In the late summer of 1839, Thoreau and his older brother John made a two-week boat-and-hiking trip from Concord, Massachusetts, to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. After John's sudden death in 1842, Thoreau began to prepare this memorial account of their excursion. A tapestry of travel writing, essays, and lyrical poetry, Thoreau's book was far ahead of its time, but it can now be appreciated for its descriptions of natural phenomena, the rural landscape, and local characters intermixed with digressions on literature, philosophy, and the Native American and Puritan histories of New England.