The Trail Sparknotes

Life and death, happiness and sadness, loneliness and company, frustration and understanding, guilt and content. All of these are emotions that you will experience as you walk in Toby’s footsteps through The Trail, written by Meika Hashimoto. In the story, the main characters are Toby, Lucas, Denver, Sean, and Moose. The main setting is a portion of the Appalachian Trail, along with many shelters throughout that section of the Appalachian Trail. In the beginning of the story, it introduces Toby, the protagonist, and hints at his reasoning behind why he is hiking the Appalachian Trail in the first place. It also introduces Lucas, Toby’s best friend, and some of the ways that whatever happened between them effects Toby. The overall conflict, or problem in The Trail is Toby battling guilt and the emotional aspect all together, along with the physical obstacles he has to face. The solution to the problem is Toby becoming content with who he is, what has happened between

him and Lucas, and being proud of what he has accomplished and learned through the process of hiking a part of the Appalachian Trail.

At the end of the story, Toby goes through an event that is action packed, and the ending of that event is what leads the book into revealing the overall theme.
The book, The Trail, takes place on a portion of what is called the Appalachian Trail. From start to finish, the Appalachian Trail is roughly 2,200 miles in length, and starts in Springer Mountain, Georgia, and ends in Mount Katahdin, Maine. For Toby’s specific portion of the hike, he was hiking 400 miles from his grandma’s home in Norwich Vermont, to Mount Katahdin, which is one of the 4 trailheads. Throughout the Appalachian Trail, there are things called shelters, in which people that are hiking the trail can stay at. These shelters provide warmth, food, and company, which are all things that a majority of the hikers are craving. Not

to mention, it gets them out of harm's way when mother nature decides to throw them a curveball. There were numerous occasions where Toby found himself spending the night in shelters because he hadn’t taken care of his needs properly that day, and the shelters practically saved his life, which made them an important part of the setting. Speaking of mother nature, the weather was an extreme factor when it came to the setting. There were multiple scenarios where Toby found himself caught in a storm, and if he didn’t take the appropriate steps, death was a possibility. In the story, it exclaims, “Denver and Sean had saved me on that rain-drenched day when I had nearly given up. Without them, I would probably have quit the trail...The wind and hail are relentless. All the energy drains out of me. Once again, I am alone in a storm,” (Hashimoto 128 and 131). These are two examples of ways that the weather in the setting affected Toby in a negative way. Furthermore, the broad way to describe the setting is it was nature, and there are countless things that can happen in nature that will make everything completely change. For these reasons, the choice of setting in this book is extremely significant, and if the story were somewhere else, it just wouldn’t be the same.