Warren Doyle Knows More About the Appalachian Trail than Anyone

Warren Doyle in Asheville, North Carolina

(Photo: Mike Belleme)

Warren Doyle Knows More About the Appalachian Trail than Anyone. He Hates What It’s Become.

Published: Nov 11, 2023 Updated: Oct 2, 2024

Doyle set a speed record on the AT 50 years ago, long before YouTubers and partying twentysomethings had flooded the iconic trail. Through his Appalachian Trail Institute, which he's run since 1989, he’s still trying to convert a new generation of thru-hikers to his personal philosophy of what the trail should be.

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Class won’t start for another three hours, but Warren Doyle is already telling people how not to hike the Appalachian Trail. It’s a Monday morning in late March, and a torrent of rain has rushed from slate gray skies since dawn, shrouding the spring green of the Appalachians surrounding Mountain City, Tennessee, in mist. Three miles outside of town, Doyle’s driveway is a bog, water racing across in rivulets. He is oblivious to the downpour, even as rain drips down his ruddy face and through his white beard. Doyle, 73, scowls at the large pickup driven by the first of the five students to arrive at his Appalachian Trail Institute, a hiking school he has run since 1989. The truck is taking up too much room, he complains, forcing everyone else to park in the spongy yard. Before Doyle even greets his pupil, a retired soldier from Maine, he has an order: move.

“If you roll into a shelter on the AT like that,” Doyle says, referring to the lean-tos that dot the 2,198.4-mile footpath, “no one will like you very much.”

She glares, shrugs, and relents, climbing into her cab. After all, she has paid $300 to spend five days here, at the long-running quarterly seminar where Doyle talks about what he’s learned while hiking 40,000 miles on the country’s most historic trail over the past five decades.

Half a century ago, Doyle set a fastest known time on the AT: 66 days, a staggering speed even by the standard of today’s ultralight backpackers. He has lived and walked among the Appalachians, some of the world’s oldest mountains, ever since, finishing the entire trail 18 times. No one knows more about the Appalachian Trail; from memory, he can cite the exact mileage from the trail’s start in Georgia to the best creeks for bathing or the trickiest trail junctions. What’s more, no one has successfully led more people up the entire trail, either by guiding them in groups or teaching them in classes like this one. Doyle is the Appalachian Trail’s undisputed guru.

But within the trail’s sprawling modern community, he may be the most polarizing citizen, too. First connecting Georgia to Maine in 1937, the Appalachian Trail suggests such a complete escape from society that it is often described as a “green tunnel,” its hikers hugged on all sides by trees and dirt. When Doyle first hiked the trail in 1973, only had ever walked its length; in 2022 alone, nearly 1,500 finished. These days, it is so busy and popular that the green tunnel is often called the country’s longest bar crawl, as hikers push from one trail-town pub to the next. Doyle, however, is devoted to an antediluvian ideal of the place he considers holy—more specifically, to a time on it before Bill Bryson’s 1998 A Walk in the Woods and YouTube vlogs shot it into stratospheric popularity, or a nexus of hostels and shuttles and navigation apps made it easier.

In his classes, attended each year by a few dozen beginners, he does not lecture about gear, Leave No Trace practices, or new trail technology. Instead, he proselytizes on how that’s all nonsense: He has never filtered water, or dug a cathole for his waste, or packed out his toilet paper. He believes the outdoors has become a place for profit, not thought, a system he bitterly calls “the outdoor gear industry.” And he believes the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, the nonprofit that helps manage the trail, should be all but abolished. These grievances shape the core of his curriculum. Once a young idealist who found extreme personal freedom in the hollers of Appalachia, Doyle has aged into an extreme skeptic of modernity, not altogether removed from the resentful ideas that helped popularize Donald Trump or Yellowstone. He is half domestique, helping people achieve an ambitious dream, and half Bartleby, staring out and saying no.

These are the lessons of the first day, delivered in a series of three-hour lectures. When the marathon finally ends sometime after 9 P.M., another student—a mild-mannered 67-year-old former State Department employee with decades of hiking experience—walks outside and sighs. “What the fuck was that?” she says. Later that night, the students discuss leaving early. They expected advice about backpacks or rain jackets to buy and dehydrated foods to try, not grandiloquent philosophizing and political rants. It was as if they’d asked Phil Jackson to teach them how to dribble, only to be lectured about Zen and, say, his problems with celebrity.

Perhaps sensing the mood, Doyle offers his version of a mea culpa the next morning. “I wasn’t born this way. I didn’t come out of my mother’s womb ranting and raving,” he says, his voice rising toward a shout. “But I’m not ashamed of how I feel. It’s based on experience.”

Everyone stays, and I’m left to wonder: How did he become so bitter about his love?

Doyle was raised outside Bridgeport, Connecticut, the younger of two children in a working-class family that lived in a coal-heated, two-story house on five acres along a gravel road. His father was a mechanic and toll booth operator on the Connecticut Turnpike, having never finished high school. His stay-at-home mother was a Russian immigrant who arrived in the United States at 13. The couple met at a square dance.

As a kid, Doyle loved the countryside, often telling his parents that if the state ever paved their road, he was leaving. He was a good student who liked social studies. But after being bullied for being a teacher’s pet, he decided to recede into the classroom, never answering questions and earning only average grades.

When Doyle was 13, his older sister, Colleen, got a seemingly innocent headache. Three days later, she died of a brain aneurysm. Colleen’s passing jolted him out of early-teen apathy. He resolved to make something of himself. “I had learned to wear a T-shirt with an imaginary M, for ‘mediocre,’” he says. “When I saw my parents’ grief, I took the M off and became an achiever. It became my fuel.”

He joined the musical theater, started a teen club for community dances, and caddied for wealthy Nutmeggers at a nearby country club. He had the grades for Yale, just 30 minutes up the coast, but he didn’t want to saddle his family with debt.

Doyle instead commuted from home to Southern Connecticut State College, parlaying his time at the public school into a series of transformative extracurriculars. He performed the music of , the football star turned singer and civil rights activist. Before his junior year, Doyle won a scholarship to work for two months at an orphanage high in Jamaica’s mountains. He’d started bagging peaks in college, mostly in New York’s Adirondacks and New Hampshire’s Whites, but he truly fell for mountain vistas in Jamaica.

His writing about that experience earned him a second scholarship when he graduated at 21. This time, he shipped south to Pipestem, West Virginia, where poet and labor organizer had opened the Appalachian South Folklife Center, working to educate and assist a community of coal miners. Doyle had seen poverty in Jamaica, but he didn’t anticipate its breadth or severity in the United States. “I was seeing the same thing in my own country—‘America the Beautiful,’ all that stuff,” remembers Doyle. “I came back with a lot of questions. I started to doubt my education.”

West became a paragon of civic engagement for Doyle, his mix of radical independence and community service suggesting a way to live beyond the organized religion or government bureaucracy that seemed to pervade every aspect of life. Doyle distrusted those structures anyway. He had been accepted into the University of Connecticut’s graduate school of education. But West’s work was his new north star. He wanted to become instead what he calls “a social change educator.”

First, Doyle decided, he had to challenge and change himself. “I needed to do something no one was telling me to do,” he says. “No trophies, no extrinsic reward.”

He’d gotten to know the Appalachian Trail through his adventures in the Whites, and it felt like a solitary place where he might test his mettle. On May 29, 1973, two months after his 23rd birthday, his parents dropped him off near Georgia’s Springer Mountain, the Southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. “It wasn’t institutionalized yet,” he says. “It was a tabula rasa.”

Doyle at the AT’s southern end in 1973 (Photo: Courtesy Warren Doyle)

Doyle headed north wearing jeans and a dark cotton T-shirt with the words “Georgia to Maine” emblazoned across the front in blocky yellow letters and his sole sponsor, a natural grocer, on the back. A two-quart canteen dangled from his neck, with a transistor radio stuffed inside his Alpine Designs external-frame pack alongside a metal headlamp that required four D batteries. He slept beneath a nylon tarp and subsisted on Logan bread, a Canadian sweetened endurance concoction of oats and seeds, made and mailed by his fiancée, Naydine.

Doyle had the speed record and the strict schedule it would require in mind, hoping it would test his limits and reshape him. He was on pace for the first quarter of the trail. Then disaster struck. Famished in Pearisburg, Virginia, he downed a quart of orange juice and a half-gallon of milk in a single sitting. As he crossed the New River on a highway bridge, his bowels erupted, diarrhea running down both legs. Locals rushed him to the emergency room, where he spent two hours being lorded over by doctors. He squandered two days in a motel.

“I wasn’t born this way. I didn’t come out of my mother’s womb ranting and raving,” Doyle says, his voice rising toward a shout. “But I’m not ashamed of how I feel. It’s based on experience.”

Once back on the trail, Doyle began hiking 20 hours a day, sometimes posting 40 and even 50 miles as he churned northward. He zoomed down Massachusetts’s Mount Williams blasting a Beethoven symphony, closing in on the record. By Vermont, he was back on schedule and vowed not to fall off again.

“The sacred white blazes were there,” Doyle says of the 12-square-inch rectangles that still mark the path. “Beauty, pine trees, pine needles on the ground.”

Only 66 days after he began, Doyle reached Mount Katahdin, the trail’s other end. He had shaved nearly a week off the previous “endurance record,” as he prefers to call the FKT. (To Doyle, that term and—even worse—“speed record” imply that it’s all about how fast you can go, not your ability to suffer and endure.)

Doyle had thought about delaying his engagement to Naydine until after the trail, because he worried that his pilgrimage, as he often calls it, might change him in unpredictable ways. It did. The trail convinced him he had a “certain capacity to love, to do, and to think” that his current relationship wasn’t fulfilling. He eventually broke it off.

He was so grateful for what he terms “the gifts of the trail” that he wanted others to have the opportunity. But the trail’s old guard wasn’t impressed. After his hike was over, he attended a meeting of the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Connecticut chapter, offering to help maintain a stretch of trail in his home state long blazed by an octogenarian named Seymour Smith. They didn’t like that he’d sprinted up the trail rather than strolled, so they didn’t want his help.

“I went there with the hope I could carry his white paint pail, walk with him, listen to his stories. I wanted to give so much back,” says Doyle. “But I was a pariah, because I had used the trail as a racetrack.”

This first rejection embittered Doyle, then empowered him. He decided to aim smaller and younger. When he finally began graduate school after finishing the AT, he organized a series of eight Sunday treks for first-year Huskies. Those trips collectively crossed all 50 or so of Connecticut’s AT miles. When one student suggested they try to hike the whole state in 24 hours, Doyle bit, advertising what he dubbed his debut “Super Hike.” All but one of the dozen beginners finished that sprint on April 20, 1974.

He asked the kids to write a paper about the experience. One student, Kirk Sinclair, wrote nearly 40 pages. As Doyle read those words, he had, he says, “a proverbial vision.” If one day on the Appalachian Trail proved so powerful, how might all of it stretched over a single season feel? He developed a plan: “We wouldn’t all walk together, like some military barge,” Doyle says. “But we’d be spread out, all moving in the same direction.”

A year later, in late May 1975, Doyle and 18 students arrived at Georgia’s Springer Mountain. After 109 days, which included only a single rest day, they arrived at the base of Katahdin. “He was unflappable,” remembers Sinclair, who had signed up for the full AT after the Connecticut hike. “He would do weird things all along the way, like dance in the rain and play in puddles. There was a refreshing uninhibitedness about Warren. Other people became that way as they hung around him.”

In fact, it was raining the day they arrived in Maine. Regulations at Baxter State Park prohibited anyone from climbing to the AT’s end in bad weather. For a moment, the group pouted under a shelter, stewing over the fact that they’d walked a very long way only to fall mere miles short of their destination.

“Our heads drooped, and then we realized this was all bureaucratic bullshit. It didn’t have anything to do with us,” says Sinclair of the weather diktat. “We sang songs and did the little skits we’d done along the trail. That’s the great part of Warren.”

Two weeks later, 18 of the 19 hikers returned and climbed Katahdin. They held hands and formed a circle on the top, commemorating the first of what came to be Doyle’s eight “Circle” expeditions along the AT during the next 35 years. Only one of those groups, he says, didn’t have a 100 percent completion rate. (Today, about 75 percent of people who begin the AT do not finish.)

After the final Circle hike in 2010, Doyle began leading “Smart Hikes.” That is, rather than making hikers lug all their gear from Georgia to Maine, he follows them in a van stuffed with their supplies. Doyle’s critics often say such support adulterates a thru-hike, or at least the idealized spirit of a self-reliant walk in the woods; Doyle believes that’s not everyone’s ambition, and it doesn’t have to be.

“I know a lot about the Appalachian Trail, and I want to help people succeed in their dreams,” he says. “I believe I’m serving my country that way. A country is only as strong as the number of people in it who have realized their dreams, and anyone who completes the Appalachian Trail is going to be a better contributor to our society.”

Warren Doyle in July of 1973 — At just 23-years-old Doyle hiked the entire trail in just 66 days. (Photo: Courtesy Warren Doyle)

In 2009, Doyle was wandering the backroads of rural Tennessee when he spotted an old white house for sale. He stopped, looked around, and fell in love.

He was ready to retire from his teaching job in the education department of Lees-McRae, a private college just across the North Carolina border where he had worked for seven years. This seemed like prime real estate for his longtime dream—the , a hub for his beloved contra dances (a passion second only to the AT) and teaching people how to start and finish the Appalachian Trail. By that point, he had already run the for two decades. It was a mobile school, operating wherever he happened to be; the could become its permanent home.

The ATI was never about the latest gear or the best on-trail cuisine but instead Doyle’s crash course in the practical philosophy of endurance. “Life is not the trail,” he loves to say. The koan became the school’s credo.

Back in March, as new students found their way to class, Doyle eyed each prospective hiker for weakness, then attempted to spear it verbally. Could the high-powered Massachusetts realtor with the Louis Vuitton handbag hold on to her beauty standards for 2,200 miles, he wondered aloud. When another revealed he was a retired military officer, Doyle kickstarted a guessing game: What kind of people were the worst thru-hikers? Lawyers, he announced, though military personnel weren’t far behind. “People who have lived their lives existing because there is an enemy take that mindset on the trail,” he said. “Combative personalities don’t do well here.”

And yet combat became the week’s motif. Doyle repeatedly referred to hikers who drank alcohol on trail as “trust-fund babies.” He warned of inevitable violence between that lot and former soldiers, as though they were mutually exclusive. Speaking of the military, he delighted in an anecdote about a bumper sticker that read, “My Dad is fighting for your freedom.” No one was fighting for his freedom, he insisted, because he could always find it on trail. Both soldiers squirmed.

Doyle is most easily characterized as a libertarian, someone who sees most state mandates as unnecessary burdens on freedom. (Doyle, it should be noted, proudly survives on Social Security payments.) His philosophy stems from self-confidence, or, more specifically, his belief that he knows more than most people. In July 2021, for instance, the Forest Service suspended camping atop Max Patch, a popular spot high in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, the bald had become a miniature Woodstock. The Forest Service recently extended this restriction until 2026. Doyle, though, grinned as he told me about a cold if glorious night he’d just spent there with several thru-hikers.

“People make rules for people who are irresponsible,” he said. “I’m not, so those rules don’t apply to me.”

Each day’s sermons often went far into the crazy-uncle zone. While extolling the virtues of drinking unfiltered water, for instance, he praised the waterborne parasite giardia, because it kept his stools loose and staved off hemorrhoids for the entirety of the nineties. He saw no downside, and he hoped to get it again. “I don’t even have to pay those little critters,” he said. “They don’t unionize.” (Giardia has been linked to myocarditis, arthritis, and cognitive decline, among other health problems.)

But during the week, the idealistic libertarian acted like an authoritarian. His rules about punctuality (always) and drinking (never) were strict, and he was perplexed to learn that students had not gone to his Mountain City Mexican restaurant of choice.

As for hiking, he would not tell anyone directly that a piece of gear or a certain approach was wrong. He would instead talk at length about what he considered best, browbeating his paying audience into submission. A flip-phone purist, he denounced smartphones, their maps, and their social media apps. “Educators aren’t enablers of failure,” he quipped with a shrug. “Cyberspace is.”

Though he’s often been asked to write a book about his time on the AT, his “book,” as he calls it, remains —examples include: leaving your comfort at home, giving in to the trail’s rigors, and not taking shortcuts. (For him, these commandments did not conflict with his Smart Hikes—the miles matter to Doyle, not the strain on your back. The walking was enough.) “This is major league, people,” he would yell during his homilies, looking up from his sheet. “Major league!”

Doyle pooh-poohed modern hiking jargon like “”—hiking with a light load while your gear is shuttled ahead—because its definition had evolved over the decades. He didn’t resist people toting lighter loads, as on his Smart Hikes, but he despised the linguistic shift. The idea of “stealth camping”—that is, away from any sort of established campground—was redundant, because he believes no one should be camping near other campers anyway. Those who carry bear canisters or bear spray were sheep, blindly following unnecessary rules.

Over five days, Doyle talked his class through the trail one mile at a time, and his tone rang with worry. He ranted about stretches of trail he ironically dubbed “safety zones,” places where bad things could happen. He described seemingly every murder that had ever occurred on trail in lurid detail, speaking with a kind of Law & Order zeal.

All his advice coiled into a single thread: Don’t change the Appalachian Trail. Let it change you. “I’ve never encouraged anyone to do the trail,” he said toward the beginning and end of the five-day seminar that did exactly that. “I don’t want to be responsible for pain and suffering in this world.”

Doyle on top Maine’s Mt. Katahdin after his maiden trip on the AT in 1973 (Photo: Courtesy Warren Doyle)

In the late nineties, Doyle was dating a woman in West Virginia, Sally Swisher, whose teenage son, Sam Swisher-McClure, was a competitive cross-country runner. Doyle tantalized him with tales of his hikes, plus his antimaterialist invective and love of nature.

They began to hike together, finishing a 64-mile span of the AT in 24 hours before Swisher-McClure graduated from high school. The youngster soon raced across Vermont’s Long Trail alone, setting a new FKT on that trail, just as Doyle had done five years after his 1973 AT conquest. Together, they turned their ambitions toward the AT in the summer of 1998, exactly 25 years after Doyle broke the record. Doyle trailed Swisher-McClure north, meeting him at road crossings deep in the woods in a van and sometimes hiking with him. The teenager made the trail’s halfway point in 24 days, putting him well ahead of the standing mark.

But he’d trudged through obstinate foot pain for days. After one faulty step on a rock in Pennsylvania, the trail’s most notoriously tedious state, he knew he was done. Swisher-McClure never learned if it was a stress fracture or extreme tendinitis, but he never again returned to the AT for long stretches. Doyle and Sally Swisher soon split, but Swisher-McClure holds no grudge, just pride at their effort.

“Frustration isn’t the word, but I felt disappointment. I poured everything I had into it, and I couldn’t go any further,” says Swisher-McClure, now a radiation oncologist in Delaware. “That’s what I was looking for: to test my limits, to find out where that point was.”

Their failure marked the start of a new chapter in Doyle’s relationship with the trail—the one that has truly bolstered his status as the Appalachian Trail’s aging sage, even getting him into . He has become both coach and crew for some of the most impressive endurance records in American hiking, using the ATI as a kind of incubator and scouting combine for talent.

“People make rules for people who are irresponsible,” Doyle said. “I’m not, so those rules don’t apply to me.”

Jennifer Pharr Davis was just a nervous new college graduate when she attended the ATI in 2004 in preparation for her first thru-hike. Like so many of Doyle’s students, she’d found it after an elementary online search—How do you hike the Appalachian Trail? In class, he spotted toughness in her, and she detected a warm and funny mentor underneath a gruff exterior. He spent a year helping to train Pharr Davis ahead of her 2008 endurance record, which stood until she broke it herself in 2011. Doyle doesn’t hide his pride in their relationship; during the ATI’s five days, he mentions her two dozen times.

“He is one of the few people who looked at me and said, ‘I think you can do something almost no one else thinks you can do,’” remembers Pharr Davis. “He sees potential.”

A decade after Doyle supported Pharr Davis’s first record, he spotted potential again. A Portland pianist and marathon runner, Liz Derstine had read starkly different opinions of Doyle; Pharr Davis had praised him in her books and , while Scott Jurek, who had courted controversy as he broke her record in 2015, recounted a tense standoff in the rain with Doyle in his book, . (Jurek didn’t consult with Doyle before his record run and, as he told me, “felt like he was spying on me.” In turn, Doyle now calls Jurek, with audible disdain, “one of those Western runners.”)

Wanting to decide about Doyle for herself as she eyed a record attempt, Derstine attended the ATI in 2019. As other hikers walked six or so miles each day, she ran ahead, gleefully turning in double-digit jaunts with a full backpack. Doyle was impressed. Off and on for the next year, he carted her to different sections of the trail, testing her stamina. On July 7, 2020, she struck out from Springer Mountain, covering the Doyle-mandated 69 miles that first day. He met her 427 separate times during the next 51 days as she raced ahead. “I never was late,” Doyle says, beaming.

“It was just fun for him, timing me to see how fast I could go,” Derstine says. “It’s really fulfilling for him to see people fulfill their dreams. That’s been his life’s work.”

The relationship was worth it, Derstine says, if not always easy. Doyle insisted that sleep was only a psychological need and that she could do without much of it, even as she suffered the effects of intense sleep deprivation. She fretted about hiking during the COVID pandemic, but he saw it as a valiant act of defiance. And when she expressed doubts on about the wisdom of a 69-mile gambit a few days after it happened, he took offense.

“He told me it rubbed him the wrong way, because it seemed like a comment on his planning,” she told me. “There’s a lot of stuff Warren shares his advice on, like the psychological aspects of hiking. But he doesn’t have personal experience with the physicality of running.”

I wondered if supporting such record quests gave Doyle a sense of authority and dominion over the trail, especially since he no longer hikes himself. “Everyone wants to feel useful, especially as they get older,” he admits. “If an educator feels useful, he is going to try to enable success for willing learners. I choose my willing learners.”

These days, Pharr Davis considers Doyle a family member, someone she loves even if she disagrees with the finer points of his sometimes coarse approach. His place in AT lore, she thinks, should be secure.

“He has given more miles to the Appalachian Trail than any other hiker and more hours to people who want to hike the trail than anyone else,” she says. “He deserves ownership of that place and our record, whether he wants that or not.”

Doyle’s combative approach, however, hasn’t always been so conducive to remaining part of the AT’s lore. When I first reached out to Sandi Marra, the president and CEO of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, to speak about Doyle, a junior staff member asked, “Who is Warren Doyle?” In 2023, he is not part of the story they tell of the trail.

Marra, of course, knows Doyle. They met many years ago, when he was leading a young hiker through an infamous section of Virginia dubbed The Roller Coaster. He recognized her, and they made small talk about the day and the hills. But for decades, Doyle’s relationship with the ATC has been anything but affable.

Funded in part by federal tax dollars, the ATC is a key partner in a consortium that also includes the National Park Service in managing the Appalachian Trail, not only monitoring its hikers year to year but also planning for its future. For Doyle, the number one threat to the trail isn’t climate change or private development—it’s the ATC, which he views as part of a micromanaging bureaucracy fond of government overreach. It represents the antithesis of the feeling he found there in 1973. “The Appalachian Trail is a slender thread of freedom, but the organization most identified with it does a bunch of stuff that borders on nannyism,” he says. “That’s not freedom. That’s fear. John Muir would be rolling over in his grave.”

When the ATC 2020 thru-hikers to postpone their attempts during the pandemic, Doyle lashed out, framing it as the rise of a “dystopian society, where people’s freedom of movement is limited.” When the ATC accepted in 2020 from a company building a natural-gas pipeline across the trail about 100 miles from Doyle’s home, he said it had again sold out hikers, caring less about the pilgrimage than padded coffers. (This money was earmarked to buy land around the trail and support the region’s recreation industry.) And when the ATC about the economic, social, and racial privilege of being able to hike and advocates for equity and inclusion, he scoffs, pointing to his own humble roots. The trail doesn’t care about your past, he says, only your present.

“When I hear about Warren, I have visions of this Eurocentric view of man versus nature, this place that has to be taken alone and conquered,” says Marra. “This is the experience of white man with nature.”

In 1978, the federal government began buying hundreds of thousands of acres along the AT, securing the route in perpetuity through a contentious process that lasted decades. Some of it was acquired through eminent domain, which Doyle considers a national disgrace; he believes the casual agreements with landowners who simply allowed the trail to pass through their land were sufficient. Now that it’s done, Doyle believes the ATC, the U.S. Forest Service, and the National Park Service should relinquish all control to the local hiking clubs that maintain the trail across 14 states. The ATC’s 62-person full-time staff should be trimmed by 90 percent, he says, reducing it to mere figurehead status.

But 100 years after construction began on the trail, Marra insists that the hardest work remains. Those pipeline funds, for instance, are part of a broad effort to purchase and protect more land around the AT. The short-term goal is to expand and preserve the trail’s sense of wilderness. The long-term goal is to use those rewilded and undeveloped spaces as a tool against climate change, a new East Coast carbon sink. The ATC’s vision calls for a comparable to the great untamed expanses of the American West. After securing 80,000 acres, the ATC hopes to preserve 100,000 more over the next five years.

“It’s important for the soul of the country and the health of the planet to contribute to forest connectivity and carbon sequestration, so we can have healthier air and water,” says Marra. “It’s part of our agreement with the American public that we’re going to take the lead on making sure the trail exists into the future.”

Doyle, however, dubs this “empire building,” consistent with a government whose end game is the acquisition of most everything, especially personal freedom. He once told me that the hiker was more important than the trail; only the former, after all, is temporary.

“The only thing that’s threatened in our country is a wilderness state of mind, the wilderness within us,” Doyle tells me when I ask him what’s wrong with preserving more wilderness. “It’s been sapped away by liability insurance and rules and regulations and nannyism and fear and limiting what people can do.”

As much as it has been a path through the wilderness, to epiphanies, and for feats of extreme endurance, the Appalachian Trail has always been an arena for ideas, too. The iconic American footpath now seems sacrosanct, as federally safeguarded as the Smokies through which it runs. But only a century ago, it was a revolutionary idea, born of the novel desire to create a wild sanctuary.

In the decades since, the AT has prompted debates about socialist ideals and shared spaces, private property versus the public good, capitalist encroachment on community resources, and cultural undergrounds reaching curious masses. Overdue questions of accessibility, inclusion, and equity now permeate the trail, much as they do American life itself. In fact, Philip D’Anieri’s recent concise history, , doubles as a summary of a century of American discourse.

Doyle first set out on foot in 1973 to think, to examine his notions of relative privilege (even if it’s a word he dismisses) as a working-class white kid from Connecticut. It transformed his life, turning him into a lifelong educator.

“A couple years after doing that first hike, I came to the conclusion that I was conditioned and educated in the schools,” says Doyle. “But I was set free in the mountains of Jamaica, the coal fields of Appalachia, and along this slender thread from Georgia to Maine.”

He has now spent half a century in service not to that thread, per se, but instead to its hikers—guiding them, shuttling them, teaching them, chastising them, encouraging them. And as their cultural ideal has changed from a solitary descent into the woods to a popular hike interconnected by Instagram handles, YouTube channels, trail angels, and government agencies, Doyle has grown cynical, convinced that most of the kids aren’t doing it right. They’re posting too much, he believes, and thinking too little.

It’s hard not to feel Doyle should have seen all this coming. He adores and often quotes transcendentalist writing, like Hegel’s or Thoreau’s . (And, like Thoreau, he has long advocated for civil disobedience, even climbing Katahdin in the rain to challenge the policy that stymied his group in 1975. He still calls Baxter State Park, Katahdin’s home, Baxter State Prison.) He keeps cheap used copies of Walden for sale alongside books of Appalachian folklore and hiking manifestos in the multi-room library of the Folk School.

During Doyle’s talks, I can’t help but think of one of Walden’s most famous passages and how Doyle seemed to overlook its irony as it applies to his stubborn positions: “I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors,” Thoreau wrote. “If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about.” Doyle bemoans people who stop hiking before the sun sets in order to hang out with new friends at a shelter, mocks those who used water filters to prevent giardia. They haven’t taken his “earnest advice.”

“The Appalachian Trail is a slender thread of freedom, but the organization most identified with it does a bunch of stuff that borders on nannyism,” Doyle says. “That’s not freedom. That’s fear. John Muir would be rolling over in his grave.”

In 2023, the Appalachian Trail remains what it has always been—a place for people to test other possibilities. Doyle simply thinks the old ways, his ways, are good enough to follow forever.

I was surprised, then, when I reached out to my classmates from Doyle’s Appalachian Trail Institute. Nearly all of them had wanted to bail after the first day of class. But three months later they almost all said the experience was crucial, perhaps even transformative. After they let his invective and cynicism fade, they were left with insight into what the trail would require.

The soldier Doyle scolded for her parking job concluded she indeed wasn’t ready for the Appalachian Trail. She will instead hike Vermont’s Long Trail this year, and she is thrilled. Doyle gave the military officer he chastised for inflexibility a brain dump of the backwoods road crossings and parking lots he could use to meet his wife as she finishes her own hike. Though he, like almost all of the students, nearly quit school after the first day, he ended up returning in gratitude to volunteer for Doyle, cleaning the classroom we shared. The State Department employee remained the least convinced of Doyle’s usefulness, but she admitted he had prepared her for the way many hikers now treat the trail as an item on a checklist, not a lofty spiritual pilgrimage.

And the well-dressed realtor who had never backpacked or camped before she started the trail only days after Doyle’s classes ended? He told her he thought she could finish, so long as she could do without her creature comforts. One day away from the trail’s halfway point in Pennsylvania, she told me that that advice had indeed empowered her.

“He is like a Provençal olive—salty, an acquired taste. He is not for everyone,” she said. “But I genuinely think he cares about people’s success, and that’s why he doesn’t sugarcoat anything. He’s not afraid to deliver what he has.”

Nearly two months after my week at the Appalachian Trail Institute ended, I passed Doyle’s home on my way to Trail Days, a long-running convocation of AT hikers and hangers-on, gear makers and festive locals in Damascus, the southwest Virginia valley that brands itself “Trail Town, U.S.A.” Doyle has been speaking at the event for decades.

On Friday night, he paced throughout the century-old schoolhouse, narrating a slide show of images from a lifetime of hikes, including that 1973 record. As bittersweet songs by John Denver and Dan Fogelberg played on an oversize boombox, Doyle clicked through the images. He offered occasional bon mots, paraphrased The Jungle Book as a parable for disappearing into the woods, and quoted Walt Whitman more than once.

“I’ve got all these memorable moments,” he said, sullenly. “I’ll never be able to exhaust them.”

Doyle finally introduced his last set of songs for the night, beginning with Steve Winwood’s 1986 synthesizer-driven smash, Given the night’s folksy feeling and Doyle’s general suspicion of modern circuitry, it was a surprising choice, at least until he started speaking, as always, about the trail.

“We all need higher loves. For most people, it’s religion, and certainly we all need faith,” he said. “But my higher love revolves around the Appalachian Trail, the journey, the pilgrimage. I keep the trail inside me, all the time.”

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Lead Photo: Mike Belleme

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Warren Doyle Knows More About the Appalachian Trail than Anyone. He Hates What It’s Become.

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