And this activity is not a rare, few-can-do-this pursuit. Almost anyone physically capable of walking can hike. But, as with everything else in life, people need to “choose it and do it” if they are to gain the benefits that come from this healthiest of outdoor pursuits.

This book is more devoted to the “why” of hiking than the “how.” This book shares how hiking affects “wellness.” lndividual chapters offer testimony from the lives of people who hike as a regular part of their daily lifestyle.

There are many books written about backpacking, an extended hike into the wilderness where the hiker stays out at least overnight and carries all their food, equipment, and sleeping gear. This book, however, focuses on dayhiking, walking through nature but not staying overnight.

Why write such a book on such a simple activity as hiking? Because hiking, in its simplicity, actually meets real human needs, consistently, honestly, and effectively. There are too many promised cures for all that ails us; too many hyped, expensive, sometimes even harmful remedies, practices, and quick fixes that don’t work or work so poorly as to not merit our using them. However, hiking is an inexpensive pastime that benefits the participant far more than anyone else.

Hiking brings you into the natural world. No passive video or television images here. Hiking involves walking through nature, climbing hills, stretching, examining rocks, flowers, trees, and waterways with nose, eyes, ears, and hands. Hiking demands that you get into the scenes you walk through, experience them directly by sweat, preparation, and discipline. Hiking is a “doing” thing.

More than 155 million adult Americans have yet to discover the universal and enjoyable benefits of hiking. This book is written especially for you, in the hopes of inspiring you to take up hiking, share this pleasurable pastime with your children and friends, and thereby gain the advantages that almost 45 million Americans have already discovered.

Those who are already hikers will find this book a great affirmation of the healthy lifestyle they have chosen, offering them perhaps even additional insights into why they so much like and benefit from their adventures on the trail.

Whether you are a veteran dayhiker or are brand-new to this activity-welcome to the ultimate natural prescription for health and wellness: hiking!"

Humankind in Nature

Rediscovering Our Lost Connection

“In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world-the great fresh,

unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of

civilization drops off and the wounds heal ere we are aware.”

-]ohn Muir “The Wilderness World of John Muir”

THE MOVE FROM THE LAND TO THE CITY

We once all walked the land-together. Humankind’s first “career” was that of a hunter-gatherer. People moved about the earth on foot as a normal function of daily living. Walking through nature-hiking-was a necessity. Hunting required fast and steady travel over long distances. The horse was not yet domesticated. Whole tribes and nations migrated on foot to new homelands or pasture lands, summer-to-winter and winter-to-summer. Hunting trails were the first highways; changes of climate drove our ancestors to trek to new feeding and hunting grounds out of desperate survival. People experienced an intimate relationship with the land, forests, grasslands, mountains, and rivers.

But our longtime involvement with the land began to change with the advent of the first villages and cities. Farming began replacing the hunt. The city began competing with nature as the source of people’s vital connection with life forces and the earth’s changing seasons.

Beginning with the first landings of colonists in Virginia and New England, America offered a wild, untamed land, “from sea to shining sea,” America the beautiful. Decade after decade, the frontier beckoned to the American spirit to come and enjoy new opportunities and the freedom of open spaces,

pure water, and clean air Whether it was the stunning beauty of Daniel Boone’s Kentucky, the spectacular Rocky Mountains of Colorado, or the fertile lands of Oregon and California, every age of American exploration and discovery was followed by the relentless push westward, with the taming

of those lands and eventual creation of the rural lifestyle-small villages and towns, farms, and ranches where people lived in dynamic relationship with the seasons and the surrounding countryside.

America was identified as a land where eastern forests pushed against and over Appalachian mountains and into southern swamps, eventually spilling out into the thousand-mile grass-and-prairie lands of the Midwest, which in turn flowed westward, meeting head-on the massive Rocky Mountains. From

there, America extended into the deserts of the Great Basin and southwestern mesas and plateaus, before finding relief in the cool Sierra Nevadas and Cascade Mountains of California and Oregon, with the final jewels of American geography being the Columbia and Willamette River valleys, the rain forests, mountains, and waterways of western Washington, and the sun-drenched Mediterranean-like playground of Southern California.

During the nineteenth century, more than 75 percent of Americans lived in rural communities, and the vast majority of people were farmers. Until the early twentieth century, the American Dream included the enriching experiences of our wilderness, our forests, rivers, prairies, mountains, and deserts. For generations, adults fondly remembered their childhood antics along countless riverways, ponds, and lakes, in secluded woods and great, endless sweeps of prairie stretching to infinite horizons.

But as with the migration of population in Europe from the villages to the cities, Americans, by the beginning of the twentieth century, began a mass migration to cities and their metropolitan areas.

After World War II, the population shift included a surge of people into the suburbs. During the years

following the mid-1960s, the dramatic shift of population into urban areas increased. In time, the country witnessed the well-documented decline of the inner cities, the growth in suburban sprawl, and the aggravated assault of pollution on our waterways, open spaces, and clean air: Billboards and

advertisement of every kind competed for space along roadways, on buildings, radio, television--wherever we could look, whenever we could hear.

While not restricted by the concentration of massed buildings of the inner City, suburban living is still exposed to most of the cultural, commercial, and media blitz found in city living. In the 1990s, 75 percent of all Americans live in metropolitan areas of over 100,000 population. The shift from rural living to the cities is nearly complete.

The Rat Race

Modern life has drawn humans into cities and surrounding metropolitan environments.

The culture of our society, often created in the city, is dispensed through the media, through movies, television programs, magazines, radio, and entertainment. This interaction between city, culture, and people greatly influences all of us, especially children and what they eventually come to believe, want,

aspire toward, act upon, and expect. Life for many individuals in our culture is their response or reaction to what culture suggests is “real” and worthy of pursuit.

Technology has been raised to the status of a god in modern society, with conventional wisdom believing that television, the telephone, the computer, radio, the compact disc player, movies, and almost every other product of technology is there to offer the chance for communication, information, and entertainment. Too often, all that this technology really does is offer an effective means for

“mass distraction”-endless possibilities for individuals to escape away from themselves, instead of into the sanctuary of themselves.

Young people often base their decision on whether to go to college upon their cultural bias toward what college is supposed to do for them, what they are going to get as a payoff-a job, a better life, more money, prestige. The clothes we wear, the hip phrases we use, how we treat

others, our decisions, who our friends are, if and when we marry, if and when we have children, and how we treat those children are all influenced by our interaction with culture.”

"And coloring, flavoring, highlighting all of what we call life is the economic value system of this culture, values that sum up many of our choices: Money is good, what sells has value, what does not sell does not; we are “worth” what we “have” financially and “of worth” if we help someone create a profit. Too often, the pursuit of what the media suggests is worthy of our energies becomes too dominant in of our life-how much we buy for Christmas, for Halloween, Valentines Day, this event and that event.

Geography is a subject in decline. People’s experience of nature often becomes what was seen in a movie or on television. Many young people would rather hear a rock concert than a rushing stream. America, in far too many places, no longer celebrates its natural heritage. The world of commerce is drawing us away from realizing the benefits of the natural world-not everywhere but, with 75 percent of us living in metropolitan sprawls, in far too many places.

Americans have coined a phrase that captures all the frustrations of modern life lived in response to the commercial drumbeats of the workplace and the demands of economic survival: the “rat race.” Daily, many people rise to face a workday doing jobs that are unfulfilling. We are keenly aware of our public job or career identity. Paid less for doing more, many people look forward to their private lives at home. But especially it is the weekends that Americans covet. The “weekend” has come to mean more than a mere reprieve from the daily routine of work. Like the garages joined to our homes, the weekend offers us the opportunity to tinker with our private lives, build something based more on our desires and interests than the demands and roles of the workplace.

But what happens on those weekends? How many Americans actually build lives that satisfy and free themselves from the pressures and stress that the workweek creates? If you would believe the many polls and surveys done during the past ten years concerning quality of life and the burdens of stressful living on today’s American, the results show that too many of us fail to show up at work Monday morning refreshed and revitalized.

The simple act of living in cities, surrounded by concrete, steel, asphalt, neon, noise, pollution, and social ills, crowded together, waiting in long lines for gas, groceries, a ticket to our entertainment escapes, etc., all weigh heavy upon our souls and psyches. In cities, there often are no horizons, just skylines. In cities, the stars shine at night, but are difficult to see through the smoke, haze, and light. Something vital to true human living is missing. Nature is in recess.

The Psyche of the City

I’ve lived in cities; I am no stranger to their ways . . .London, Dublin, San Francisco, San Diego, Vancouver, BC, Denver, Cincinnati. Besides these larger metropolitan areas, I’ve called home a handful of small towns, with populations less than 100,000. Cities to me are an interesting distraction offering a smorgasbord of culture and ethnic expressions of food, manners, dress, language, and looks. Superimposed upon this melting pot is the corporate/commercial culture of brand names, advertisements, jingles, catch phrases, television personalities, celebrities, and all the other hype of the marketplace that passes itself off as “America” and as life itself. Musical dance numbers sell everything from toilet paper to soft drinks. Neon lights, banners, billboards-all compete to inundate the city dweller with the messages of the consumer-driven culture to buy, buy, buy; look, look, look; spend, spend, spend.

I grew weary staying in the cities. While living in San Francisco I happened upon a Greek immigrant and his family. He invited me over for dinner and shared with me his frustrations of living in the city. “Oh, I can’t complain about the money. I earn five times more here than what I made in Athens. But no one seems to be able to slow down long enough to enjoy life, to talk with each other, spend an afternoon discovering who the person you’re with really is. So I’m returning to Greece. At least there, people know how to really live.”

Cities can do that: offer a narrow vision of what it means to be human. The Greek immigrant and his family’s complaints were well founded. Life in the city often pressures the dwellers therein to feel suffocated, driven, hurried, and lacking perspective.

Nature Can Transform Us

As a school boy I remember geography lessons as a celebration of the American landscape. My fellow classmates viewed with awe the natural collage of mountain, prairie, forest, and desert that teachers presented as our rich, American natural heritage. Graduation into adulthood meant more than just job, career, or making my way in the world. It also meant having the freedom to visit and partake of the natural wonders that America represented.

Some of us also remember from our youth experiences such as working on the land, visiting a relative in the country, knowing firsthand the outdoor life of farm or ranch-country living. But life changed, and we often have just memories of times when the land and nature spoke their quiet peace and sang the beautiful melodies of birds; of open fields, sweet with new mown hay and grass, the climb up a hill to survey the kingdom we felt was surely ours for the taking, at least all the way to the nearest creek or swimming hole. The challenge from that youth remains: how to rediscover the wonders of nature, the power of the land.

I have a friend who for years, as a teacher, has introduced high school and college-age young people to the joys of hiking. He tells me that often people who were totally uneasy about being in nature almost instantly were transformed the moment they stepped out on the trail, touched a tree, smelled a flower, and looked to distant horizons. During a hike they expressed their wonder out loud, forging ahead to see what lay over the hill, climbing down into canyon recesses to discover colorful rock formations, challenging themselves with demanding ascents up trails that took them to the heights of mountain overlooks. Instead of stodgy, blank-faced students in the classroom, kids magically transformed into curious, exploratory, challenged youth. Teenage girls who hours before worried about breaking a nail, not being cool, or getting dirty were now besting the boys in the quest for adventure along the trail.

This same teacher invited his students’ parents along, and witnessed a similar transformation in them. Once he took a lawyer, who hadn’t been outdoors for years, out on a long hike. As they reached the trail’s end and began their return, the lawyer quipped, “I don’t want to go back; I want to stay out here. I don’t care if I ever go back.”

While this is an extreme reaction to the joys of hiking and being back in nature, his assertion suggests a phenomenon that I also have witnessed with people I first introduced to hiking: they like the experience in an enthusiastic way that shakes them free from sedentary mentality they have lived with for years, and recaptures some vital memories inspired from youthful first encounters with nature."

"What explains this transformation?

Years ago I was given a dog as a gift. She was my first dog since my teen years, and I spent several weeks just getting her accustomed to me, my home, and her surroundings. During this time, she was somewhat withdrawn, tentative, and quiet. Finally, after securing a good leash, I took her outside for the first time, to walk the nearby golf course. The moment we stepped outside, I witnessed the birth of a “new dog.”

Instantly Skitts perked up, a flash of excitement swept over her as her face lightened up, her personality became quite animated, even joyful-she was in her true “element” again, out and about in nature, sniffing grasses, exploring new odors, discovering the world for the first time, it seemed. From that day, I knew that I had a true hiking companion, a real trail dog. And after climbing Colorado peaks over 14,000 feet high with Skitts, hiking hundreds of trails and thousands of miles with her, her enthusiasm has never waned. She is fully alive to her senses in nature, and on the trail. Home again.

I’ve thought about this experience, and about the transformation that took place with those new hikers I and my friend had taken into the natural world. I juxtapose the blank, empty, lost look of many city folk I’ve seen with the aliveness of kids, dogs, and adults on the trail, and a theory emerges.

We humans lived in and with nature following hunting paths, hiking woods, grasslands, and mountain trails. We evolved cosmologies, philosophies, religions, rituals, and traditions based on our interaction with nature. The natural world was our home; hiking was what we did to move about in that world while living out our daily life. just as my dog Skitts has been imprinted genetically to respond to her place in nature, have not we humans also been impacted down to the very cells and psyches of our so-called “human nature?” Being penned up in cities with their concrete, steel, glass, plastic, pollution; being bombarded by the media, crushed in a flowing sea of people-this is a very recent happening, measured in a few generations versus the many more years of our primitive, natural heritage.

It feels good to be out in the woods, on a mountain, crossing a desert, looking to distant horizons, thrashing about meadows and grasslands, because that’s where our first and true home was. We are meant to relate to nature, smell its intoxicating fragrances, challenge its mountain slopes, feel its solid, reassuring presence beneath our feet, look to far-reaching horizons that open our vision heavenward to the stars and the universe itself. In nature, we become centered in our true selves, grounded in its healing touch, enlivened by the sensual, physical expressions of color, sound, scent, and visual magnificence. The famous naturalist John Muir encouraged people in his day to exit the cities and regain themselves in the wilderness.

The city is artificial and contrived, however necessary it seems. Humans, I believe, are simply at home when hiking a trail. I never fail to feel this warm, inviting familiarity whenever I go into the natural world. Leaving work on Friday afternoon, we regain our freedom “out there.” Something heavy and false slips off our shoulders and we are reborn...homecoming!

Lifestyles Embracing Rather Than Divorced from Nature

In my more than twenty trips across America, visiting 42 states, I’ve come to recognize that there are two types of lifestyle in this country. In one, nature is seldom visited, and when it is visited, the event resembles a trip through a fast-food outlet. For example, 2.5 million people visit Zion National Park in a given year, but fewer than 2 percent ever took out backcountry permits or experienced the backcountry trail system. Hit and run. It’s true that many people don’t go into the backcountry for a variety of reasons such as disability, infirmity due to age, inclement weather, inconvenient illness during one’s vacation, etc. But to many people, being outside is alien, strange, unfamiliar, and, under certain circumstances, frightening.

Passive viewing of life, encouraged by television, computers, and the Internet, together with a culture devoted to escapism through entertainment and spectator sports, is a trend that has divorced millions from opportunities of experiencing themselves in a more challenging, vital way. Life is not a collection of sound-bites and images, jingles and one-liners. Those whose lifestyle is divorced from outdoor recreation must somehow add the benefits of hiking through nature. We may have been drawn into the city for economic survival, but we now must reclaim the land in order to regain our real selves. And all over America, people are taking such steps to embrace nature.

The other type of lifestyle is one of`close and fond interaction with the land and nature. These people hike, fish, boat, ski, bike, and camp. They know where they live, the physical lay of the land, the roads, rivers, ponds, woods, and high-country trails. They love the land, know it, appreciate it, enjoy it to the full. They can be alone in the wild; they can commune with nature’s solitude and feel inspired and comforted throughout the four seasons. Theirs is a love affair with the great outdoors, as necessary to be in as it is to eat. For them, human nature embraces the natural world and it is as integral to their lives as wet is to water. Even when such individuals are working and living in cities, they make time to frequent the outdoors, visiting both city parks and the nearby countryside. Long weekends are often spent miles away, in wilderness or along some beckoning trail.

For years the city folk of Southern California have escaped to the open, sunny desert resorts of the Palm Springs area. More and more of these visitors are searching for something beyond distraction and escape. They are taking to the local trails, both in the deserts and their canyons and in surrounding mountains. Hiking is becoming their lifeline toward finding a true balance in their lives. By hiking the desert-mountain trails that envelop this resort, visitors are releasing the stress, pressures, and overloaded minds they bring with them from city living.

How do I know this? In September 1992 I started a local hiking club. Within three years we had a thousand members enjoying the outdoors, hiking trails both in and out of state. Visitors from all corners of the earth joined us. As a hike leader, I was able to chat with people on my hikes and learn their feelings and observations about what hiking meant to them.

The general feeling was that hiking and being in nature was, for most, a spiritual experience. They felt cleansed, more alive, curious, optimistic, and fun-loving while out in the natural world, during a hike, than where they came from. Hiking was akin to taking a retreat, meditating, getting back to the basics. A feeling of balance returned to their lives. The beauty of nature, peaceful and scenic, touched their hearts and souls. Life seemed more harmonious to them, as they reconnected to their natural heritage. The exercise helped, too!

Hiking is one sure way that people can reconnect with themselves, feel their own bodies as they strain up a challenging mountain slope, experience their own physical and mental energies released and flowing by the exercise hiking affords them, and enjoy the scenic encounters with nature that inspire rejuvenation of heart and soul.

Making Nature More Accessible

In large cities the natural world, though perhaps visible, is often at a distance and has to compete with concrete; people often cannot see the natural World from the city centers. While city parks offer some relief, urban residents need to rethink their priorities for what constitutes a fulfilling lifestyle. Urban planning must come to include natural development and access. Parks, river walkways, and recreational areas must be a part of any city’s development plan. What is now successful in cities throughout the United States must be studied and applied in those cities lacking natural access and development.

Colorado is a model state for urban planning that addresses people’s need for visiting nature and hiking. In the Grand Valley area that includes the Colorado River, four slate parks, and the hub city of Grand junction, the county and city governments are building a Colorado Riverfront Trail that will hug the Colorado River while joining the state parks system together into one walking/hiking network. Imagine being able to leisurely walk for over 40 miles along the riverfront of one of America’s premier waterways, while gazing up at the spectacular Book Cliffs to the north, the Uncompahgre Plateau and the Colorado National Monument to the west, and the imposing Grand Mesa to the east. Here, city and nature merge, allowing people to always feel close to their natural heritage.

In Denver, the Highline Canal weaves its way through the city, a tree-lined waterway whose accompanying walking path allows the traveler to feel as if he or she is in the countryside, rather than in Colorado’s largest city. City parks are abundant; so are bike paths and walking trails. The most visited state park, Cherry Creek, lies within the metropolitan area. This sprawling lake and nature pre-

serve covers over 4,200 land and water acres, and joins the neighboring Chatfield State Park, with its 5,300 total acres--natural havens in the midst of Denver’s booming urban development. Visitors to both parks can swim, sail, hike, fish, and camp, as if they were miles away in the Rocky Mountains.

Responsive and responsible city and state planning made this a reality. Five more state parks within 30 miles of downtown Denver make this area one of the most nature-accessible in the entire United States. From the corporate boardrooms, seminar and convention meeting rooms, college classrooms, offices, and businesses of Denver, residents and visitors alike are offered beautiful, enriching recreational outlets within minutes. The city has embraced its natural heritage. If Denver can do it, why not every urban area in the country?"

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Natures peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees, the winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.”

-John Muir, “The Wilderness World of John Muir”

HIKING IS A HEALTHY LIFESTYLE FOR TEENS TO SENIORS

The act of walking through nature affects people in a holistic way: the complete human being receives some benefit from hiking. The body receives a vigorous workout; the will is challenged to reach beyond itself when the trail beckons up to steep mountain heights; the individual’s sense of responsibility grows with the successful planning and execution of any trip logistics; personal connections take place between hikers sharing their concerns, hopes, and challenges; and the spirit is refreshed by the beauty of unpretentious nature. Even though hiking is thought to be the simplest of activities, all the simplicities of a hike work together in a complex whole to create wellness for body, soul, heart, and spirit.

Hiking is an activity that helps produce “wellness” in the person practicing it. 0ur physical, mental, psychological, social, creative, and spiritual needs are, in part, fulfilled by a regular regimen of hiking. Ask hikers about the benefits of this “sport” or interest, and they have specific, enthusiastic, reasons why they hike, reasons that are connected to the fulfillment of real needs.

“I took up hiking when I was fifty-one,” said a friend of mine. “I never thought that it would impact my life like it has; I never was the ‘outdoor’ type. Show me a corporate office, and I was home. But I was also greatly out of shape…a real mess sometimes. Part of me was actually afraid of being alone in nature. Nature was an unfamiliar place. I couldn’t trust my body to take me where I wanted to go, certainly not to scramble over rocks and up mountainsides. But over the past several years I’ve become something of a mountain goat. My business friends from my pre-hiking days can hardly believe that I’ve hiked 11 miles and 8,000 feet straight up a mountain! Now I feel confident on the trail. I trust my conditioning, and I’ve learned that nature is a friendly place after all, especially if you’re prepared and if you like being out in it.”

Hiking greatly helps reduce stress and clarify thinking, assessment, and decision-making processes; it gives perspective on issues and concerns that a person needs to see clearly and from multiple points of view. Hiking can help you dramatically lose weight, firm and tone, build cardiovascular and aerobic conditioning, strengthen muscles, and energize your body at a very high level. Hiking guides a person into their own deeper self, into a healthier connection and friendship with who they really are; in the process, it helps free people from dependency and negative conditioning, feelings, or ideas, and instead reveals the great spiritual lessons and divine presence found throughout the natural world. Solitude becomes a friend; honest, quality sharing with a loved one can be greatly enhanced. Hiking provides a setting to enhance relationships, build intimacy, more closely bond with someone, facilitate communications with hiking companions, and meet and get to know new friends, while gaining a deeper sense of oneness with all humanity and all life on our planet.

Hikers gain self-confidence about their ability to move about successfully and safely in the natural world. Hiking allows the opportunity to teach, share with, and enjoy children in ways not possible in the more competitive society we live in. It offers a means of gaining a peaceful and quiet retreat from the onslaughts of media and modern culture while offering an endless flow of beautiful scenery, which inspires deep creative urgings and brings joy not commonly found anywhere else. Hiking, in some very special and private moments, provides the setting in which the deity of your own heartfelt personal experiences can reach out and touch your soul with a kind love and guidance that are reflected throughout all the glories of creation.

Hiking enlivens both body and soul, heart and mind, offering the best in the human experience to anyone willing to venture out along the trail, alone or with friends and family. For some, this lifelong adventure has already begun the day they took their first hike. For many more of us, the trail still beckons for the first time.