The moss that was minded in 2025 (Part II)
In which we revisit the Top 3 stories of the year!
This is a continuation of yesterday’s newsletter, in which I began breaking down the 10 most widely-read stories of 2025. I ran into the size limit for Substack emails. SO, here are the really big ones—the Top 3 Mind The Moss offerings from the year 2025:
#3: How to walk across a National Park
Getting to enjoy a National Park by strolling from place to place and peeling off of the trails for grub, grog, and rest is one of those fantasies that’s near-impossible to realize in most places—because, like America itself, most NPS sites are designed for cars first and foremost. But Acadia, the only National Park in New England, is an exception. The park’s labyrinthine trail network connects landmarks such as Jordan Pond and Cadillac Mountain to the neighboring towns! This, combined with the free shuttles that run in Acadia in summer and early fall, makes it possible to not just explore the park without a car, but to literally walk from one end of the park to the other. And while I originally reported and wrote about this for The Boston Globe, that feature story (included in the special Wild Issue from the Ideas team) was a partial re-telling of my cross-park hike. So…I laid it out in more detail for you all, and I added some How To seasoning.
#2: Long walk home
For those of you seeing the above image for the first time, that’s me during the spring of 2013—working as a seasonal caretaker at Zealand Falls Hut in the White Mountains and setting off for the long 8-mile walk from the hut to Route 302. Twice a week, I had to hike down to the valley and then hike back to the hut with fresh food supplies. This felt like a sole-crushing ordeal at first, but with time, it turned into one of my favorite rituals. It brought me back to the 1990s, when walking to school or around your town or city was fairly commonplace for a lot of kids. And it made me think about what we stand to lose, if we’re too burdened by work and plagued by car-centric planning to experience the cathartic power of a long walk home. Evidently, a lot of you have felt that power at some point. Because since this particular Mind The Moss story was first published in April, and it’s hovered near the top of the most widely-read stories in the newsletter’s history. This was the greatest surprise for me. It was a more personal and contemplative story, with no obvious outlet for hiking or traveling. I guess it worked!
But there was another story—published rather recently—that snagged the top spot…
#1: Did Mark Zuckerberg just buy a mountain in Maine?
In a way, I find it fitting that this story—in which the purchase of a beloved mountain near Moosehead Lake is linked to Mark Zuckerberg—caught more eyeballs than any other in 2025. We are living through a scourge of insatiable greed from the wealthiest people in the world, and the vast majority of us are paying for it, through the loss of public resources and safety net programs, and in cases like this, the seizure of lands that we’ve enjoyed recreationally. Whether the person behind the LLC that purchased Burnt Jacket Mountain and fenced off its hiking trails was actually Mark Zuckerberg is kind of beside the point. This kind of thing happens often enough these days that it’s wholly believable that Zuck yanked the mountain away from locals. But it could have just as easily been Larry Ellison—who’s hard at work acquiring more media companies and reshaping them in his own reactionary image. Or Elon Musk, whose net worth is about to surpass $1 trillion. As I mentioned the other day, public access to the great outdoors is intrinsically political, and we overlook this to our own detriment. Because once a place like Burnt Jacket Mountain is suddenly lost , it’s often lost for a long time.
That said, if there’s one thing that I’ve learned about Mainers, it was perfectly stated by Steve Yocom, a photographer interviewed by the New York Times for this story.
“The people at Moosehead will hardly trust somebody if they come to town doing good,” Yocom said. “But if you come to town and take something from them right off the bat? Good luck.”
Thank you all SO much for another full year of reporting and writing Mind The Moss! I can’t believe the path has brought us this far, beyond the Summer 2021 launch of the newsletter, when many of us were still getting our first COVID-19 vaccines. What a ride.
Sincerely,
Miles