Mountain Hiking

Why Hike?

Many people will agree that the fall colors are beautiful, that waterfalls splashing down walls of rock, moss, and fern are delightful, and that wide views of valley after valley from a ridge or mountain top are breathtaking.  They so enjoy a scenic drive, but why get out and walk?  Why hike? 

Most of us walk a few miles every day, but that's to and from the refrigerator, the bathroom, from desk to filing cabinet, and down supermarket aisles.  Others walk more than that on the job, but walking jobs aren't usually held in high esteem.  We think the good jobs are the ones that let us sit behind a big desk and tell others where to go.  Finally, there are those who walk or run for exercise, but who walks for fun? 

It was a hundred years ago that John Burroughs, a naturalist, wrote, "We are not innocent and simple-hearted enough to enjoy a hike.  It is too slow, too cheap.  We crave the astonishing, the exciting, the faraway." 

We want a plummeting roller coaster or the upside-down cyclone at an amusement park, a hurtling space odyssey at a movie theater, or at least that scenic drive at 40 miles per mile.  We listen to body-thumping, brain-disintegrating music.  We watch TV shows that are laugh-a-minute (at least to the laugh track) and Internet downloads that arrive in just a blink.  Used to this high-speed entertainment, how can we possibly concentrate on a hike along a forest path? 

Some of our best-known artists, writers, and philosophers were hikers:  Shakespeare, Dickens, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, and John Stuart Mill.  When Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft eloped, they hiked the first hundred miles of their honeymoon (and then she wrote Frankenstein). 

We can see more when we hike.  We can hear more, and touch, smell, and taste.  We can hear the waterfall, as well as see it.  We can feel the mist and smell the damp earth.  The trees tower right over us.  We walk around them and feel their leaves and bark.  We have the time to stop and admire a slug crossing the path.  It's huge and moving like a slow-motion ice-skater.  At home it is just a pest and we sprinkle it with salt.  I notice a sassafras plant, dig the root, and break it.  The odor takes me back forty years, when I dug them for tea.

My Dad used to motorcycle, a compromise, of sorts, between foot travel and the automobile. He was not enclosed in a box of steel, isolated and separated from forests and mountains. But he was enclosed. He was enclosed in his helmet and gloves, in a box of noise and exhaust fumes, and in an attention-focusing box of acceleration, deceleration, brakes and clutch, bounce and jerk. I, on those same forest tracks, have the soft breeze in my hair, the smell of warm pine, and the slow, controlled movement of my own body.

On foot, we have the freedom to go north, south, east, or west, and to think our thoughts in peace.  Responsibilities to the material world?  They're not here.  We left them well behind and far away.  We can't do any of this on a bike, cycle, or from a car.  We have to hike.