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The place attachment construct has been used by leisure researchers and practitioners to refine our understanding of certain leisure behaviors for over two decades. Despite the construct's importance to natural resource-based leisure, little empirical work has appeared in the leisure literature examining the construct's antecedent processes; that is, the processes that lead to recreationists'; attachment to settings. This study examined one antecedent, activity involvement, using covariance structure analysis. The authors examined a model suggesting that place attachment (i.e., place identity and place dependence) would be predicted by activity involvement (i.e., attraction, centrality, and self expression) among four groups of hikers along the Appalachian Trail (i.e., day hikers, overnight hikers, section hikers and through hikers). Using LISREL's multigroup procedure, results indicated that the place identity dimension of …