Walk A Walk to Wachusett, Concord to the summit
Thoreau looked at a blue mountain on the horizon for years before he went to stand on it. Your everyday steps follow him from Concord to the summit, and his words unlock along the way.
- 30 miles
- 7 stops
- Henry David Thoreau, 1843
Thirty miles to a view
For years Thoreau watched a blue mountain sit on the western horizon and did nothing about it. Then, one July morning in 1842, he and a friend picked up stout staves and walked at it until they were standing on top. Thirty miles, two days, and the discovery that a view is not a place until you have been to it.
In July 1842 Henry David Thoreau and his friend Richard Fuller picked up stout staves and walked west out of Concord, Massachusetts, through Acton, Stow, Lancaster and Stillwater. They stopped for raspberries on the way, and climbed Mount Wachusett. It was thirty miles in two days, to a mountain he had only ever seen as a colour.
Thoreau wrote it up the next year, before Walden, and it is where he first tries out the idea that runs through everything he wrote: that a place means more when you have walked to it yourself. It is the shortest journey in the library, a good first walk, and one you could finish in a week without changing anything about your day.
- Distance
- 30 miles (48 km)
- Stops
- 7, each with its own passage and plate
- Map
- The real world, on Apple Maps
- Text
- Henry David Thoreau; Project Gutenberg ebook #9846
Where it starts
Summer and winter our eyes had rested on the dim outline of the mountains in our horizon, to which distance and indistinctness lent a grandeur not their own, so that they served equally to interpret all the allusions of poets and travellers; whether with Homer, on a spring morning, we sat down on the many-peaked Olympus, or, with Virgil and his compeers, roamed the Etrurian and Thessalian hills, or with Humboldt measured the more modern Andes and Teneriffe.
A Walk to Wachusett · Henry David Thoreau
This is the passage Bematist gives you the moment you set out. The other 6 wait at the places they happened, and the only way to read them is to walk there.
How long would Wachusett take you?
Thoreau took two days. At true scale on everyday walks it's about a week or two, the one journey in the library that barely needs a pace at all.
A rough guide, at about 0.75 m a step. In the app the pace comes from your own 30-day average in Apple Health, and stays fixed for the whole journey.
On the way
The words, at the places
7 passages, each waiting where it happened. You can see how far away the next one is, but not what it says.
Walk it with friends
Send a link and walk the same road together, each of you on your own streets, wherever you live.
No streak to lose
Steps come straight from Apple Health. A quiet day is just a short one, and your place on the road only moves forward.
More roads like this one
See the whole library, with a new book every month, chosen by walkers' vote.
Set out for the summit.
30 miles of A Walk to Wachusett, on the walks you already take.
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