End to Ending: An Appalachian Trail Thru-Hiker's Story

End to Ending is both a raw first-hand account and a time-traveling reflection-a vivid memoir written by a young man who walked the entire Appalachian Trail in the 1990s, and now reissued with the clarity and insight of three decades gone by.

At nineteen, Tanner Critz heard whispers of a footpath stretching from Georgia to Maine. At twenty-one, he shouldered a heavy pack, said goodbye to his father at the trailhead, and stepped into a world where hunger replaced comfort, and solitude peeled away everything but the truth. The original manuscript-penned soon after his 1995 thru-hike-captures that experience with the voice of someone still buzzing from the wild. It tells of firelight conversations and snowbound missteps; of trail magic and tumult; of Vikings with trail names and minds cracking open in the mountains; of becoming one with the woods, not just walking through them.

Now, thirty years later, Critz returns to that trail-not with his boots, but with the reflective lens of age, fatherhood, and loss. This anniversary edition includes new chapters and commentary that deepen the meaning of the original journey. He watches his sons reach the ages he was then. He stands at the mirror of time, no longer the boy who hiked into the forest-but the man who walked out.

End to Ending is a book for anyone who has stepped into the unknown in search of themselves, or who wonders what becomes of the seeker when the trail ends. Poetic, gritty, and soul-searching, it reminds us that some journeys don't stop when the walking does-they echo for a lifetime.