This fourth edition arrives seriously late: Walker III appeared in 1984, and most of its gear gospel, even much practice gospel, is now old testament. You can blame the updatage delay on my stalwart powers of procrastination, but at last, here we go again. With a difference.
This time, two of us are at it.
I’m now pushing 80, don’t expect to live much beyond 120, and am already backpacking far less ambitiously. So I’m no longer in intimate touch with the most current gear. Obvious solution: co-opt a partner. The trick: find the right one. Perfection, it seemed to me, would be a longtime backpacker, a generation or two younger than me, conversant with gear but no mere gearhead; a proven writer, in tune with the book.
Chip Rawlins—who helped me with snowpack forecasts for my last book, River, and whom I’d met briefly in Wyoming—belongs, in his own words, to “the generation inspired by the first edition of this book. With frame-pack squeaking and agave staff in hand, I set out in the late 1960s to explore, and have made a life of it.” Along with walking for pure pleasure, he worked as a backcountry ranger. In the late ’80s and early ’90s he shifted to wilderness hydrology and acid rain monitoring; in the course of this work he logged over 4000 miles afoot and another 1600 on skis—and received the U.S. Forest Service National Primitive Skills Award. Since leaving the Forest Service in 1992 to write, he has mapped glaciers, studied mountain streams, and thereby kept his soul in condition. His ongoing love affair with walking has so far off-sprung two poetry books and two of prose.
When we talked about coauthorship, Chip seemed eager. And here we are, in tandem.
Every part of the book has passed our twofold scrutiny. Much of the old nontechnical stuff stood up okay, but I’ve nipped-and-tucked it all and refurbished the writing to my new satisfaction. Chip has backpacked many miles researching equipment and has rewritten nearly all the material on gear and some on technique. So the book speaks with two voices.
In a sense, so did earlier editions. Vanna Prince’s illustrations backed up the text beautifully. Vanna was keeping the faith for this edition, too, and had nearly all the drawings done when she went on a long-awaited European trip; but minutes after getting off the return flight she suffered a massive stroke. She died 10 days later. Chip and I feel a loss that is more than professional. Even in late life, Vanna sparked; illuminated; leavened. We miss her. But her work lives on in this edition—and will, in some form, in any future revisions.
Extending that thought: perhaps I should admit my fragrant hope that by handing the walking staff over to Chip—partially this time, totally later, if all goes well—I’ve given the book a chance to live on, post-Fletcher.
In this edition, for clarity, we’ll preface all my material, old and new, with the label COLIN and all Chip’s with the label
CHIP: Reading this edition might seem like listening in. But The Complete Walker IV is more than just a private talk between Colin and me. During the long and healthy life of this book, readers have written bales of letters ranging, as Colin observed, “from bloody silly to brilliant.” And the result is a deepening of our collected experience.
Not all the experience that went into Walker IV took place out-of-doors. During the rewrite, Colin and I also worked closely with trusted advisors, editors, and our all-important illustrator. By the time of her death, Vanna Prince had finished more than a hundred new drawings for this book. To get the details right, she made a pilgrimage to Wyoming, sketching away cross-legged as I stuffed packs, set up tents, and demonstrated stoves—and learned to appreciate her as an artist and, no less, a friend. Looking through her unfinished sketches can still catch me up. But six months after she died, the momentum of writing and publishing carried us to the point where we had no choice but to find an illustrator for new drawings and alterations to some of Vanna’s old ones. And Hannah Hinchman, who added drawings to my book Sky’s Witness—along with publishing two fine books of her own—has stepped in to complete the work.
In the years since the third edition appeared, some good things have worn out. In their stead, designers and makers have proposed new means of getting us over the next hill and out of the rain. We’ve tried them out, adopting the most useful and graceful solutions: as we walk, so we learn.
New alloys, resins, fibers, and manufacturing techniques have thoroughly changed the look and feel of outdoor gear. Simple things like the water bottle have elaborated into “hydration systems” with filters, pumps, bladders, tubes, and valves. And, for good or ill, the cottage-industry fringe that once produced outdoor equipment has become a $5-billion global industry.
To keep track of what’s what has become difficult in itself, let alone determining what works and what’s just passing fancy. For gear and technique are not separate matters; rather, one nudges the other, and is in turn nudged back. Yet even as we differ spiritedly on the particulars, in the long run (or long walk) some changes simply prove more embraceable than others. For instance, these words were laid down not with a fountain pen, nor yet with a typewriter, but on a computer. Or computers: Colin uses an IBM-clone and I use a Macintosh laptop.
Other practica: Given the lengthening combination of mailing address, phone number, and Internet Web site, the contact information formerly in the text has mostly migrated to appendixes. Be aware too that although frequent mention is made of trade names, we elected to leave out the ®, saving gallons of ink.
The tension between our inexhaustible monkey-fascination with the new and strange, and the immemorial truth of nature is not limited to the terrain of this book. When we shift our gaze to the backcountry itself it is clear that while some things (like gravity) have not changed, others have. Human population in 30 years has leaped and bounded. Permits, user fees, and restrictions in general have predictably increased, while favorite and once remote campsites are overrun. And as we seek out ever remoter and quieter spots, the horde seems poised to follow.
This is not to say that either Colin or I have run out of places to walk. But it is to confess that as writers we must adopt practices that are increasingly subtle and furtive. So as we focus minutely on gear and techniques, we will talk about places themselves in fuzzily general terms.
COLIN: In a sense, nothing we write about has changed since the first edition. Equipment and techniques are mere means to an end, and the things we’re writing toward are timeless. Cloud shadows still scud across sunlit peaks. Fleeing lizards still corner frantically around creosote bushes, flinging out little spurts of sand. Both Chip and I now have hilltops very near our present homes—different from and yet not different from the flat, grassy one mentioned on this page—that we can climb for exercise and short-term mulling and sanity; hills on whose summits we can sit for days, when the need arises, in space and beauty and silence, so that we can sweep the daily clutter aside and penetrate surfaces and consider what to do with the rest of our lives—or perhaps just so that we can, severally and a thousand miles apart, wrestle with the preface to a new edition of an old book.
Then there are the wider, ephemeral-constant, wilderness moments that hang long and vivid in memory. Years ago, beside a remote Alaskan river, I met my first moose and then, minutes later, still high from that enlightenment, had a caribou stroll up to within eight paces of where I stood upright in the open. The caribou eyeballed me with a long and strangely glassy stare; then it began to angle slowly away—and I saw the huge, suppurating wound on its haunch, probably bear-inflicted, that had no doubt glazed the poor beast’s mind. Snowshoeing for a week in the Sierra Nevada, I once sat at 10,000 feet, cradled in the silence and softness and harshness of a cupped basin, and watched its rocky slopes as the sun of yet another turning summer beat down from a cloudless sky and began to cleave and slough off into the past, in massive cake chunks, the rich white legacy of what we humans had regarded as an extraordinarily stormy winter. No, if you back off just a little ways, nothing much has changed since I wrote the first edition. Essentially, the old writ stands.
And here, once again, is the old and also, this time, new-new book.
Summer 2001