Introduction: At over 2,000 miles long, the Appalachian Trail (AT) is the world’s longest hiking-only trail. Every year, thousands of people attempt to hike the entire length of the trail (called thru hiking), trekking through and dwelling in the woods for up to 7 months. The objective of this research was to explore how thru hikers perceived and experienced the autonomous (wild) animals that dwell along and around the trail.
Methodology: The Trek (2017) is a long-distance hiking dedicated website which features a thriving community of bloggers, who write and post narratives about their experiences on the trail. A total of 1,691 blog posts, written and uploaded to The Trek during the years 2015 and 2016, by 166 hiker-bloggers, were reviewed to find references to encounters that hikers had with wildlife on the trail. Blog posts naturally lent themselves to a narrative research approach. Once the collection of narratives that identified hiker experiences of wildlife had been assembled, they were thematically coded, using intuitive analysis to identify commonalities between people’s experiences.
Main Results: A notable theme that emerged from hiker accounts was that they frequently heard animals without seeing them, in part due to the density of the woods that they travelled through, and in part because much of the wildlife along the trail was active during the night. This means that some animals were perceived and experienced by hikers principally through the sounds that they made, a unique way of coming to “know” animals that could inspire feelings of awe, joy, surprise, confusion or even intense fear.
Principle Conclusions and Implications for the Field: Hearing animals on the AT was a way of recognising and attending intimately to their Otherness. Hiker narratives provided a relational epistemology of sound, which provided another way of getting to know the nonhumans on the trail, and was the main way of getting to know certain species, such as birds and insects. Future research should focus on the importance of sound, particularly vocalisations, in looking at how humans come to relate to nonhuman species, and vice versa.