140 GOURMET TRAVELLER
I
n the glorious rhetoric that once characterised
American leaders, Lyndon B. Johnson made
an impassioned plea to Congress on 8 February
1965 to preserve the nation’s wild places.
It was a time of rapid urbanisation across
the United States, and the President feared
his countrymen’s souls would wither as they moved en
masse from the country to sprawling cities. “Association
with beauty can enlarge man’s imagination and revive
his spirit,” he told the gathered lawmakers. “Ugliness
can demean the people who live among it. What a
citizen sees every day is his America. If it is attractive
it adds to the quality of his life. If it is ugly it can
degrade his existence.”
This was the elegant preamble to a presidential
decree to preserve America’s natural beauty for the
enrichment of its citizens. Johnson proposed the
creation of a national network of hiking trails and
the preservation of existing ones. “The forgotten
outdoorsmen of today are those who like to walk,
hike, ride horseback or bicycle,” he said. “For them
we must have trails as well as highways.”
The National Trails System Act was passed three
years after his historic speech. In 1965 the nation had
141,600 kilometres of hiking trails; 50 years later, that
distance had more than doubled to 311,408 kilometres.
These include the Continental Divide Trail, which
bisects the nation from Mexico to Canada; the Pacific
Crest Trail on the West Coast, celebrated in Cheryl
Strayed’s bestselling book, Wild; and the mighty
Appalachian Trail, stretching 3,524 kilometres along
the spine of the Appalachian Mountains through
14 states, from Georgia to Maine.
Johnson’s outdoorsmen are no longer forgotten,
but they need to be serious about their tramping to
enjoy many of the network’s finest moments. The
US trails system can be difficult to access without a
well-stocked backpack, a tent and a solid couple of
months off work. In his bestselling memoir about
the Appalachian, A Walk In The Woods, Bill Bryson
grumbled that many of the country’s main trails are
inconveniently remote and tricky to visit without a
full-blown commitment to roughing it. The Appalachian
Trail, he wrote, “was designed for pushing on, ever
on, not for dipping in and out of”.
There’s some truth in his complaint, yet with
planning it’s possible to hike sections of the