Appalachian Trail

The Appalachian Trail, also called the A.T., is a hiking trail in the Eastern United States, extending almost 2,200 miles (3,540 km) between Springer Mountain in Georgia and Mount Katahdin in Maine, and passing through 14 states. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy claims the Appalachian Trail to be the world's longest hiking-only trail. More than three million people hike segments of it each year.

The trail was first proposed in 1921 and completed in 1937. Improvements and changes have continued since then. It became the Appalachian National Scenic Trail under the National Trails System Act of 1968.

The trail is maintained by 31 trail clubs and multiple partnerships and managed by the National Park Service, United States Forest Service, and the nonprofit Appalachian Trail Conservancy. Most of the trail is in forest or wild lands, but some parts traverse towns, roads, and farms. From south to north it passes through Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine.

Thru-hikers walk the entire trail in a single season. The number of thru-hikes per year has increased steadily since 2010, with 715 northbound and 133 southbound thru-hikes reported in 2017. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy estimates there are over 3,000 attempts to traverse the entire trail each year, about 25% of which succeed. Many books, documentaries, and websites are dedicated to the pursuit. Some hike from one end to the other, then turn around and thru-hike the other way, a "yo-yo".

Affiliated trail sections extend from either end from the north as the International Appalachian Trail into Canada and beyond, and from the south as the Eastern Continental Trail into the Southeastern states of Alabama and Florida.

The Appalachian Trail, the Continental Divide Trail, and the Pacific Crest Trail informally constitute the Triple Crown of Hiking in the United States.

The trail was conceived by Benton MacKaye, a forester who wrote his original plan—called "An Appalachian Trail, A Project in Regional Planning"—shortly after his wife's death in 1921. MacKaye's idea detailed a grand trail that would connect a series of farms and wilderness work/study camps for city-dwellers along the Appalachian Mountains from the highest point in the North (Mount Washington in New Hampshire) to the highest in the South (Mount Mitchell in North Carolina). Hiking was an incidental focus of his plan. In 1922, at the suggestion of Major William A. Welch, director of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, his idea was publicized by Raymond H. Torrey with a story in the New York Evening Post under a large headline reading "A Great Trail from Maine to Georgia"

On October 7, 1923, the first section of the trail, from Bear Mountain west through Harriman State Park to Arden, New York, was opened. MacKaye then called for a two-day Appalachian Trail conference to be held in March 1925 in Washington, D.C. This meeting inspired the formation of the Appalachian Trail Conference (now called the Appalachian Trail Conservancy) (ATC). Arthur Perkins, a retired judge, and his younger associate Myron Avery took up the cause. In 1929, Perkins, who was also a member of the Connecticut Forest and Park Association and its Blue Blazed Trails committee, found Ned Anderson, a farmer in Sherman, Connecticut, who took on the task of mapping and blazing the Connecticut leg of the trail (1929–1933). It ran from Dog Tail Corners in Webatuck, New York, which borders Kent, Connecticut, at Ashley Falls, 50 miles (80 km) through the northwest corner of the state, up to Bear Mountain at the Massachusetts state line. A portion of the Connecticut trail has since been rerouted (1979–1983) to be more scenic, adhering less to highways and more to wilderness, and includes the Ned K. Anderson Memorial Bridge.