“What’s the difference between a national forest and a national park?”
“Is this plant edible?”
“What kind of animal made this scat?”
These are only a handful of the questions Colby Brokvist received while sharing trail mix, swapping stories and splitting firewood as he thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail over the summer of 2000. Somewhere along the 2,000+ miles of protected land between the A.T.’s southern terminus at Springer Mountain, Georgia, and its northern terminus at Katahdin, Maine, a seed was planted…