Bryson briefly discusses some of the most famous people who have successfully completed the end-to-end AT trek, including Earl V. Shaffer, who in 1948 became the first to accomplish it; Ward Leonard, who completed the trail in 60 days in the 1980s; and Bill Irwin, a man with blindness, who completed it with a service dog. Then, Bryson returns to the narrative and rationalizes his and Katz’s decision to skip a portion of the AT by noting that they’d already walked half a million steps and that “it didn’t seem altogether essential to do the other 4.5 million to get the idea of the thing” (163). During their cab ride from Gatlinburg to Knoxville and rental car journey to Virginia, they experience the mind-numbing transition from being in a forest for so long to being back in the crass urban world.

Bryson discusses botanical history at length, noting how botanists from Europe plunged deep into the forests of North America to discover and cultivate new plants. He notes that aside from Indigenous Americans, the first people to venture deep into the woods “weren’t looking for prehistoric creatures or passages to the West or new lands to settle. They were looking for plants” (166-67). The flora present in the Americas was unknown, and they could make money from it. While numerous botanists discovered new species in the Americas, Bryson singles out John Bartram as the first and most prolific: “Of the 800 plants discovered in America in the colonial period, Bartram was responsible for about a quarter” (168).

In their AT trek, having skipped more than 200 miles of the trail, Bryson and Katz pick it up again in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, where spring is in full swing and the weather is warmer. For weeks, they barely see another hiker but do meet one man who has been section-hiking the region for 25 years by parking his car in one place and his bicycle in another. The lack of other hikers means that they have each shelter to themselves, which is a treat, but after six nights they emerge in a clearing and spot the bright lights of a town—Waynesboro, Virginia—roughly six or seven miles to the north. Tired of noodles as their nightly meal each day and with little conversation between them, Bryson and Katz decide to hike to town in the morning to get a motel room, eat in a restaurant, and do laundry.