Summoning the Mountains: Pilgrimage into Forty

by Amy Allen

Overview

Hoping to rekindle the spirit of freedom she once knew, a divorced, single mother sets aside family and society’s expectations to seek fulfillment by following a lifelong calling. On the eve of turning forty, Amy reaches for her personal goal of hiking the Appalachian Trail. Accepting the name of “Willow”, bestowed by her teenage sons, she settles them into new lives at their father’s house and departs on a 2000-mile walk.

Willow journals of walking through storms, injuries, hunger and doubt. Surprised when her sixteen-year old is suspended from school, Willow bends to this new development to find herself mothering on the trail, learning as much from her son as he does from his adventure. When her son returns to school, Willow must find her place within the hiker community and face her fears alone.

Amy transports the reader into the forest giving the armchair hiker a glimpse into a world of coyotes, butterflies, birds and bears,sharing her determination and frustration as she makes her way from Georgia to Maine on foot. This is a story about what it means to embrace challenge in our lives—a story about change.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940015289343
Publisher:	Saille Productions, a Wyatt MacKenzie Imprint
Publication date:	09/10/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	312
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Amy Allen holds a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from Appalachian State University (1987) designing her degree around her interest in Native American culture, combining Anthropology, Native American Studies and Social Work with an English minor. She went on to study at University of Oklahoma’s Field School of Ethnography, living and working with the Southern Cheyenne.

Amy has been a backpacker for over 28 years. She has built and lived in a debris hut and spent a winter living in a tipi. She was a NC Governor’s School graduate in Voice in 1983, and won the NC Federation of Women’s Clubs Literature Scholarship for her poetry at age 16. Amy has journaled her life experiences since age 12, her enthusiasm for life apparent in an eclectic resume that includes logging with a team of draft horses, baling Christmas trees, tapping maple trees, making rawhide for local drum-makers as well as more conventional work such as technical support, human resources and data analysis. She has brain-tanned buckskins, been a baker in inner city Philadelphia, and picked blueberries in western North Carolina. Amy was a founding member of a small family community wilderness program whose goal was to foster a holistic relationship between today’s families and the outdoor classroom. Her hobbies include organic gardening, yoga, sewing, canning and baking.

Amy lives in Western North Carolina with her husband and two grown sons. Amy continues long-distance hiking and has completed the Foothills Trail and parts of the Benton MacKaye Trail.