Long-Distance Hiking: Lessons from the Appalachian Trail

Blending sage advice with personal experiences and anecdotes, this unconventional book is an unusually thoughtful account of long-distance trekking on the Appalachian Trail. Mueser draws upon interviews and questionnaire data gathered from over 100 long distance hikers hoofing it through the Applachian Mountains.

Proving that no sacrifice is too great in the name of science, avid hiker Roland Mueser once devised a controlled experiment and carried it out during blackfly season in the woods and swamps near his New Jersey home: He ran a 4-mile course through the woods wearing DEET repellent on alternate days, and tallied the number of bites sustained during each run.

Roland is the author of several books, and his articles have appeared in Appalachia, the Colorado Mountain Club magazine T&T, and other outdoor journals. A retired physicist, Roland is a former member of the engineering research faculty at Harvard University and Pennsylvania State University and was a research scientist for Bell Laboratories. After retiring, he thru-hiked the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail in 1989.