The blog
“The principal motive of the wander-spirit is curiosity—the desire to know what is beyond the next turning of the woods” (Stephen Graham). I think of curiosity when remembering the walks of my boyhood. In those days my buddies and I followed few marked trails, and most of our hikes began with curiosity. “Is that a…
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Going tramping is at first an act of rebellion, writes Graham. “Only afterwards do you get free from rebelliousness as Nature sweetens your mind.” Graham says, “you leave your back door and make for the distant hills.” It’s the natural follow-up to walking in freedom. The walker/artist must rebel against the norm or expected. Take…
According to Graham, when you make walking an art, “you get into an air that is refreshing and free. You liberate yourself from the tacit assumptions of your everyday life.” I’m guessing it is not an accident that most artists are libertarians (and I’m not talking about politics). I mean artists tend to be free…
Stephen Graham called it “The Gentle Art of Tramping.” “It is a gentle art; know how to tramp and you know how to live.” I am intrigued by the idea of walking as art and the walker as an artist. When I view great works of art, be they paintings or symphonies or novels, I…
Years ago my wife visited her sister who lives in Vienna, Austria, and I got to tag along. It would be my only trip to Europe, and I learned something important. Europe is seen best on foot. That is, we traveled by plane, train, automobile, bus and riverboat, but the sites I remember most I…
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Not all mountain summits are above tree line. If your body can’t handle the elevation but you still want to reach a top with great views, here are some of my favorites: For a nice, short hike in the Land of Enchantment, try the Atalaya Mountain Trail, which starts near St. John’s College in Santa…
Walking in the mountains can turn hazardous—like the time I climbed New Mexico’s Wheeler Peak with three of my students. The hazardous part was caused by freezing fog, not something I expected in early September and a condition that made the footing slippery and the temperature bone-chilling (think of a cold shower using ice water).…
“The mountains are calling, and I must go,” wrote John Muir. How do mountains call us? Thoreau said it’s in the air: “There is something in the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires.” So what is that “something”? I suppose there are as many answers to the question as there are people who…
In his essay, “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau recommended walking in the American West. But it wasn’t so much the direction he was recommending but the condition of the region. “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild.” “I am leaving the city more and more and withdrawing into the wilderness,”…
Robert Moor (On Trails, 2016) once said that we not only make trails, but “trails make us.” If that’s true, perhaps we need to be more careful about the places we choose to walk. Wallace Stegner, a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, historian and cutting-edge American environmentalist said the same. In a1950 piece designed to influence…
I’m thinking about Ouray, Colorado. If I believed in reincarnation, I would say I must have once been a Ute Apache. That would explain the connection my spirit has with this former hunting ground of Chief Ouray and company. For me, it was love at second sight. I first came here with the family in…
Fall is my favorite season. Always has been. I love football games on cold Friday nights, pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, crisp autumn mornings. And I like the color, something one notices on fall walks. Last October Charlotte and I got to spend a couple of days in Lewisburg, West Virginia, a place where fall foliage…