MOUNTAIN LINES is Jonathan Arlan's nonfiction debut about his solo, month-long, 400-mile walk from Lake Geneva to Nice — in the tradition of trekking classics like A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, The Snow Leopard, and Tracks

In the summer of 2015, Jonathan Arlan was nearing thirty. Restless, bored, and daydreaming of adventure, he comes across an image on the Internet one day: a map of the southeast corner of France with a single red line snaking south from Lake Geneva, through the jagged brown and white peaks of the Alps to the Mediterranean sea—a route more than four hundred miles long. He decides then and there to walk the whole trail solo.

Lacking any outdoor experience, completely ignorant of mountains, sorely out of shape, and fighting last-minute nerves and bad weather, things get off to a rocky start. But Arlan eventually finds his mountain legs—along with a staggering variety of aches and pains—as he tramps a narrow thread of grass, dirt, and rock between cloud-collared, ice-capped peaks in the High Alps, through ancient hamlets built into hillsides, across sheep-dotted mountain pastures, and over countless cols on his way to the sea. In time, this simple, repetitive act of walking for hours each day in the remote beauty of the mountains becomes as exhilarating as it is exhausting.

MOUNTAIN LINES is the stirring account of a month-long journey on foot through the French Alps and a passionate and intimate book laced with humor, wonder, and curiosity as well as a meditation on movement, solitude, adventure, and the magnetic power of the natural world.

Jonathan Arlan is a writer, editor, and inveterate walker. Born and raised on the Great Plains, he has lived in New Orleans, New York, Egypt, Japan, and Serbia and traveled in over thirty-five countries.

"No journey is too short or mundane if taken with an open and inquisitive spirit. The intimacy and candor of Arlan's narrated trek through the French Alps offer latter-day aspirational vagabonds something tangible: a gentle inspiration, a reminder that wandering, and wondering, can and should be an accessible miracle, easy to fall in love with and to pursue."—Anna Badkhen, author of Walking with Abel and The World Is a Carpet

“Jonathan Arlan paints an evocative picture of what it’s like to walk through Europe’s highest mountains—arduous days, stunning views, friendly people—and his decency and self-deprecation make him an engaging companion for the armchair traveler.” —Thomas Swick, author of The Joys of Travel: And Stories That Illuminate Them