THE CLEAREST WAY INTO THE UNIVERSE IS THROUGH A FOREST WILDERNESS.
—John Muir
This is a how-to book, an instructional manual on how to hike and camp in wild country safely and in comfort. Much of the book concerns techniques and equipment—factual stuff leavened with a little bias and opinion, but down to earth and functional nonetheless. The scope, theoretically, is worldwide, though you won’t find much about tropical travel; my own experience has been mostly in the wild areas of North America and Western Europe, ranging from the hot deserts of the Southwest to the Arctic wastes of Greenland.
Over the years I have made several hikes lasting many months, the sort that refine your techniques and show you what equipment works. These include through-hikes of the Pacific Crest and Continental Divide Trails; 1,600 miles along the length of the Canadian Rockies; 1,000 miles south to north through Canada’s Yukon Territory; 1,300 miles through the mountains of Norway and Sweden; 1,250 miles from Land’s End to John o’Groat’s in Britain; 1,600 miles over the 517 summits of 3,000 feet in the Scottish Highlands; and the 800-mile Arizona Trail. These experiences, along with many shorter trips—more than twenty-five years of backpacking at least 20,000 miles—constitute my credentials for presuming to offer advice. Along the way I’ve made many mistakes; these are related for entertainment and with the hope that you can learn from them without having to experience them firsthand.
But my highest qualification is my enjoyment of backpacking, and the fact that, for me, it is a way of life, a reason for existing. I want to share that by pointing others in the same direction. The result is this book—an attempt to mesh the reasons for backpacking with the ways to do it.
Capturing the essence of backpacking in words—the joy of walking through the ever-changing, ever-constant natural world, the magic of waking to sunlight glinting on a mist-wreathed lake, the excitement of striding through a mountain storm—is difficult. At heart I suspect it is impossible to describe this experience to those not disposed to listen. How can one convey to a skeptic the liberating sense of living in the moment, free of thinking about tomorrow; the painful delight in the exquisite beauty of a fleeting cloud, a tiny flower in an ocean of rock, a butterfly’s wing; the awe engendered by a mountain vista stretching unbroken beyond the power of sight; the fragile moment of identity when you stare deeply into a wild animal’s eyes and just for a second connect? But then, it’s not for skeptics that this book was written. If you are interested in my thoughts on backpacking, you are already responsive to the real world outside our technological shells.
Rest stop, Sallie Keyes Lake, John Muir Wilderness, High Sierra.
Why backpack? Why forgo the comforts of home or hotel for a night under the stars or sheltered by a flimsy nylon sheet? Many people hike in the wilds but return to civilization at night. This is experiencing only part of what the wilderness has to offer; it’s like dipping your toe in the water instead of taking an invigorating swim. Only by living in the wilderness twenty-four hours a day, day after day, do you gain that indefinable feeling of rightness, of being with instead of against the earth, that gives the deepest contentment I have found.
I’m aware that this sounds mystical, but I make no apology. We are too prone to value only what can be defined in logical terms or assigned a cash value. Yet the natural, self-regulating earth cannot be quantified, calculated, and summed up—every attempt uncovers another mystery just beyond our grasp. And this pleases me. I’m content not to fully comprehend the joy I find in the wilderness; to try would be a fruitless task, like chasing the end of a rainbow; and the goal, if ever realized, would only disappoint.
The heart of backpacking lies in the concept of the journey itself, a true odyssey, a desire to explore a world beyond our everyday lives, and in doing so to explore ourselves. Not so long ago, all journeys were like this, because the known world extended little beyond one’s hometown. Now, with modern communications and mass transportation, most “journeys” consist of nothing more than the mechanized moving of bodies from one place to another, a process so sanitized, safe, controlled, and so insulated from its surroundings that it precludes any sense of freedom, adventure, or personal involvement. Only when I shoulder my pack and set out into the wilderness do I feel a journey is really beginning, even though I may have traveled halfway around the world to take that first step.
A journey requires a beginning and an end, though what it is really about lies between those two points. Many journeys are circles, starting and finishing at the same place; others are point-to-point, linear hikes that finish far from where they start; and still others are there-and-back-again routes where you retrace your outbound steps. All three are appealing, but I especially like circles, routes that take you through new country every day yet return you to your starting point. A circle emphasizes the primacy of the experience rather than the conclusion. Closing the circle finishes the journey, returning you to the same place, enriched by the wilderness you have hiked through.
Though being in the wilderness is what matters, and the real goal of any hike is to experience nature, a more specific purpose gives shape to a trip and provides an incentive to keep moving. Thus I always set a goal, even on day hikes—a summit, a lake, a distance to cover, a crag to visit, a vista to see. Once I’m under way, the overall goal is subordinated to the day-by-day, minute-by-minute events and impressions that are my reason for hiking.
Walking is the only way to really see a place, to really grasp what it’s like, to experience all its aspects. This is true even for cities but applies much, much more to mountains and deserts, forests and meadows. Seen from a car, a train, or even a “scenic viewpoint,” these are only pretty pictures, postcard images for the surface of the mind, quickly forgotten. By walking through a landscape, you enter into it, experience it with every one of your senses, learn how it works and why it’s as it is. You become, for a time, a part of it. And once you stay out overnight and entrust your sleeping self to its care, a deeper bond is forged and, fleetingly and at the edge of your mind, you begin to grasp that we are not apart from but part of the earth.
This process of exploring the relationship between the self and the natural world grows and expands as you become more experienced and confident in wilderness wandering. It does not, I suspect, have limits. Perhaps it reflects a need to return to or at least acknowledge our primordial roots, to recall the time, the vast time that covers most of human existence, when humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers.
I would not contemplate returning to such a state, even if it were possible. Civilization has good points as well as bad ones, but I do think we have gone too far toward a belief that we are superior to and separate from nature, that it exists for us to tame, control, and exploit. And in taming and controlling nature we tame and control ourselves, losing our freedom and the ability to live in and be part of the wilderness.
If backpacking has any validity apart from being an enriching personal experience (good enough in itself, of course), it lies in this. At a time when the balance of nature itself is threatened, backpackers in particular should understand that we have to change our ways, to acknowledge that our interests coincide with nature’s. By experiencing the wilderness directly, by being in touch with the land, we can learn how valuable—how essential—it is, and that we must try to preserve and restore our still-beautiful world.
But what do we mean by wilderness, a magic word, redolent of mountain and forest, untamed nature and wild beauty? As defined by the Wilderness Act of 1964, wilderness is “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” To be viable as a complete ecosystem, a wilderness needs to be large—huge, even—providing space for wildlife to survive and live free and for the landscape to be complete from valley bottom to mountaintop, from foothills to highest peaks. These vast, pristine areas are the prime places for backpacking, places of dreams and adventures. However, many areas backpackers hike are neither this size nor untouched. In Europe in particular, wilderness areas are small and, if defined in terms of never having been touched by human hand, virtually nonexistent. I think that wilderness is as much an idea, a concept, as a physical reality. If there is enough land to walk into, enough room to set up a camp and then walk on with that freedom that comes when you escape the constraints of modern living, then it is wilderness, in spirit if not by definition.
Early-season snow in the White Mountains, New Hampshire.
All wilderness areas need defending, from the vast expanse of Antarctica to the small pockets that still exist even in heavily industrialized countries. That there are places you can reach only on foot, requiring effort and commitment to visit, is vital. It will be a sad day when the last such spot succumbs to the paved road and the hollow stares of detached tourists.
Ironically, wilderness also needs defending from those who love it. Damaging practices and an increasing number of hikers are turning many popular areas into worn-out remnants. Wilderness travelers traditionally lived off the land for shelter as well as for food; they built lean-tos and tepees, cut boughs for mattresses and logs for tables and chairs. Today this is irresponsible—and often illegal—in most wilderness areas. There is too little wilderness left, and every scar diminishes what remains.
Even with modern equipment, backpackers have more impact on the land than dayhikers and therefore have more responsibilities. No-trace, low-impact camping must be the norm if the wilderness is to stay intact. This book emphasizes these techniques, because there are only two solutions to the problem of hikers’ damaging the wilderness: self-regulation and the practice of minimum-impact techniques by all, or bureaucratic regulation, which already is the norm in many parks worldwide. In some areas wilderness camping is allowed only on specified sites. In a few places in the Alps and elsewhere, wild camping is forbidden altogether, and people are required to use campgrounds or stay in mountain huts. Such restrictions are anathema to the spirit of freedom inherent in backpacking, but they will become common unless backpackers learn to respect the wilderness.