Blazing Trails

by Fran Withrow 03.2024

I love reading about hikers who explore trails I might never see, describing their beauty and the experience of being out in nature. So when Charles McGuigan told me about “On Trails,” I rushed out to pick up a copy at the library.

Robert Moor has written an exquisite book about trails that encompasses much more than just walking through the woods. On an Appalachian Trail hike in 2009, Moor began to muse about trails in general. How are they formed, and why? What can we learn about the world and about ourselves by studying trails?

Moor says that understanding “how we make trails, and how trails make us,” will help us navigate our ever changing world. He begins by exploring the earliest fossilized trails and speculating, along with experts, about why the first creatures began to creep, crawl, and walk. This leads him to study those great trailblazers, ants, and how their impressive collective intelligence allows them to succeed so well.

The study of ants and other insects who create and use trails helps explain why some trails last and others fall into disuse. People (and ants) who are forging trails are always searching for the easiest and most logical path forward. As others follow, the original traces morph into a legitimate trail. Like ants, hikers continually make a “best guess” as to the most efficient route, which explains why trails are fluid and changeable.

Moor also explores the trail-making ability of larger animals. His description of the few weeks he spent as a volunteer sheepherder in Arizona are just grand reading. He quickly learns how sheep follow a trail, and is amazed at the incredible skill of the indigenous Navajos in tracking them. (Navajos are among the only people in North America still herding sheep on foot.) He exhibits charming candor in describing his ineptitude in sheepherding, losing his charges more than once, while his Navajo hosts find the missing flock using only faint markings in the dirt.

An exploration of indigenous peoples who do not need or have maps follows. How incredible that they visualize their trails by landmarks and by the stories that tie to them to the earth. What have we lost by our dependence on Google Maps to help us navigate our world?

Trails, Moor says, are ways we connect, and new technology like GPS has revolutionized how we relate to one another. How is that changing us and our experience of the world? Can we remember to remain in touch with the physical world, to the tangible trails in our lives, in spite of the pull of scientific innovation?

All our lives we explore the trails left by those who came before us. We use these physical and symbolic trails as we walk through the world, leaving our own traces and trails behind. How will our trails change the earth for those who come after us? Reading this lovely book will have you thinking more about where you go, as well as what you will leave behind.