Alone in the Appalachians: A City Girl's Trek from Maine to the Gaspe

by Monique Dykstra

The legendary Appalachian Trail, stretching from Georgia to Maine, attracts millions of hikers every year. The International AT, opened in 2000, has added 1,073 km from Maine to Quebec. This addition to Raincoast's popular Journeys series is the tale of writer and photographer Monique Dykstra's adventures while hiking the brand new International Appalachian Trail. She's a city girl who thought hiking was "simply a matter of throwing some clothes and a few granola bars into a pack and heading for the hills." Two months, 1,073 km, and countless blisters later, she wasn't so sure. This extremely funny narrative includes Dykstra's descriptions of the characters she meets along the trail as well as 50 of her fascinating photographs.

Genres: Nonfiction

124 pages, Paperback

First published June 20, 2002

Reviews

[Liralen · Rating 3 out of 5]

For this book, I had proposed a personal account of hiking the IAT. But self-reflection is much like belly laughter—hollow if forced and hard to do on demand. What if I didn't have a single profound thought for two months? Because really, how much could a person write about walking down a trail? (20)

Alone in the Appalachians is Dykstra’s account of hiking the International Appalachian Trail—a roughly developed hiking trail running through Canada. If you think the Appalachian Trail (i.e., the better-known trail in the U.S.) sounds far too rustic and remote for you, then, uh, the IAT is not something you should consider…but if you think the AT is now far too commercial and heavily trod, then there might be something in the IAT for you.

For all that this is a ‘personal account’, there’s a limited amount of the personal here…but that’s made up for with pictures and ruminations on isolation.

There is no word that adequately describes the insignificance one feels when confronted by endless wilderness. We're talking wilderness here, not park land. Parks—no matter how large or wild—have nice, neat borders around them. They have signs and rules, forest rangers and entrance fees. Parks have an address. They are somewhere.

The wilderness is nowhere. Next to nowhere, there's just more nowhere. And your presence in that nowhere amounts to exactly nothing. Surrounded by wilderness—as you are on Mount Carleton—you realize you're just one of billions of organisms scattered on the earth's surface. It's a realization that's both humbling and exhilarating. (87–88)

My brother and I spent a few days hiking and camping in Algonquin Provincial Park around the same time that I read this. Algonquin is packed with sparkling lakes—as long as you have something to purify water, you’ll never risk dying of thirst—and deep, deep woods; even in summer, it felt incredibly remote. We went entire days without seeing anyone else, and I spent a fair amount of time calculating how long it would take to hike out to get help if one of us broke a leg. The Powers That Be aim for the smallest human footprint possible (which is somewhat ironic at times—we were there after a lot of rain, which meant that the trails were chewed up with mud…and consequently hikers had gone around the trails, and chewed more land into mud, and more land after that, which could have been avoided with even temporary log bridges), but it’s still a park. There are signs (not enough to keep us from getting lost) and two or three campsites at any given lake along the way and fire pits and wooden box latrines. (No lie—I was pretty thrilled that there were latrines at the campsites. I’d expected to have to dig holes.) Algonquin Provincial Park is nowhere near the IAT, and what Dykstra describes is something else entirely.

Hers is not a trip that I would want, particularly—too much solitude, and too much chance that I’d take a wrong turn and wander for weeks in the wilderness before dying in a ravine somewhere (pessimistic, yes, but it’s valid—my sense of direction is notoriously terrible). But…it’s nice to dream.

[Sarah Frey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dykstra gives the impression that her entire motivation for hiking - was to write a book about it.
The text follows an "and then this happened, and then this happened" monologue, chartered by short stories of local history. The memoir gives no insight into the authors internal journey, nor does a great job of capturing the natural beauty and struggle of the hike.
However, I was most disappointed by the author's consistent reference to her fear of "the reserve" she must hike through in Quebec.

[Evan · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was a failure for me from before I even started reading it. I went looking for a book about hiking the Appalachian Trail in the online library catalogue and found this one. My mistake. I read it anyway, but this writer didn't really have anything interesting to say.

The worst parts were when she gave information about New Brunswick that was obviously false. The province was populated by only a handful of fur traders, Acadians and bands of Algonquin Indians before 1800? UNB was founded in 1785 and I'm pretty sure they didn't start a university for a few fur traders. Algonquin Indians? The Algonquin live in Ontario and Quebec, not in New Brunswick. The indigenous people of the area are the Mi'kmaw and Maliseet, who are about as Algonquin as an Englishman is German, which is to say, sure, it's a branch of the same language family, but that doesn't make it the same thing.

People in New Brunswick are bilingual and speak both French and English, and there are no tensions between anglophones and francophones? Sure, people in the francophone regions are typically bilingual, but once you travel away from those areas, almost no one speaks French. I've met more than a few anglophone New Brunswickers who blame francophones for their inability to get good jobs in the province. There's even an organization active in the province called the Anglo Society that is basically just an anti-francophone hate group.

Shame on this writer for not doing even a little basic research that could have prevented her from writing this nonsense, and shame on the publisher for printing it.

The pictures were nice, at least.

[M · Rating 2 out of 5]

With Amazon as my witness, I've had this book on my to-read list for over two years. Hiking the Appalachian Trail, or at least portions of it, is a dream of mine, and this memoir of a city girl's trek through the Canadian portions of the trail, seemed to promise a vicarious experience that might satisfy me until I find the time and money to invest in the project.

Dykstra's writing style is terrible; she's whiny, self-indulgent, superficial in her characterisation of the people she meets, and trite in her descriptions of the landscape. If writing involves stringing one cliche phrase after another, then Dykstra is a skilled writer. Given her lack of hiking experience, one wonders why Raincoast Books offered her the contract to write this book. Still, her research is thorough, and the Essential Guide, at the back of the book, is well laid out, so I would recommend this book to anyone planning to hike the IAT. Rather than lessening her credibility, Dykstra's mistakes suggest (to me, at least) that this hike would be difficult, but not impossible. She learned. Anyone following in her footsteps can learn from her. If I'm hanging onto this book, it's for the information it contains. The photography is also beautiful.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't love the way this book is organized or the writing style but I do like the photos, the honesty of it and learning how un-finished the IAT is. I love the story of the day in Quebec where the author hikes along a really skinny trail that is sheer on one side - it's completely terrifying and there is only space for one person and she wonders what would happen if hikers from different directions needed to pass. She meets some people the next day and she asks the woman what she thought about the really scary part and the woman asks which part she means. Funny. I really love Gaspe - that's why I read this.

[beyondthepale70 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is that even if you are a manolo's and la perla girl anyone can successfully backpack and hike...