On Trails

On Trails: An Exploration is Robert Moor’s 2016 book that explores the ways trails allow us to understand more about the world—from unseen ant trails to hiking paths spanning continents and from highways to the internet. The book details Moor’s seven-year journey across the globe, interweaving these adventures with history, science, philosophy, and nature writing. In doing so, the author raises profound questions from all walks of life. Told in an arc spanning the dawn of animal life to the modern-day digital era, Moor’s work provides a new vision of our species, world, history, and ways of life.

The book opens in Newfoundland with information about Ediacarans, which lived in the toxic sediment of the littoral waters off Mistaken Point, Canada, some 565 billion years ago. Alex Liu of Oxford University discovered fossils of these creatures in 2008. Moor begins by describing Ediacarans because these creatures carved out the oldest known trails on Earth. His scientific informant suggests that the trails demonstrate the creatures’ attempts to regain perches they had been dislodged from due to waves. Thus, the first trailblazers we know of may have simply been on a mission to return home.

Moor’s own journey lay along the 3,500 kilometers of the Appalachian Trail, from Georgia to Maine, which he set off to hike the entire length of in 2009. The journey took him five months. The author notes that in preparation for writing this book, he helped herd sheep on the Navajo Reservation and sought out vestiges of Cherokee trails in North Carolina because indigenous trails paved the way for our modern road network. He learned to construct a working stove from Coke cans. He also immersed himself in the writings of eighteenth-century French naturalist Charles Bonnet, ninth-century Chinese poet Han-shan, and twentieth-century American engineer Vannevar Bush. Finally, Moor considers the vast network of trails found on the Internet, where, he says, you can become genuinely lost.



Moor grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and resided in New York for several years. He first encountered a part of the Appalachian Trail at age ten at a summer camp in Maine. Our own first steps, says the author, are high on life’s list of celebratory moments, and we immediately use them to create our own paths between necessities. This is the crux for Moor. Trails endure because they work to connect nodes of desire, and because these paths represent the expression and fulfillment of collective desires. As long as the desire remains, so will the paths; when the desire fades, so, too, do the trails.

Trails, Moor says, have evolved to serve philosophical, spiritual, and directional needs. They have authors, be it ants, cows, or water. Each creature that follows, however, is an editor that adds to the iterations. As with all communal undertakings, trails transform with time.

Moor describes an astonishing experiment in which researchers wondered whether a slime mold could connect a series of oat clusters in a way that mirrored the location of major popular centers around Tokyo. The slime mold effectively recreated the layout of the city’s railway system. That is, a single-celled organism could design a railway system just as capably as top engineers in Japan.



Moor explains that not only has he hiked several exotic trials in, for example, Morocco, Malaysian Borneo, and Newfoundland, but he is also taking part in the ongoing, massive effort to expand the Appalachian Trail to Greenland and even regions of Africa, based on the theory that those locations have parts of what was once a single mountainous chain, the ultra-proto Appalachian, on the supercontinent of Pangea.

Along the way, Moor presents several portraits of the people he encounters. Trails are formed by those who walk on them, and Moor himself is shaped by those he walks with—what they teach him and help him to see. He also introduces various themes, one being the dual nature of trails. While they give one a sense of freedom, one is actually tightly bound, traveling a thread from A to B. His exploration becomes a contemplation of the path of life, where to walk, and how to live.

The book concludes beside a highway in Texas, where civilization meets wilderness. Moor joins with Meredith Eberhard, a retired optometrist who, at age sixty, underwent an epic hike in the 1990s. Eberhard speaks about the innate instinct to seek a mythical Mount Olympus, to find solace, silence, and meaning. Instead, he concludes that he could find just as much peace in the rush-hour traffic of the city as he would immersed in nature. Most of us live in cities, and chances to be in the wild are rare. We must savor the wild wherever we are.



Moor quotes poet Gary Snyder, who said, “A person with a clear heart and open mind can experience the wilderness anywhere on earth.” A compelling mixture of travelogue, history, sociology, and philosophy, On Trails is a meditation on the significance of trails for animal and human life. “The planet,” cites Moor, “is a wild place and always will be.”