Great Hiking Trails of the World by Karen Berger

Great Hiking Trails of the World by Karen Berger is a coffee table reference book put out by Rizzoli. I’ve collected nine of these Rizzoli books now, and they’re all lovely — the kind of thing you keep on the coffee table not as decoration but because you actually flip through them.

This one is my favorite of the bunch.

Why American Hikers Are Spoiled (In the Best Way)

Part of what makes this book special is that it gets out of America — which says something, because America is almost absurdly blessed when it comes to trails.

I don’t think most Americans have any real idea how good we have it. Everyone knows the Appalachian Trail. But what about the Pacific Crest Trail? The Continental Divide Trail? The New England Trail, the Vermont Long Trail, the Pinhoti Trail, the Benton MacKaye Trail? I could keep going. The sheer volume of long-distance hiking infrastructure in this country is staggering — and because we have so much of it, we tend to take it for granted.

The wealth of America’s public lands is a gift that took generations of political will to build and protect and maintain. Most of us walk right past it.

The Rest of the World Has Caught Up

Here’s the thing, though: the rest of the world has been paying attention.

Some regions have been doing this for centuries and just needed to re-invest — Europe being the obvious example. Others, like Chile and Argentina, are now getting the funding and political momentum to build trail infrastructure at serious scale. And some places, like Australia, are dealing with the opposite problem: so much land that building and maintaining trails across it is its own enormous challenge.

Great Hiking Trails of the World covers all of it. This isn’t a greatest hits of American hiking with a few international bonus tracks tacked on. It’s a genuine global survey of what humans have built — and continue to maintain — to let you experience the world on foot, without a motor, without a car. As a human should experience a landscape.

What I Like About This Book

There’s a lot of places in this book I know I’ll never go. That doesn’t matter. That’s almost the point.

Flipping through it delivers that particular feeling — hard to name exactly — where every time you think you have a solid sense of how big and beautiful and wonderful the world is, you turn a page and realize you were underselling it. The world is bigger. The trails are longer. The landscapes are more extraordinary than whatever ceiling you had in your head.

Karen Berger is also just a genuinely excellent writer. She’s written a lot of hiking books and articles over the years, and it shows. The prose earns its place alongside the photography rather than just captioning it.

Who Is This Book For?

If you’re an active hiker researching your next big trip, this book will give you ideas you hadn’t considered and context for trails you may have already heard of.

But honestly, it might be better suited for the armchair traveler — someone who loves wild places and the idea of long trails even if the logistics of getting to them will never quite line up. It scratches that itch beautifully.

Highly recommended. And if you haven’t explored the Rizzoli outdoor collection yet, this is a great place to start.