The Appalachian Trail's End

Henry David Thoreau climbed Katahdin in August of eighteen forty-six, before there was a trail, before there was a park, before the mountain had a relationship to anything except itself and the people who had lived near it for thousands of years. He was twenty-nine years old, on a canoe trip through the Maine woods, and he approached the summit through a fog that descended before he reached the top. He turned back below the peak.

What he wrote about the experience did not fit the transcendentalist vocabulary he had built around the woods of Concord and Walden Pond. He wrote of Katahdin as a place of primeval, untamed, and forever untameable Nature, not a philosophical landscape but an indifferent one. He called it a place no man can stand there and put all nature behind him. It frightened him. He said so.

The Appalachian Trail's northern terminus sits at Baxter Peak on the same mountain, the endpoint of a footpath that runs two thousand one hundred ninety miles south to Springer Mountain in Georgia. Thru-hikers who reach the summit after five to seven months of walking typically describe it as a place of triumph. The wooden sign at the summit says Katahdin, northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. The sign does not mention Thoreau.

The mountain exists in its current public form because of Percival Baxter, a former Maine governor who spent over three decades, from nineteen thirty to nineteen sixty-two, purchasing land around Katahdin and donating it parcel by parcel to the state, on the condition that it remain wild forever. He spent approximately twenty million dollars of his own money. The park is named for him. The peak the Appalachian Trail ends on carries the Abenaki name the mountain has always had.