In 1930, while working as a guide in the national parks, he created Back Home Again, a moderately successful daily single-panel which included characters from Gainesville and North Georgia.

Trail was a younger "alter ego" of Dodd (Gurr 2006), likewise a pipe-smoking outdoorsman and conservationist but footloose and free to travel to adventure.

Dodd's challenge with this alter ego was to write an educational outdoors-themed continuity strip, in varied settings, about a good-guy conservationist who nevertheless remained credible as a man in his responses to exploiters and to underdogs, and to romance and to hardship.

At its peak in the 1960s, the strip enjoyed distribution to about 500 newspapers through North America Syndicate and spun off numerous publications about camping and wildlife.

On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Mark Trail in 1986, he told a reporter that he had quit Georgia Tech's architecture program because of failing grades in math and chemistry.