Though fixed in the public imagination, the world-famous footpath, which stretches from Georgia to Maine, has been stretched, shrunk, rerouted and redesigned since it was declared complete in 1937.
As America has transformed, so, too, has the A.T. — changes that have inspired resistance, ridicule and relief. Originally 2,050 miles, it is now almost 2,200 miles. And it continues to get longer.
By many historians’ estimate, less than half of the trail remains where it was originally laid.
The southern terminus in Georgia was moved from one mountaintop to another, 37 miles away.
More than 300 miles of trail in Virginia was discarded.
A ribbon of the path along a suburban highway near Washington was abandoned for steep wilderness terrain resembling a roller coaster.
More than half of the A.T. in Maine was rerouted.
“I’m going to guess there have been 1,500 to 2,000 modifications to the trail’s route, and most of them are so small that you wouldn’t be able to really see it on a screen,” said Mills Kelly, a professor at George Mason University who studies the A.T. The author of “Virginia’s Lost Appalachian Trail,” Kelly also hosts a podcast called “The Green Tunnel,” a reference to the trail’s heavy tree cover.
Those adjustments — crisscrossing 14 states, eight national forests and the ancestral lands of 22 Native American tribes, most of them forcibly removed by the government in the 1800s — have left cartographers at the Park Service struggling to keep up. Past iterations are often forgotten, their blueprints scattered among more than 30 local trail clubs, stored in plastic tubs in the basement of a former club president, glued to vellum at one club’s office in Vienna, Va., and in a new archive at George Mason University.
The Washington Post tracked down some of the biggest changes to the A.T. over the past 86 years, charting how it has been reimagined for 3 million annual visitors and the tens of thousands who have committed months to hiking its entirety.