Movie Review: A Walk in the Woods

Last weekend I went to see A Walk In The Woods, a movie about two people who should probably not have tried to hike the Appalachian Trail (AT) setting out to hike it.

The movie has an all-star cast that includes Robert Redford as Bill Bryson, Nick Nolte as Stephen Katz, and Emma Thompson as Catherine Bryson, Bill’s wife.

The movie is an adaptation of a 1998 book with the same name. It is about Bill Bryson, a travel writer, who late in life decides to hike the Appalachian Trail with an old friend, Stephen Katz. The two men set off on the journey and find some of the problems that had driven them apart long ago still exist. However, over the course of their adventure, they begin to work out some of their differences.

For me, the movie sparked an incredible urge to be out on a trail. The natures scenes, mixed in with the comedy that these two actors bring to the screen, made me want to drive to the nearest mountain. In fact, I went home and pulled up some of my unprocessed videos and pictures to keep myself from driving to Colorado (because it is where the nearest mountain is located, not because the AT is there, which it is not).

One issue I did have with the movie was that it glossed over some of the efforts of hiking. While it gave hints at how exhausted a couple of people not prepared for a hike could be, it did not discuss food, weight of equipment, and physical ailments such as blisters and sores. To me, they were not suffering as much as a couple of older and out of shape men should have been. However, I can write that off to limits on screen time and storytelling.

While I have not hiked the AT, it is one of those things I want to do when I find myself in a position that I can take 3 or 4 months off from life and just hit the 2,180 mile trail. However, I have hiked near parts of the AT in Pisgah National Forest and that was some of my favorite hiking.

So, for the movie, I would give it 4 out of 5 stars, possibly due to hiker’s bias in seeing the trail on the screen, but I also found myself laughing throughout the movie.

To close out this post, I’ll include a short clip of a red fox we saw in RMNP back in 2014. It eventually used us and some other hikers to help chase some food into its mouth, though I did not have a clear shot of the fox through the underbrush get that on video.