JOHN MUIR ASSOCIATED wilderness with health and peak experiences: “One of the most beautiful and exhilarating storms I ever enjoyed in the Sierra occurred in December, 1874, when I happened to be exploring one of the tributary valleys of the Yuba River.” He climbed to the top of a one-hundred-foot-tall Douglas spruce to experience a wild windstorm. The “brushy tops” of the chosen tree, and the trees surrounding it, “were rocking and swirling in wild ecstasy.”
He had climbed many trees for his botanical studies, so he reached the top of this one easily. Then came the “exhilaration of motion.” The tops of the trees bent and swirled while Muir clung to the branches “like a bobo-link on a reed.” He kept his perch for hours. He frequently closed his eyes “to enjoy the music by itself, or to feast quietly on the delicious fragrance that was streaming past.” When the storm began to calm, he climbed down and walked through the woods. “The stormtones died away, and, turning toward the east, I beheld the countless hosts of the forests hushed and tranquil, towering above one another on the slopes of the hills like a devout audience. The setting sun filled them with amber light, and seemed to say, while they listened, ‘My peace I give unto you.’”1
In Muir’s world, the extreme animation of nature was contagious.
Health isn’t just the absence of illness or pain, it’s also physical, emotional, mental, intellectual, and spiritual fitness—in short, it’s about the joy of being alive. Why fitness? Stephen Kellert, the Yale professor who helped refine and popularize E. O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis, suggests that talking about fitness, in the broadest interpretation of that word, helps us move the discussion from pathology to potential.
Along this line, outdoor gyms make sense. The movements required for hiking, fishing, horseback riding, camping, and other outdoor activities strengthen the body, as do the lifting, reaching, and bending motions of gardening. Thus, we strengthen weak muscles and increase joint flexibility ranges, along with physical stamina, balance, and coordination. As the prior chapters described, nature-based exercise not only builds physical fitness but strengthens our senses, our intellectual capacity, and our mental health.
“I remember distinctly the moment that my approach to fitness was transformed,” writes Tina Vindum, a former Alpine skier, competitive mountain biker, and author of Outdoor Fitness, a book that recommends stepping out of the gym and into the outdoors.2 She had spent years of her life in gyms. “Over time, I had been growing increasingly frustrated with training in the static indoor environment,” she wrote. “My muscles had grown so used to the repetitive exercises of standard gym equipment, I had reached a plateau that was taking away from my performance. One day I found myself staring out the window in the middle of yet another boring indoor workout, gazing at the majestic Sierra Nevadas, feeling stifled and frustrated. . . . Leaves covered the ground, and the wind was crisp and cold. Like a kid stuck in a classroom, I pined for the freedom that lay outside my window. That day, I rebelled.” She headed outside and was soon running slalom on the more challenging, uneven terrain of the forest, doing strengthening exercises against tree trunks and boulders.
Like Vindum, Kelli Calabrese, a Texas-based trainer and coauthor of the book Feminine, Firm & Fit, writes about how outdoor terrain trumps indoor machines.3 “Machines are created to make it easier on you, but the ground forces you to adjust to whatever the elements have done to it,” she says. “Literally every section of a hill is different and will work your calves a little differently.”
We don’t need an exercise trainer to take us outside. But for some people, it helps. Then there’s the group approach. In the UK, Green Gyms, as developed by the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers, gets people out of energy-consuming indoor gyms and in contact with nature, using their muscles to improve local landscapes.4 The basic idea is that people can band together to organize their own nature gyms, meeting at local parks, gardens, and nature trails, where they can hike, garden, or do nature-reclamation work together. People can also do this on their own, of course. The bottom line: nature is full of gyms, if we look for them.
In addition to the benefits to physical and mental health, there’s the added spiritual value of green exercise. The theologian Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement, to look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; to be spiritual is to be constantly amazed.”
That quote comes to mind every time I talk with Brook Shinsky, who lives in Oakland, California, and works for The North Face, an outdoor gear and apparel company. Shinsky lists a remarkable variety of exercise methods that she pursues outdoors: pedaling (mountain and road), snowboarding, rock climbing, running, and wingsuit flying (for that, she dons a special suit that shapes her body into an airfoil, creating lift). The wingsuit, sometimes known as a birdman suit or squirrel or Batman suit, allows Shinsky and other wingsuit fliers hair-raising advantages over typical skydiving, including reduced descent rates, longer free falls, and increased maneuverability. I asked Shinsky, who is in her early thirties, if she ever became so focused on the act of jumping, gliding, and landing that she stopped noticing the natural world. To the contrary, she replied. “I was always intrigued by birds as a kid, and now I know how it feels to fly—I become a bird. I see the world as a bird does, and it is in this time that I am truly present and fully aware,” she said. As she described her experience, I came to a better understanding of the attraction of extreme outdoor sports, which are preferred by an increasing number of young people over more traditional outdoor sports, such as fishing and hunting. This is a complete immersion in nature, with the added attraction of risk. Some men and women, in pursuit of outdoor sports, plug their ears with iPod earbuds; they’re oblivious to the natural world—or, at least they obscure the experience of being there. But Shinsky clearly was seeking a different kind of communion.
A few years ago, I met Margot Page. She lives in a 160 -year-old clapboard farmhouse on a rise that overlooks a village and a valley. Her house is white with green trim and is seemingly held to the hill by the deep-rooted maple trees circling it. Page is one of a handful of women who have made a name for themselves in the culture of fly-fishing. She and other women fly-fishers, and some men, too, she admits, are extending—subtly, imaginatively—their relationship with nature. They pursue “a different kind of fishing,” she says. “They approach the water; they don’t fish right away. They watch and listen and stand back and then they try to integrate themselves into the context of this environment. That is how you work with fishing, that’s how you connect.” I came to think of this kind of angling as “deep fishing.”5
Page also described a different kind of fishing organization: Casting for Recovery, a nonprofit group that teaches fly-fishing to breast-cancer survivors. Though she has not had cancer, Page serves on the board of advisers. The idea of fishing as therapy is old; the creation of fishing therapy groups is relatively new. Most of the women who join Casting for Recovery, she explained, have never fly-fished. “When they return to that chemo room, to the hard time, they’ll have a place to return to, in their minds, and it might give them a moment of peace.” The doctors on Casting for Recovery’s advisory board believe that the benefits are both physiological and psychological. “The casting helps muscles that have been frozen, nerves that have been severed. Some women get frozen shoulders after they have mastectomies. The physiological motion of casting helps to loosen them up. The instructors have been trained to help adapt the casting motion to whatever circumstance the patient finds herself in,” Page explained. Beyond physical therapy, something else is at work here. Some of these women follow Page’s lead and pursue a deeper healing immersion in nature.
Page’s deep fishing concept is akin to Brook Shinsky’s approach to wingsuiting. We might call what Shinsky does “deep flying.” From her perch as an outreach employee for The North Face, Shinsky detects a change occurring among an increasing number of young people —the millennials, as the outdoor industry refers to them—who have tended to view the natural world as a stage for thrills: nature as a theme-park ride. “Many young people are realizing that these outdoor activities have more to offer than a simple adrenaline rush,” she told me. “They’re discovering the physical, psychological, and even spiritual benefits of exercising in nature, and are becoming more aware of their surroundings.”
In a sense, surfers led the way in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Their films showed this deeper awareness, and now Shinsky can point to young filmmakers who prefer other extreme outdoor sports, whose films now express the same aesthetic and reverence for nature’s gifts.
So “deep green exercise” may be the trend that comes after extreme sports, or at least makes them more interesting. One can imagine deep skiing, deep snowboarding, deep rock climbing. Conway Bowman, an ESPN fishing star, uses the term “ragged edge sports.” He and I have considered what the parameters or precepts of this new genre might be. Among them: sensory immersion in nature rather than spectatorism; doing outdoor sports in unusual ways and unexpected locales; doing more than one outdoor activity at the same time (fishing plus birding = bishing, or fishing plus wildlife photography = phishing); combining recreation with conservation (tagging sharks, counting mountain lions); eschewing the most expensive equipment, preferring handmade or restored equipment, and practicing minimalism; when fishing or hunting, killing to eat or not killing at all (some fly-fishers now use flies with no hooks, to feel just the thrill of the strike). And most of all, unplugging the iPod and opening one’s senses to the full experience.
We were born to walk. And run. And hike. We need to keep moving. Perhaps when we hike we do so by necessity, as we trace the invisible songlines of our genome.
One gratification that comes to some hikers —and perhaps especially to trail runners—is sometimes referred to as hiker’s high, which can be defined as runner’s high plus the sensory additives of being outdoors. Scott Dunlap took up trail running—runs in natural settings —in 2001, “to get off the work treadmill and see a bit more of the outdoors.” In his blog, Dunlap describes the high, which occurs around eight or nine miles into a run, as a “mystical feeling that you can run forever, without borders —psychological or physical.” His high, he says, “may be triggered by something as subtle as a sudden shift in temperature, or it may result from an epic moment such as traversing a razor’s-edge ridge at 13,000 feet as storm clouds bubble on the horizon.” Another hiker, Sage Ingham, of Rockville, Maryland, wrote on National Geographies online “Ask Adventure” feature: “It never fails that about three to four hours into a hike I get what I’ve come to call a ‘hiker’s high,’ when I’m suddenly seized with a fit of the giggles. What’s going on?” An explanation comes via research that shows that long-distance runners show an increase in the body’s own opioids, resulting in feelings of euphoria and happiness.6 In California, my nephew Kyle Louv is considered one of the best college runners. For years, beginning early in high school, Kyle practiced his running in the forests near his suburban home in Eureka. He is convinced the subtle and not-so-subtle influences (the occasional appearance of bears) of the terrain dramatically increased his speed, endurance, and euphoria. Perhaps he was tapping into his genetic past, the fight-or-flight response combined with the runner’s high in nature.
Some of our society’s hunger for drugs may be related to our yearning for this unified state of mind, body, and nature. Recreational drugs, or drugs used in a religious context, are present in nearly every society, including those of tribal peoples who live closer to nature. But the purpose and context is more often than not about transcendence, not escape. In Western society, drugs and alcohol are more likely to be used to blunt pain, to block the static and noise —the excess, often meaningless information that comes our way every day. By contrast, the high achieved through deep green exercise opens the senses; this high is about transcendence, about natural ecstasy. Australia’s noted nature philosopher Glenn Albrecht has come up with a name for this spontaneous euphoria, this feeling of oneness with the earth and its life forces: “eutierria” (eu = good, tierra = earth).
When I was in my early twenties and working for Project Concern, a medical charity, I spent a few weeks in Guatemala. I had more time than work, so I hiked often. I walked for miles along the shore of Lake Atitlán, the deepest lake in Central America. That same year, an earthquake killed more than twenty-six thousand people in Guatemala; it was so massive that it cracked the lakebed, opened a subsurface drain, and within the month dropped the water level two meters. Nature, like people, can fill us for a lifetime, or empty us in a millisecond. Later, near Antigua, a larger town in the Central Highlands, I hiked up Volcán de Agua, or “Volcano of Water,” known as Hunapú by the Cakchiquel Mayans. Beginning in tropical heat, I climbed the steep path up Hunapú into dense forest. By the time the mist began to close around me in the cloud forest, the temperature had plummeted and I was shivering. Unprepared for the extremes of the twelve-thousand-foot altitude, I reluctantly turned around and headed back down the volcano.
This is when I first experienced the hiking high. I had picked up a branch to use as a walking stick, and as I sped down the slick trail, at times jumping across deeply eroded fissures in the path, my strides became long and airy. The tragedies of the world, natural and man-made, disappeared. I felt as if I were flying through the clouds, and in those moments I wanted to—and felt I could—keep going forever, and leap across the world.
The only other time I have felt this particular euphoria was a few years later, after hiking up San Diego County’s Stonewall Peak, which from a distance resembles the mountain above Atitlán. On the way back down Stonewall, with my future wife, Kathy, ahead of me —our pace was growing dangerously quick—I realized in a flash of intense clarity that I was happy, and that if I could keep walking with Kathy, this hike never needed to end.