(Coming Soon!)  

Opposite Trails

A Photographic Comparison of the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails

David Gafney

 

       Pacific Crest Trail, Goat Rocks Wilderness, Washington;  Appalachian Trail, One Hundred Mile Wilderness, Maine

      In a nation now heavily populated, but with a history and heritage deeply interwoven with the story of wilderness, there exists two footpaths that travel over mountains that are about as different from one another as two ranges of the same latitudes can possibly be. One is ancient and rounded and covered by an ocean of broadleaf vegetation. The other is youthful and jagged with peaks reaching high above the elevation where even evergreen forests can grow. Yet as different as the country is through which these two trails pass, both provide a common experience to those who choose to hike them. For each offers to civilized human beings an opportunity - not so much to escape from, as to return to – the "real world" of rock and water, plant and animal. Travel into the wild to experience that elemental world that was our beginning and which shall yet prove to be our salvation.                                                       

David Gafney                

 laConte laurel

Pacific Crest Trail, Laconte Canyon, Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park, California; Appalachian Trail, mountain laurel in Shenandoah National Park, Virginia

      Illustrated with 75 wilderness images, Opposite Trails provides the opportunity to experience a vicarious journey along America's two preeminent long-distance hiking trails. In three sections entitled Southern Discomfort, the Middle Kingdom and Northern Exposure, David Gafney’s wilderness images will carry you from south to north to experience something of the majesty and diversity of our country's priceless wilderness heritage. Together, the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails comprise a thin strand of dirt, root, rock and mud that extends for more than 4700 miles through an incredible array of landscapes and natural environments. Individually, they reflect all that so greatly differentiates East from West - from the wide-open expanses of volcanic rock and ridge of the North Cascades, to the claustrophobic blanketing of the land by dense and often impenetrable forests of the Great Smoky Mountains; from the searing deserts of cacti and brittlebush in southern California's Anza-Borrego country, to the moose-inhabited spruce bogs of Maine.  Opposite Trails captures, through stunning wilderness photography, the majestic wild diversity of the American landscape.

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Opposite Trails, a Photographic Comparison of the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails *

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Other Books by David Gafney (click on link to preview):

© David Gafney 2010