Hiking Memoirs

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK A timely and important book that challenges everything we think we know about cultivating true belonging in our communities, organizations, and culture, from the #1 bestselling author of Rising Strong, Daring Greatly, and The Gifts of...

After Paul Stutzman lost his wife to breast cancer, he sensed a tug on his heart - the call to a challenge, the call to pursue a dream. With a mixture of dread and determination, Paul left his job, traveled to Georgia, and took his first steps on the Appalachian Trail. What he learned during the next four and a half months changed his life and can change yours as well. In Hiking Through, you'll join Paul on his remarkable 2,176-mile trip through 14 states in search of peace and a renewed sense of purpose.

Carrot Quinn fears that she's become addicted to the Internet. The city makes her numb, and she's having trouble connecting with others. In a desperate move, she breaks away from everything to walk 2,660 miles from Mexico to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail. It will be her first long-distance hike.

A young British backpacker goes missing on the West Coast Trail. No one is sure whether she died or simply disappeared. Apart from Laura. Twenty years later, a body has been found. And there's only one person who could reveal the secret that Laura's been hiding all this time. But she knows that two can keep a secret. IF ONE OF THEM IS DEAD.

Carrying only basic camping equipment and a collection of the world's great spiritual writings, Belden C. Lane embarks on solitary spiritual treks through the Ozarks and across the American Southwest. For companions, he has only such teachers as Rumi, John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen, Dag Hammarskjöld, and Thomas Merton, and as he walks, he engages their writings with the natural wonders he encounters, demonstrating how being alone in the wild opens a rare view onto one's interior landscape, and how the saints' writings reveal the divine in nature.   

An honest account of a woman's trek on the John Muir Trail is captured in this lively trail journal. Celebrate her joy as the beauty of the High Sierra in California is slowly revealed, feel the comradery of trail friends she meets along the way, and sympathize with her when all she wants is for the trail to end. Along the way — hikers of all ages — but especially mature hikers, will see how she and her husband met challenges head-on, lightened their load, planned meals and managed daily logistics for more than three weeks on the trail.

Not many people can say they met and married their spouse within thirty days of beginning to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. But that’s exactly what happened to twenty-five-year-old Claire Henley Miller. Mile 445 is the inspiring—and romantic—true story of how Miller left corporate life behind to embark on a 2,650-mile hike from Mexico to Canada. She is doing it alone, and the only gear she takes to survive the trek in the mountains of California, Oregon, and Washington fits inside her sixty-eight-liter backpack. At the start of her five-month journey, she meets a handsome young man ...

Forced to face physical shortcomings, A 100 Mile Journey is the story of the struggle of a middle-aged woman hiking Section A of the Pacific Crest Trail and a few extra miles beyond. The full mileage of the trail hovers around 2,650 miles and stretches from the Mexican border to Canada. Section A meanders through arid valleys, scorching deserts and occasional mountain pine forests in southern California. Doubters said she wouldn’t last a day. Even though her ultimate goal was a complete thru-hike, she did finish section A, fighting aches and pains of small, niggling injuries and arthritis...

In Whistler's Walk: The Appalachian Trail in 142 Days, author Bill Monk brings readers his real-life, day-to-day account of hiking the Appalachian Trail in its entirety, from intense, necessary preparation at the start to the emotionally charged conclusion of summiting Mount Katahdin. Based on Monk's journal entries written daily along the way, readers are afforded the up-close and intimate privilege of witnessing his very real trials and triumphs, and each incredible, beautiful moment as he experienced it. Anyone who has hiked, or plans on hiking the Appalachian Trail, lovers of nature, ...

Oprah's Book Club 2.0 selection. A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again. At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's...

Terror on the Appalachian Trail by Harlan Blackwell A solo trek into the mountains was supposed to be peaceful. But the Appalachian Trail holds something far older—and far hungrier—than solitude. When experienced hiker Martin Ellis disappears without a trace, his last journal entries hint at unnatural cairns, shadowy watchers, and a forest that shifts around those who enter. Weeks later, another backpacker arrives, unaware that the trail is watching—and waiting. A skin-crawling horror story set deep in the wilderness, where what returns from the woods may not be human at all.

★★★★★ "I love how Martin shows us not to get caught up in the stress and tension of goas and deadlines!" - Reader Review _____ Martin Armitage never guessed that it would forever change the way he looked at his life when he decided to hike the entire 273 mile length of The Long Trail, stretching from the Canadian border in the north all the way to the southern end of the state of Vermont. Just a few short days into the walk, and forced to call a halt as an injury prevented him from continuing, he was filled with anger and a sense of failure and frustration. But what seemed like a ...

Living a life of quiet desperation? Maybe you should run away, at least for a while. What Happens if You Keep Going? is a collection of 15 mostly true travel stories about accidental rites of passage and dirtbag pilgrimages. In a world of doomscrolling, political chaos, and creeping burnout, it’s encouragement that you don’t have to accept your fate—travel still provides a way to create the life you want. Among the stories, you’ll find: A teenage clown evangelist in Peru reluctantly accepting his life’s mission. A pilgrimage in Spain achieving the opposite of its intended result. ...

One April morning I left the Mexico border and walked north on the Pacific Crest Trail. For five months I hiked through the California desert, the snows of the Sierra Nevada, and the Cascade Mountains of Oregon and Washington. My goal was to succeed in an epic challenge: to hike 2,650 miles and reach Canada before the October snows.

Phillip believed he had it all together. He loved his work in the recovery field and felt deeply grateful for his family. Then a few “pesky” lumps in his neck turned into a life‑shattering diagnosis: Stage 4 oropharyngeal cancer, a tumor at the back of his tongue. Treatment saved his life—but left him exhausted, hollowed out, and wondering what came next. In the middle of that darkness, Phillip sensed a startling invitation: walk the Appalachian Trail. Phillip was not a seasoned long‑distance hiker. His only backpacking experience was a single week in the Adirondacks as a teenager...

After graduating from college, Jennifer isn't sure what she wants to do with her life. She is drawn to the Appalachian Trail, a 2,175-mile footpath that stretches from Georgia to Maine. Though her friends and family think she's crazy, she sets out alone to hike the trail, hoping it will give her time to think about what she wants to do next. The next four months are the most physically and emotionally challenging of her life.  

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER The incredible follow-up to one of the most talked about books of the decade - the phenomenon, Waterstones Book of the Month and Costa Award shortlisted The Salt Path. _______ 'Extraordinary: wise, unflinching, exquisite. Profound' Observer 'A thrill to read. The...

What happens when a burnt-out tech professional ditches the comforts of modern life and hikes 2,650 miles across the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada? A head-on collision of midlife crisis and wilderness reality, where he’s never felt more alive. Somewhere between blisters, bear poop, and resupply, it clicks. Those cryptic ideas of Zen and Taoism he skimmed almost two decades ago—about ‘simplicity’ and ‘attachment, ’ the kind most of us flag as hippie nonsense, actually started making a whole lot of sense.

THIS GRIPPING AND TRIUMPHANT MEMOIR FOLLOWS A LIVING LEGEND OF EXTREME MOUNTAINEERING AS HE MAKES HIS ASSAULT ON HISTORY, ONE 8,000-METER SUMMIT AT A TIME. For eighteen years Ed Viesturs pursued climbing’s holy grail: to stand atop the world’s fourteen 8,000-meter peaks, without the aid of...

Diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) at 12, Kira believed she could never backpack away from everything that kept her stomach pain in check. But 13 years later, she hiked the entire 211-mile John Muir Trail — in the face of a debilitating flareup, a breakup, and a gut-wrenching parasite. Kira's (mis)adventures overcoming chronic pain among the breathtaking Sierra Nevada helped her rediscover everything her body was capable of. And in the highs and lows, the beauty and pain, the perseverance and regret, she came to understand true resilience. All to inspire you, the reader, to ...