The Trail: a novel

Great book for trail lovers anyone who likes multi day walking often in the wilderness. Very well written JMT trail experience with an accompanying story exploring life and purpose.

The story was beautifully written and took the reader on their own journey. The same journey we all share "life".=

Prompted recall of great days on the John Muir trail

This is a really good book!!!!!

I just finished this and really enjoyed it. You have to get past the first few chapters, which are kind of corny and seem amateurish in their writing, but once you meet the second character and they start hiking the trail it’s very good. It’s about the John Muir Trail (JMT) in the Sierra Nevadas around Yosemite. It’s full of great historical information, literary references, and plant/animal information. I had heard of John Muir but didn’t know about the trail or all the other stuff he did. It has some humor and some good story telling about friendships and life. Even though I don’t agree with the spiritual aspects of the book, I didn’t let that keep me from enjoying it. Just some FYI. It’s also kindle unlimited.

Vor fast zwanzig Jahren bin ich den JMT auch gewandert und viele Beschreibungen in diesem Buch haben meine Erinnerungen wach gerufen und es war, als ob ich erst gestern dort gewesen war. An manchen Stellen war mir das rumphilosophieren ein wenig zu dick aufgetragen, aber dennoch konnte ich das Buch nicht weglegen…. Und ich hatte damals denselben Mantra-Song im Kopf wie der Autor. speziell auf dem Golden Staircase.Was mich allerdings erschreckt hat war, wieviele Leute der Autor auf dem Trail getroffen hat. Vor 20 Jahren war definitiv weniger los gewesen und das war gut so.Ein tolles Buch für jeden, der den JMT schon selbst erlebt und und jeden, der ihn noch erwandern will!

There’s a lot in this book. There’s the angst of youth, the fear of death and all the life in between. Partly a great coming of age book, a study on looking at your demise, a travelogue and a philosophy book. I live it

This was a great story with meaningful insights, particularly toward the end (the value of sauntering vs hiking, being present to one's life and experiences instead of focused on goals and the destination, and "the thing that divides us from real experience is language.")However, long-winded lectures by the older character were so uninteresting to me I skipped ahead a lot, but serious hikers might enjoy the history of the JMT and early mountaineers more than I did. Also off putting were grammatical errors and deliberately casual language by the younger character: " they musta packed in;" Whaddya mean?" This distracted from the story and made the character seem more like an adolescent instead of a college aged man.All in all, the book contained valuable messages but for the reasons noted was a bit of a grind.