Ethan Gallogly, The Trail ***

My second book in a row about walking a long distance trail. The Salt Path was the South West Coast Path in England; The Trail is the John Muir Trail in California. Both books also feature a terminally ill hiker who (spoiler!) goes into remission.

The Trail misleadingly bills itself as a novel. Sure, it's fictional, but its clear intent is to capture the experience of hiking the John Muir Trail rather than to tell an evolving story. There are three pages about picking up their permit, just three paragraphs about waking up to a salivating bear. There's a bibliography and historical timeline at the end, with heaping helpings of Sierra history throughout.

The book consists of chapters named after the twenty-eight days of their hike, with an illustrated map and mileage summary for each one. The book is filled with mostly good advice about backcountry travel, although I question their wisdom in climbing Forester Pass in a storm. Their trip is filled with encounters that are no doubt based in fact but likely occurred over the author's thirty years of backpacking. 

Gallogly forms the book into a quest narrative, with the young narrator and his older, more experienced companion each having emotional issues to work out. Unfortunately, character development is the weakest and least convincing aspect of the story. Gil is a reluctant neophyte, Sal his master, the other hikers embody diverse stereotypical wayfarers. The characters don't develop over time, and their insights are trite and exactly the ones you'd expect from hiking literature.

I take it back. Dialogue is the weakest and least convincing part of the book. Young Gil is prone to questions like "Why was John Muir famous?" and "You said yesterday that Solomons had a barometer for measuring altitude, and I forgot to ask you how it worked." Former professor Syd readily supplies the exposition in well constructed paragraphs. Gil restates the main point in terms of kung fu movies, eventually earning him the trail name Po after the star of Kung Fu Panda.

I found the clunky prose embarrassing in the early going but eventually learned to roll with it.