Many people who have been following this blog may have noticed a sharp uptick in the amount of hikes that I’ve been logging and posting. Prior to 2015, I had a handful of hikes posted from some treasured favorites, but as of this past summer, it became a full-on blitz of new trails and explorations. So what prompted all these new postings? It all boils down to what’s become a ridiculously overused and oversaturated cliché of a quote by John Muir: “The mountains are calling and I must go.” I’ve actually seen it so much now that I can’t stand the sight of it. Yet the message behind it (which is completely lost on many people who display it) recently began to resonate in me much stronger in recent months than in previous years.
Some people describe paradise as a beach on a remote island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. For me, it’s the mountains surrounding Jackson Hole. When I first moved to the area, just being among them was euphoric. Any outing into higher elevations to explore more was just icing on the cake. At the time, wildlife was still my primary interest, so the absurdly easy access the area provides to virtually any animal I’d want to regularly photograph had me glued to the roads like many others here. Every spring came the inevitable “bear season,” where both grizzly and black bears would scour terrain near roads waiting for the snow to melt before heading deeper into the wilderness. It’s an easy addiction to get hooked to; kings of the food chain gracefully lumbering along the roads, often with adorably playful cubs, paying no mind to the herds of people that have gathered to watch them exhibit wild behavior in plain sight.
Then the tourists show up, earlier and earlier every year. I’m not against visitors getting to see such a remarkable sight, but as bear sightings increased, park rangers became overwhelmed and simply couldn’t be at all of them. Too often I witnessed, to be blunt, idiotic behavior around wild grizzly bears: a child calling a grizzly sow only dozens of feet away like it was a puppy (the mother standing next to him didn’t seem to mind); swarms of people crowding around a bear leaving it stressed and nervous with few options for escape, essentially negating the energy it was consuming; the infamous selfies with bears, of course, and many other examples. It began to (finally) dawn on me that I didn’t move to a national park to watch that kind of stupidity.
Early in one warm July, I was in the Willow Flats area of Grand Teton National Park with a few other photographers patiently waiting for a glimpse of a grizzly bear. The sun was shining bright and it was nearing the middle of the day. I realized even if the bear came out, I wouldn’t have any really fantastic shots of her. As I was thinking about this I was staring at the Teton Mountains, noticing the snow had melted a little higher than halfway up the mountains. Then it hit me. I thought, “What am I doing here? Summer’s almost halfway over and all I’ve done is just sat in my car.” I simply wanted to be in the mountains.
I had a similar revelation several years earlier while living in Phoenix. After parking at a gym on my way home from work, I looked out the window of my car and saw an almost surreal sunset seeming to emanate from Camelback Mountain only a couple of miles away. As I stared at the clouds displaying all shades of glowing pastel colors, I looked back at the bland and boring gym and thought, “Why the hell did I just park at a gym when I could be hiking a mountain under a sunset like that?” I haven’t been inside a gym since.
At the heart of it, both stories sum up my desire to not only post hikes, but also experience them. Hiking a trail, whether a few miles or a few days or more, isn’t just exercise to me. It keeps me feeling alive. I breath easier outside. My emotions are amplified in the backcountry. The danger of the outdoors is what triggers feelings of being alive, of actually living life. When your next step is completely uncertain due to an unpredictable amount of consequences of sharing the land with other beings and species, all of your senses are heightened. The emotions that are most natural to you begin to return. This is what experiencing the backcountry is all about. While most government agencies are converting bears, wolves, elk, moose, and all other animals to statistics and figures, people who understand their role in nature cringe at the thought of turning so many wild animals into token species and arbitrary quota. In fact, all wild places should have flourishing wildlife, not for the sake of management goals or even ecotourism objectives, but for our own good. They should be there so we can remember what it means to be a human on Earth.
I’ve repeated many trails both here in Jackson Hole and in Arizona and I’ve never had the same experience twice. I experience the opposite spending time indoors. I find myself falling into an almost predictable behavior when I spend too much time inside. Days become meaningless and I try to be more productive on the computer to compensate, but the effort is entirely futile. Similarly, I began to have the same futile and repetitive feelings waiting in my car for bears or photographing the same roadside attraction sitting at the same place behind a man-made concrete barrier, even if it was a different time of day. As I’ve finally taught myself, there’s more to the natural world than the roadside pullouts.
So, then why do I bother posting so many hikes instead of just enjoying the experience for myself? It’s my hope that at least a few people reading these posts will get inspired to walk beyond the concrete world and immerse themselves into their natural world. As I often reiterate, humans are still animals, and animals need time in nature. Lots of it. It’s my hope that more people will begin seeing for themselves just how rewarding disconnecting from the developed world can actually be. If someone’s found that inspiration through one of my blog posts, then it’s all worth it.
If what I’ve written hasn’t convinced you, then I would recommend backpacking in a nearby wilderness for at least three nights. Your life will never be the same. If what I’ve written has convinced you, then I would recommend backpacking in a nearby wilderness for at least three nights. Your life will never be the same.