Hiking Trails Blogs

An old Latin saying — solvitur ambulando — means “it is solved by walking.” The phrase captures one of the immutable charms of hiking: it makes it easier for the brain to work things out.

I can’t count the number of times that vexing problems melted away as the miles accumulated. Right now my most maddening issue is the yawning chasm between all my skills and the people who should be paying me to make the best use of them. But every hike brings me a little closer to figuring it out.

Staring at a computer screen fuming over unanswered e-mails gets me nowhere because I’m standing too close to the problem. Ever have one of those front-row seats behind home plate at a baseball game where you’re so damn close to the backstop that the chain links block your view of the game? It’s like that. You have to back up till things come into focus.

Finding that distance is the key. Here’s how I’ve been trying to do it:

1) Overcome prejudices

I have to give my brain permission to say “today we’re coming home with at least one practical insight from this hike.” Otherwise I’m trapped by my intuition that walking in nature stands on its own merit and needs no justification. Time spent hiking is time not spent doing work that pays the mortgage. Until I’m independently wealthy or days start having more than 24 hours in them, my hours on the trail must yield practical dividends. I know that’s annoying. Sorry.

2) Get into a mindful state

I blogged the other day about tuning everything out and focusing my senses on everything happening around me. This is the most counterintuitive part of finding mental clarity on the trail: First you have to ignore the problem you came to solve (of course this works only with vexing challenges that have no self-evident solution. If somebody’s bleeding, you apply pressure to the wound).

I start out by just emptying my brain and absorbing everything around me — but only for about 30 seconds; otherwise I risk crashing into something. Then I start focusing only on the trail ahead and pointedly ignoring the impulse to think about anything but walking for the next five minutes or so.

3) Let the good thoughts flow in

Once I’m all immersed in the experience, then I start allowing external thoughts to pour in. It amazes me how well this works — somehow preoccupying one part of my brain with the mechanics of walking frees another part to work more efficiently. I’m sure prominent scientists have invested millions in figuring out why this happens. I just know that it does.

4) Stay positive

Banish thoughts that make you angry, resentful, envious or otherwise negative — no matter how justified, negativity ruins a hike and blocks your brain from finding what you’re really looking for.

5) Find a way to remember your best ideas

The other day the ideas were flowing fast and furious. By the time I got home I’d forgotten them all. My take-away: Spend an extra few minutes memorizing your best ideas. You could also take a miniature tape recorder or notepad along, though both might interrupt the flow of a hike.

6) Don’t get carried away

There’s a risk of becoming the absent-minded professor who bumbles into a patch of poison oak or tramples on a copperhead. You have to keep your head in the game.

###

As always I’m interested in your reactions. I realize a lot of this seems blindingly obvious, but I never really noticed it till I tried to step outside my hiking bliss, figure out where it was coming from and find practical fringe benefits.

Related:

• Why hiking is really an indoor activity
• Toward building a hiking brain

I’ve come home drenched from my last half-dozen hikes, and it’s only getting hotter with the Dog Days of August just around the bend, so I might as well revisit the sweaty realities of summer on the trail.

Jeff at Mid South Hiking posted the most vital details this morning: keeping plenty of water in your body. That’s a good intro, to which I’ll add the following:

1) Take ice if you have it

I noticed on a balmy hike a few summers back that a sip of cool water seems to cool me down before I even swallow it (see, we’re just like dogs, only less loyal). Most hikers in warm climes know you can pack your hydration bladder with ice cubes; I have a couple refinements:

• Filling your hydration bladder with icy water has two pitfalls: condensation drenches everything and the ice melts by the time you drive to the trail. My fix: wrap the bladder in a hand towel, which soaks up the sweat, then wrap the towel/bladder combo in my self-inflating sit-pad, which keeps my water cold all day.
• Large chunks of ice stay frozen much longer. The trick is to find something you can freeze the water in that’ll make large cubes that’ll still fit into your hydration bladder. I wouldn’t advise pouring a bunch of water into your hydration bladder and freezing it overnight — it might work once or twice but if it weakens the plastic, you could have a messy disaster on your hands.

2) Stay in the shade, silly

Sounds obvious, I know, but sometimes in the heat of planning a hike to some way-cool locale, you might overlook the small detail that the majority of the mileage goes over ridge lines exposed to the blazing sun.

Save the sprawling vistas for when the weather’s cooler. Forests are way-cool in the summer. especially if you’re into redwoods or mushrooms.

3) Think about hiking at night

Lack of daylight adds immense complexity to a hike, and massive potential for encounters with nocturnal creatures (remember: skunks are nocturnal; as are bears).

Don’t just barge into the woods with your headlamp on: find local hiking groups that lead “full-moon” outings. While I’m the first to urge folks to get out of their comfort zone and hike solo during the day, I’m much more circumspect about soloing after dark. (More tips at Sgt. Rock’s Hiking HQ).

4) Keep your shirt on, dammit

Avoid the temptation to show off your fabulous pecs — leaving your shirt on will trap moisture near your skin, allowing the breeze to lavish the benefits of evaporative cooling on your body’s core.

Trapping moisture in your shirt is kind of like banking the water in your bottle: it stays with you in the form of sweat much longer. Going shirtless dries you out much quicker.

I used to think it might help to wear cotton shirts in the summer because cotton fabric stays wet so much longer; lately, though, I’ve noticed that once a polypro shirt like a Patagonia Capilene T wets out, it still holds moisture as long as you’re producing it.

(If you’re backpacking and hoping to keep your clothes dry, you’ll have to adjust a bit).

Go on easier hikes
Heat saps your strength, and exhaustion takes all the fun out of a hike. If you’re usually game for 2,000 feet of elevation gain in three miles, cut it to 1,000 in the depth of summer. And cut your eight-milers to six.

###

What are your tips for cooling it on the trail? Add a comment and share with the whole class.

Related: First impressions on hiking in North Carolina.

We instinctively think hiking happens in the outdoors, but on this morning’s hike it occurred to me that the experience is actually happening indoors: inside our consciousness. Everything that happens to us on a hike reflects our ability to perceive via sensory organs. We’ve only got five senses; I’ve often wondered how cool the universe must be to beings lucky enough to to have, say, seven or eight.

The limits of perception reminded me that while our consciousness can cleverly guide us through the craziest terrain, not everything we perceive is especially helpful to our hiking lives. The confusions of civilization create a lot of wrong turns.

My best example: My New Year’s resolution was to hike someplace new every weekend. My main motivation seems ludicrous now: I mostly wanted new stuff for my hiking blog, and I wanted more “I was there” dots on my map of North Carolina hikes. But here’s what would happen: I would drive six or more hours each time and spend most of the next day writing up a blog post full of pictures, GPS tracks and other stuff that made it all a huge chore.

This was way too much work for the few hours of admittedly wonderful hiking I was experiencing.

Meanwhile, another consequence of hiking in the mountains was that I felt compelled to join a gym to get in better shape for more rugged hikes. Well, I improved my cardio on a Treadclimber, but I lost those moments of hiking-in-the-woods wonder I experienced in my morning walks in the park across the road.

So this morning I was over at Tanglewood just before sunup and walked out upon a fog-blanketed meadow and said “damn, I’ve never seen it like this before.” As I walked the sun sneaked up behind the trees, revealing the picture I took above. Not the greatest one I ever took, but not bad, considering it didn’t cost me two tanks of gas for a round-trip to the Blue Ridge.

If you’re thinking, “hell, Tom, the only reason I come here is to read those hike write-ups,” well, sorry. I’ll probably keep doing them but it won’t be every week. Monthly maybe.

Middle of the Year’s Resolution is to keep it simple: Inspire people to hike.

You can find all you need to know about everyplace worth hiking somewhere on the Internet. But what’s missing is somebody saying “here’s why you need to tune out all the crap and get out there in the woods.”

Perhaps the worst tendency of the Internet is to reward novelty above pretty much everything. If it’s a baby setting her mother’s hair on fire, it’ll be all over the Web; if it’s you finding 30 seconds of clarity on a trail 10 minutes from your back porch, well, sorry, the Web doesn’t give a shit.

But I do.

So here are a few (hopefully) inspirational thoughts:

• So you’ve hiked that same greenway a hundred times and can’t imagine anything interesting ever happening there? Go anyway; concentrate on seeing something you’ve never seen before. Then stop looking. That’s when you’ll see it.
• So you think you can’t hike without $600 worth of fancy gear? Picture in your mind the one place where it doesn’t matter what kind of gear you take. Go there.
• So your hiking club goes too fast and can’t pause to appreciate nature? Start your own club, appoint yourself president, name your cat vice president for membership and hike by yourself.

That’s enough for today; need to save some for future posts.

Related:

• Toward building a hiking brain
• Mindful hiking: going with the flow
• 6 ways to get more hikes in your life
• It’s OK to be a day hiker, really

Yesterday I had it in my head that “mindfulness” — just existing in the now, mentally — was a great way to get your head in the game, hike-wise. It worked wonders in 30-second bursts: There’s nothing like emptying the mind and letting the forest pour in.

This morning I wondered what would happen if I tried getting mindful for longer stretches, like several minutes at a time. Within a quarter-mile it dawned on me that what works in a gym or a yoga studio has to be adapted to the realities of the wilderness. Living in the now for more than a minute or two created a sensory overload that almost made me dizzy. I wouldn’t call it fun.

My equilibrium returned when I focused my attention on the trail ahead and made a concerted effort not to dwell on anything outside my immediate experience. The take-away is that being now-centric is all well and good if you’re standing still, but if you’re moving, your brain’ll freak out if you’re not looking at least a few steps into the future.

So what’s the payoff for all this mental mumbo-jumbo? An easy example practically jumped in front of me. I was doing my tune-out-all-the-external-BS exercise when I heard a rushed rumbling through woods just down the trail. Probably a deer, I figured, but I didn’t see anything.

I turned a curve, walked about 20 feet and there the deer was, frozen in a stance about 20 feet from me. Ridiculously close for wildlife, but this is a suburban park and the deer are very tame. If I hadn’t had my radar tuned, I’d have walked right past him.

Maybe this is no more complicated than teaching yourself to pay attention. For years the simple act of walking down the trail has been enough; if I saw something cool I’d take a picture and post it on the blog.

Tuning out all the nonsense and tuning in my outdoor brain doesn’t come naturally. I bring all my baggage along, and many a hike has been poisoned by ruminations over the injustices big and small that define urban life.

Well, there’s no injustice in nature. There are laws, and some species like ours are luckier than others in the short run, but nature’s rule always prevails. That’s the appeal of being out there in a place where everything makes sense and fits into a logical scheme.

Our brains were built to abide by nature’s laws, and getting “back to nature” is really just getting our brains back where they belong.

Related: Mindful hiking: going with the flow

Getting your mind right can do wonders for a hike, and for your perspective on all the stuff you’re hiking to get away from. I always sorta suspected as much, but I found just how true it is this morning on a hike at the park across the road.

This insight actually germinated last week, when an editing assignment introduced me to two concepts familiar to yoga fans: flow and mindfulness. Flow is central to yoga – all that oneness with the universe and such. Setting out from the trailhead gets us into a natural flow without our even noticing it — trees, birds, breezes and such remind us we’re all paddlers in a river called life. Getting your flow on is the prerequisite to becoming “mindful,” which basically means being in the moment, paying attention to everything that’s happening and accepting it: no snap judgments, just taking life as it comes.

Doesn’t this always naturally on a hike? Sure, but it’s the exception, not the rule. How far down the trail are you before you’re thinking about how everybody seems intent on driving you barking mad? And how many times have you overheard passing hikers talking fervently about their careers or political preoccupations?

Hiking is a great way to work things out — I always come home with a headful of ideas for saving the world or shaking loose a few bucks. But I never gave much thought to my mental state. I just did whatever came naturally.

Which brings us to this morning: Instead of fretting my hike away, I made a concerted effort to focus only the moment and shut out all distractions. Within seconds I heard a bunch of bird songs I hadn’t noticed before. I began to notice the stress seeming to drain out via my fingertips. It became far easier to concentrate on the physical act of walking in the woods.

My editing assignment was an article to help personal trainers use mindfulness and flow to get gym clients more focused on their workouts and less diverted by distractions. The idea is that when you’re on your 13th rep and your biceps are burning like hell, it’s useful to think of nothing beyond listening to your body’s exhaustion signals and finishing the 14th rep.

But as with everything yoga-inspired, flow and mindfulness are universal, and universally beneficial. I say that now because within minutes of my mindfulness experiment, I had one of those lightning bolts of insight that I really needed six months ago.

The insight was this: I don’t want to spend the rest of my life lashed to this computer keyboard. Half my life is plenty. Humans evolved to walk upright in a wild setting. It’s what we’re supposed to be doing with our lives.

A few weeks back I read a delightful diatribe by a guy who calls himself Johnny B. Truant who charged his readers with a simple challenge: get out in the world and do epic shit. Well, my idea of getting epic is figuring out how to get people to pay me to hike.

I even tagged myself Hiker for Hire on my homepage and penned a piece called Top 10 Reasons to Hire a Hiker. I figure people have personal trainers, so why can’t they have personal hikers? If that doesn’t pan out I’ll move on to something else.

So now my business has a goal beyond paying for groceries. It’s to get me to a place where my office moves from down the hall to down the trail.

Mainly all I really want is to be able to help people get to that place I arrived at this morning, where 30 seconds of concentration on nothing beyond the experience of being in the woods becomes a catalyst for helping figure out what we want from life. Worth a try, wouldn’t you say?