On Trails turns hiking memoir into science history wandering

Robert Moor’s On Trails: An Exploration begins with a familiar dream—thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail—but quickly expands into wilderness thinking, trail science, language, and history, treating paths as a way to understand the world.

Hiking as escapism sounds simple until the weather pins you down.

In the opening pages of Robert Moor’s On Trails: An Exploration. the book starts exactly where a reader like me would hope it starts: Moor laying out his decision to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail. followed by early chapters that keep to the expected rhythm of long-distance travel. Chapter one centers on Moor’s trip to Western Brook Pond in Newfoundland while broadly wrestling with what “wilderness” even means.

Then the tone changes in a way you can feel. A storm traps Moor on a ridge, and the prose doesn’t romanticize the moment—it studies it. “For the better part of an hour. awash in mounting waves of tympanic rumble. I had time to reconsider the merits of hiking. Stripped of its Romantic finery. the wild ceased to inspire; only a gauzy scrim separated sublimity and horror.” It’s a line that lands like a door closing: this isn’t just a trail journal meant to make readers green with envy.

Chapter two pushes that point harder. It moves away from scenery and into details—ant trails. and even the “fine distinctions of various English words for lines of movement.” That’s the book’s quiet trick: it keeps taking the language of walking and turning it into language about understanding. as if the act of moving through the landscape is also a way of mapping ideas.

What follows is a kind of gleeful wandering. On Trails bounces across game trails. fiber optic wires. Moor’s stint as a shepherd. and then back again—shifting tones as if the trail itself were switching subjects mid-stride. One moment. Moor is drawn toward the power of nature; the next. he’s pacing an anecdote about misplacing an entire flock of sheep with the timing of a performer. Later. he turns to the damage done by colonialism. widening the frame until the wilderness story becomes something bigger than wilderness.

The movement is wide enough to risk feeling scattered—until you realize it isn’t. The book stays compulsively readable even while it reaches for far-off threads: a proto-internet imagined by engineer Vannevar Bush in 1945. and poet Gary Snyder appearing as quoted presence rather than decorative name-drop. The point isn’t to keep a straight hiking log. The point is to show how the trail idea keeps reproducing—through science, language, literature, and history.

Underneath all that topic-hopping sits a simpler engine: the book opens with a question about how the Appalachian Trail—and, by extension, other hiking trails—formed. From there, it branches outward, treating the concept of trails as a tool for understanding the world, not just a route through it.

If you came looking for a straightforward memoir, On Trails will surprise you. If you’re willing to follow it, you get something rarer: a wandering narrative that refuses to stay only about where someone walked, and keeps asking what walking means.

On Trails Robert Moor Appalachian Trail hiking memoir wilderness ant trails Vannevar Bush fiber optic wires Gary Snyder trail history