When we moved to Seattle nearly 30 years ago, I remember thinking that everyone in town was a hiker.My neighbors were hikers. I’d see them outside on a Saturday morning, loading daypacks and boots into their car (it was an old, rusting Subaru with a Sierra Club sticker on the bumper.) Television news anchors were hikers (they smiled brightly as they engaged in on-air happy-chat about the hikes they’d done the past weekend.) And when the newspaper I worked for sent me to our nation's capitol to photograph Washington's Senator Dan Evans, he talked excitedly about getting back to the Northwest for the summer. He had plans for a week-long backpack trip in the North Cascades.
I do, however, remember talking with one woman who was an outspoken, adamant Non-Hiker. A reporter for the newspaper’s Style section, she was more the type who’d be found shopping for make-up in Nordstrom than lusting over the latest ice axe at REI. She was also very funny. When I mentioned a hike that friends and I had done, she thrust her nose in the air and announced with faux-elitism: “I don’t put things on my back and go walking.”
Well, Leah and I have plans for a trip this fall to Nepal and the Himalayas. It’ll be a month-long trip, three weeks of which will be in country where, to get around, one must put things on one’s back and walk. This summer we’re preparing for our coming Nepal adventure by hiking-- hiking a LOT. Many of the trips we’re doing are in the Olympic Mountains, a short drive from our house. We call these our Home Mountains.
Yesterday we walked 9 miles on a rolling, up-and-down trail that took us through old-growth forest and along a wild river. We stopped to look at wildflowers, and I remembered words that Thoreau had written in his journal: “Nature is mythical and mystical always, and spends her whole genius on the least work.”
