My first trip abroad was every parent’s nightmare: in August of 2025, I set out to hike the Grande Randonée 5 (GR5) trail through the French Alps. For four hundred miles, from Nice, France, to Geneva Switzerland, I followed a series of red-and-white blazes through rolling countryside and jutting peaks straight from Tolkien’s Middle Earth. The GR5 passes medieval villages, national parks, and sizeable cities; it follows ancient salt trading routes, bustling roads built for modern car traffic, and ground trampled flat by cattle seeking new pastures over hundreds of springs. Napoleon’s army built some of it. There’s no consensus on Hannibal’s famous route through the Alps, but at every pass, I wondered if was following in the footsteps of elephants.
In May, I told my parents of my plan and was met with a, That’s nice, honey. Then, after reality set in that summer, with my plane ticket booked and my gear strewn across the living room floor, they peppered me (and ChatGPT) with questions. Where would I find food? How would I shower? Where would I go if I fell ill, or worse, twisted an ankle in the mountains? With the blithe confidence of a college student new to the world, I told them I’d figure it out.
Miraculously, I did. The GR5 was well-marked and largely obstacle-free. When a hailstorm caught me by surprise, I took shelter in a nearby refuge. When I ran out of water, I knocked on doors. That I, a lone person of average athletic ability, could embark from downtown Nice on a month-long walk, points to an infrastructural system that is nothing short of astounding.
A trail is a dirt path with delusions of grandeur. Very little separates the most storied among them from a trampled backyard track, so it’s easy to forget that trails like the GR5 are a herculean effort—years of building, marking, and standardizing a single, unlikely path that traverses a continent. Across the Atlantic, the 2,600 mile-long Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada took over 70 years to complete. Even more astounding is the fact that, in the world of trails, continent-crossing is a mundane feat. France alone boasts 37,000 miles of GR trail system—and this pales in comparison to the 164,000 miles, over six times the Earth’s circumference, managed by the U.S. Forest Service.
My parents were right to worry, but although I was a solo hiker, I was far from alone. At their most basic, trails are modes of transportation, and transportation is connection. Thousands of outdoors associations worldwide maintain the trails, renew the blazes, and staff the waystations that make these hikes possible. Millions of hikers set off to walk through the wilderness each year, united by a respect for the outdoors and the roads that take us through them. I owe each mile trekked on the GR5 to the passage of previous walkers and the countless hands that built the humble path upon which I walked: the hiking trail.
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Art by Lara Schaberg
