor University, contends that such a hike can best be understood in terms of a spiritual pilgrimage rather than a traditional religious one. The trail did not attract “the specific religious personality type” (62). Hikers did not see themselves as part of one religious community and were largely uninterested in engaging in ritualized worship. Rather, hikers experienced the trail in intensely personal ways. While only a small minority of hikers explicitly identified their hike with spiritual aims, “a very high proportion” of them “engaged in spiritually formative friendship building or spent time thinking about their own ethical roles” (172). Bratton measures those spiritual implications with the Spiritual Health in Four Domains Index, a framework developed by psychologists and sociologists that focuses on personal, communal, environmental, and transcendent spheres of spiritual interaction. The overwhelming majority of hikers reported that their hike generated opportunities for self-reflection and self-actualization. Moreover, the trail fostered the development of a distinctly mobile community of hikers and volunteers that served as a physical and emotional support network, framing and validating individual trail experiences. Although hikers’ spiritual experiences on the trail were conditioned by their prehike beliefs, she concludes that “the Appalachian Trail thru-hike remains a valid and powerful platform for ethical and spiritual formation, and for nurturing a love for wild landscapes and for nature as planetary partner and friend” (213).

Perhaps Bratton’s most interesting contention is that, contrary to common perceptions, the Appalachian Trail experience, both from the hikers’ and the trail angels’ points of view, did as much to cultivate social ethics as it did environmental ethics. The opportunities provided by the trail to serve others and develop relationships seem to have translated into more positive views of humanity. On the other hand, the incorporation of the environment into hikers’ ethical belief systems was somewhat more complicated. Though many were ardent proponents of environmental protection, most hikers did not extend much religious or spiritual meaning to the Appalachian landscape. Ecological reflection was not among the themes reported by most hikers, and the trail experience did not lead to greater environmental activism or a better understanding of environmental degradation. With notable exceptions, the mountains were experienced not so much as sacred space but as cherished recreational space.

The heart of Bratton’s book centers on the hiker surveys, but she elaborates on her findings with effective use of personal observations, interviews, and published trail accounts. Although fascinating to anyone who has spent time on the Appalachian Trail, her use of quantitative methods to examine something as complicated as individual spirituality leads to some want for conceptual clarity. Not a thesis driven book, The Spirit of the Appalachian Trail at times reads as one long conclusion to her field studies, replete with general rules and...