LACE up your boots, shoulder a pack, and head out on the North Country Trail this month from its origin in Crown Point, N.Y., and you could journey westward straight through the summer, past autumn’s falling leaves, and hike miles nonstop every day until snow blocks the path.
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Hiking the North Country Trail in northern Wisconsin. The trail, which is roughly halfway completed, goes from Lake Champlain to North Dakota.
Just ask Andrew Skurka, a legend of long-distance backpacking who did exactly that in 2004, spending six months walking west from New York thousands of miles to the trail’s terminus in North Dakota. “It just went on and on and on,” he said.
At 4,600 miles in length, the North Country National Scenic Trail bisects a large part of the continent, slicing through seven states — from glacier-scoured landscapes in Adirondack Park to prairies on the Great Plains — and snaking a distance twice as long as the Appalachian Trail.
“If you want to see a huge cross-section of the U.S.A., the North Country is it,” said Mr. Skurka, a 27-year-old who has hiked the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails, as well as a transcontinental trek he completed in 2005 that included the entire North Country Trail.
On course to someday become one of the longest footpaths on the planet, the North Country Trail is among eight original National Scenic Trails designated by Congress, including the Continental Divide Trail, the Ice Age Trail in Wisconsin, the Appalachian and Pacific Crest, and the Natchez Trace, among other routes. (Two new trails, the Arizona National Scenic Trail and the Pacific Northwest National Scenic Trail, received the designation this year.)
Although through hikers like Mr. Skurka are stars in the world of backpacking, the average North Country Trail trekker has little ambition to complete the entire trail. Laced through more than 100 state parks and state forests, 10 national forests and areas managed by the National Park Service, the trail brings millions of day hikers each year into some of the finest natural places that New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and North Dakota have to offer.
“You have just sublime scenery in places like Pictured Rocks, with lighthouses and cliffs over Lake Superior,” said Bruce Matthews, executive director of the North Country Trail Association in Lowell, Mich., a nonprofit that is a partner on the project with the National Park Service. “In the fall, the Finger Lakes wine country in New York, with the smell of the grape harvest and the sight of changing leaves, is hard to beat.”
Established in 1980, the North Country Trail is a work in progress, now about halfway completed. From its eastern trailhead at Crown Point and the shore of Lake Champlain in upstate New York, hikers follow more than 1,000 miles of newly cut trails as well as abandoned railroad beds and canal towpaths, detours through state parks and national forests, and miles of dirt roads called connector routes. This patchwork unites existing trail networks like the Finger Lakes Trail in New York, the Buckeye Trail in Ohio and the Superior Hiking Trail in Minnesota to create the cross-country route.
In total, about 2,600 miles of official hiking trail figure into the current North Country Trail route, with about 2,000 miles to go. “I hope to see it completed in my lifetime,” Mr. Matthews said.
My time on the trail has included trips during all four seasons and via different modes of transport — hiking boots, snowshoes and cross-country skis. A camping trip one year in October on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan sent my wife and me down fingers of the trail to explore waterfalls and overlooks, where yellow leaves packed a forest floor and trees were brown stalks in a crisp wind.
Another year, in September, four friends and I backpacked a North Country Trail adoptee, the 38-mile Kekekabic Trail in northern Minnesota. As a historic route cut in the 1930s, the Kekekabic was recently added to a reroute plan through the Arrowhead Region of Minnesota that, if Congress approves, will increase the trail by 400 miles.
“The reroute is pending legislation,” said Mr. Matthews, who heads a staff working for land easements, private-sector permissions and government approval of the ever-expanding trail. Other North Country Trail Association employees help manage the organization’s more than 3,000 volunteers, workers from New York to North Dakota who form chapters to trim trees, move rocks and put shovels to dirt each year in a slow march toward the trail’s completion.
Last summer, on a section of trail in the Brule River State Forest in Wisconsin, I met two volunteers, Peter and Lynne Nason, as they pulled on work gloves and gathered shrub trimmers from a bag. It was a Friday before noon, and the Nasons, a retired couple in their 60s, were preparing to clear out a couple miles of trail near their home in Solon Springs, Wis. “You guys got bug spray?” Ms. Nason asked, holding out a can.
I was hiking with a friend, exploring sections of the trail over a long weekend. The Nasons took out maps to recommend day hikes through county forests and state parks, noting a mile-long boardwalk recently built by trail association volunteers to traverse a bog.
We hiked off as the Nasons gathered gear and whistled for their dogs to follow, streaks of yellow fur bounding out of the bushes then up a hill and out of sight.
For the next day we would see not another soul on the trail, hiking the winding track, following blue blazes marked on trees, and brushing branches out of the way for mile upon quiet mile. Frogs burped and gurgled in tiny ponds. Wind brushed in treetops, a swishing like water of leaf against leaf.
An hour away by car — or 50 twisting miles on the trail — there would be crowds peering from guardrails on a trail spur through Copper Falls State Park, a popular park on a river gorge that we visited later in the weekend. Beyond, stretching east, the trail zigzagged into Michigan and the Porcupine Mountains, going on in the woods eventually past Great Lakes and big cities, heading east almost forever, three feet wide and thousands of miles long.
But in the Brule River State Forest the path is slight and little-traveled, a squiggle of dirt lost in thick trees. Pine boughs close in overhead. Branches reach to touch hikers as they pass by, the Nasons pruning and clipping somewhere in the woods beyond, working to keep the trail clear, trimming away the wild almost as fast as it can grow back.
