WINTER TENTING, ROCK CLIMBING, hiking with dogs, off-trail travel—all these issues bear down on one central theme. That is the overall message toward which we believe the experience of outdoor recreationists for the past quarter century—maybe since the recreational enjoyment of backcountry began—has been tending, inexorably. It is the intended theme of this book. It is the theme of individual, personal, unshirkable responsibility on the part of all of us to see clearly what we’re doing, what our proper role is in the whole backcountry, what underlying backwoods ethic must govern what we call our recreation.
In the foregoing pages we’ve probably emphasized specific actions (or restraints) too much, at the expense of more general philosophical concepts. That’s just our limitation: We tend to be doers, not thinkers, happier tending a trail than meditating over it or scribbling about it. But we have tried to bring ourselves up and remind ourselves and you, our readers, not to memorize a set of rules, but rather strive to understand the impact of our ways and think how we can best protect the backwoods environment, that means so much to us.
Rules are not what we seek. They are inconsistent with the freedom of the hills anyway, and that spirit of freedom is an important part of the mountain experience.
What we should and must seek, if we are to pass along to the next generation the privileges and pleasures we’ve enjoyed, are the demands that inevitably accompany freedom: to respect the place where we are, to try to understand its processes, to think about the effect of our presence and to act responsibly to minimize that effect, and to preserve and protect the mountain world.
Those demands suggest a code of conduct that implies something beyond thinking about specific actions, something beyond even an understanding of the ecosystem that we are visiting in the backcountry. It implies a sense of values, a deeply rooted belief that we have an obligation to respect and honor this land.
Where practice moves to values, that is where etiquette moves to ethics. In raising these environmental concerns for hikers and campers, that is our ultimate goal: backwoods ethics.