Thomas Erickson
October 2023; April 2024
Not long ago, during an email exchange, a friend asked me why I like hiking. He put “hiking” in quotes, indicating, I believe, that he was baffled as to why anyone would engage in such an activity. I began to write an answer along the lines of enjoying being out in nature, and being active, and getting into a somewhat meditative state – but found that I didn’t really believe my own words. Not that any of that was untrue; it just didn’t get at the ‘why.’ I deleted my response and told him I’d think about it.
I was soon to depart for a week of solo hiking in Yosemite and figured that would be a good opportunity to reflect on the question.
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A few months ago I read the essay “Stickeen,” by John Muir, which describes his adventures during a trip to Alaska. He writes:
I awoke early, called not only by the glacier, which had been on my mind all night, but by a grand flood-storm. The wind was blowing a gale from the north and the rain was flying with the clouds in a wide passionate horizontal flood, as if it were all passing over the country instead of falling on it. The main perennial streams were booming high above their banks, and hundreds of new ones, roaring like the sea, almost covered the lofty gray walls of the inlet with white cascades and falls. I had intended making a cup of coffee and getting something like a breakfast before starting, but when I heard the storm and looked out I made haste to join it; for many of Nature’s finest lessons are to be found in her storms….
—John Muir, Stickeen,1909
It is a wonderful and astonishing account. The streams flooding, the wind a gale, blasting the waterfalls into mist. And Muir so anxious to be out in the storm he skips breakfast!
I am no Muir. I would be considering the integrity of my rainwear, checking the weather on my phone, and pondering whether the day might be better spent reading in my tent. It is not that I am averse to challenging circumstances. I have intentionally gone hiking in the rain. It is pleasant, in the right garb. I have struggled through seemingly endless descents on gravel-strewn trails with treacherous footing. I have even, in Iceland, struggled over several kilometers of lava-rock trail with sleet blowing horizontally into my face, though had logistics permitted would happily have deferred that hike to another day. It was not pleasant, but it was worth it in the end. Still, I am no Muir, to brave a storm in hopes of learning its secrets. Our approaches differ.
To the extent I pit myself against nature, it is in the imaginings that inform my preparation. What are the likely ways I might injure myself or otherwise get into trouble, and how ought I be prepared? As the Yosemite trip approached, I unearthed my hiking gear from the back of my closet, and went through it. I have three bags that go in my hiking day pack. The ready-to-hand bag contains things I will need on the trail like sunscreen, insect repellant, and snacks. The near-to-hand bag contains things I might need, such as a flashlight, small first aid kit, rain gear, and toiletries. The emergency bag contains things I hope I will not need – items that would allow me to spend an uncomfortable night in the backcountry if I get lost, or delayed by injury. And trekking poles and an emergency satellite beacon dangle from the outside of my pack. In my imagination I have triumphed over Muir-worthy challenges, and I have the equipment to prove it! But I am content to leave actual tribulations in the realm of my imagination.
I must confess that I take considerable pleasure in this process of preparation and organization. The bags I described are labeled, each with its name and a list of the items it contains. Items that require special attention before each trip are highlighted: lights that need charging, spare batteries, medications that may expire. As I complete the pre-trip checks, I tighten the drawstring on each bag and stow it in my pack. I also train in advance. For the extreme elevation changes I’ll encounter in Yosemite, I’ve been doing stair-climbing exercises to fortify my legs, and eccentric heel drops to prepare my Achilles tendons. All this preparation coalesces into a reasonably fit body, and an unreasonably heavy pack.
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I am in Yosemite now. I am sitting at a table in the Ahwahnee Hotel, having breakfast, and pondering where to hike. In spite of my penchant for preparation, I do not plan out my hikes here. I admit there is a bit of paradox. That someone who enjoys planning as much as I do, also enjoys its absence. I know Yosemite well, having come here throughout my adult life, and so where I hike really depends on my mood and momentary inclinations. This is one reason I am fond of solo hiking – I can make last-minute decisions, or even change plans halfway through, and not have to account for it to anyone.
Today it’s a bit rainy. No sublime storm, such as inspired Muir, just ragged clouds tumbling overhead with occasional showers. I decide on an easy day, which means staying in the valley. I will hike up the Valley Loop trail towards Mirror Lake at the less-populated end of the valley. Perhaps I will do a partial ascent of the Snow Creek trail. I did the full ascent last year, and found it an enjoyable and lightly traveled route. Or perhaps I’ll do something else entirely.
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I am beginning to move uphill as I head east through the valley. The trail winds through a pine forest, and the trail, padded with needles and duff, is soft beneath my feet. Here and there, visible through the trees, are titanic boulders that fell from the valley walls long ago and now rest half-buried in the valley floor.
As I walk, I have developed a diaphanous halo of gnats. It is not a very well-behaved halo. The gnats zig in closely enough to catch my attention before they zag away. A wave of my hand disperses the halo, but it returns in a few moments. At least they do not bite, or even touch down. It could be worse.
I pause to examine the sky. Just now the sky over my head is blue, but twisted pillars of mist float against the sheer granite walls of the valley. I pause and watch them intently for a minute: their tendrils are as still as mist in a painting. Likewise, the highest leaves of the trees are utterly still.
That’s too bad. Movement on high, of leaves or mist, would mean that after a bit of climbing I would reach a breezy region that would dispel my halo. But this is part of hiking; in spite of the mild distraction, at a deeper level I appreciate even the gnats. They are part of the ecosystem, a part that unlike the trees and shrubs is aware of me, and that reminds me that I too am part of it.
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As I hike, the light shifts as clouds come and go. I like this. It throws the landscape into new relief, and I notice things that moments before I was passing unaware. Here, a slanted pillar of sunlight falls on a granite boulder, turning its mossy surface emerald green. I pause to look and touch, admiring the tiny spiked leaves of the moss that feel like velvet under my fingers. I recently read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Gathering Moss, and it has led me to pay attention. “Mosses and other small beings,” she says, “issue an invitation to dwell for a time right at the limits of ordinary perception.” I look at the serrated green tendrils of moss, wet with water and bright in the light; I notice that they share the space with grey green lichen whose smooth surfaces look ancient and indestructible. I recall how Kimmerer says that if you look closely at a carpet of moss, you can see that it mirrors the structure of the forest, with sturdy stems lofting green branches toward the sun, and moisture dripping through the canopy to sink into the surface.
As I’ve been still, the gnats have drifted off. It seems that it is not me they are interested in, but instead my movement. It makes me curious about what is going on. Apparently the gnats have a quarry – possibly deer or another large mammal – that they locate by its movement, but their needs are specific enough that when they get close to me they can tell I don’t have what they want, whether it is tasty blood, the right sweat, or simply a promising place to lay some eggs. Yet they return and return again.
Someday I would like to learn more about tiny insects, why they swarm, and how they manage to maintain their swarms. Imagine life at their scale, a scale of millimeters. The swarm, which seems dense to me, is really quite loose. In terms of body size, each gnat is thirty to fifty body lengths from its nearest neighbor. At the same time they move hundreds of their own body-lengths in a second, and yet, curving and swooping, manage to stay together. How do they maintain their diffuse swirling crowd? How do they keep track of one another? And at the same time, how do they keep track of me, a vastly larger entity?
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I have worked my way up the gentle colluvial slope to the base of the valley’s wall. The forest is thinning out, and the trail has shifted to gravelly scree that grates beneath my boots. I’ve come to the Snow Creek trailhead, and have decided to go a ways up it. I am now switch-backing up the steep granite wall, following a well-maintained trail that sweeps upward in shallow curves, as though traced out by a pendulum. Many hikers hate switchbacks, as more time is spent going sideways than towards one’s goal. But I like them. Switch-backing up a scarp allows me to get a feel for the rock mass as a whole. It is interesting to see how the granite’s texture and composition changes in subtle ways, even though it is all formed from the same stuff: magma that slowly cooled in vast chambers deep below the surface, a hundred million years ago.
As magma cools, different minerals crystalize out of it at different temperatures. In this case, plagioclase condensed first, then hornblende and biotite, dark shinny minerals whose grains catch the sunlight, followed by orthoclase, and finally quartz. In some magmas the crystals sink or float, forming distinct layers, but granitic magmas are extremely viscous, so the mineral grains stay suspended where they form, the result being granite that is speckled with white, beige and black. But under scrutiny, the mineral grains show subtle variations in size and distribution, due to slight differences in rates of cooling, and the effects of convection currents that slowly roiled the magma just as rising warm air now tumbles the clouds overhead.
So moving up the face of the granite, switchbacking across its width, is just what I want to get a sense of the frozen contents of the magma chamber. I’m curious. While much of the granite is as hard as, well, rock, occasional patches are disintegrating. I pick up a chunk of granite from the trail and squeeze, and the stone crumbles into gravel in my fist, falling to the trail in a soft cascade of sound. I play at being Superman for a few minutes, until a solid piece resists my fantasy and leaves my hand bruised. My best guess is that in these places water is seeping through microfractures and altering the granite’s plagioclase into clay – but in the damp of the day, I can’t tell if the disintegrating granite is wetter than the rest. Another question for another day.
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The slope has gotten steeper, and the switchbacks more frequent. My heart pounds. Four heartbeats as I inhale, four as I exhale. An insistent rhythm. An incessant rhythm. I feel rather than think. The breaths come and go. My steps gradually slow.
I stop. I am fully in my body. I am breath and heartbeat and a small tendril of thought that observes. Coolness comes over me. At last there is a bit of breeze. At some point, though I never notice the transition, I am back. My awareness expands beyond my body to include the trees and sky and trail and rock.
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As I climb farther, I begin to notice the occasional fine-grained pinkish stone among the gray-speckled granite. The park service, in maintaining the trail, stacks up rocks into short walls to slow erosion, and the pink stones stand out. What is going on here?
As I move higher, I see the answer: there is a vein of pinkish stone in the cliff above me. Higher still, I see more veins of varying thicknesses. I cannot get far enough back to see the whole, but I imagine they are all connected. At some point, when the upper part of the magma chamber had solidified, the pressure of deeper magma, like my fist squeezing the stone, caused a fracture that propagated upward, branching into a tree of cracks. As the cracks opened, they were inundated by a flood of watery magma, the last remnant of the original magma. That would have contained lots of orthoclase and quartz, the last minerals to crystalize, and as orthoclase can be pink, that explains the color. Because the magma has infiltrated cracks in the cooler mass of granite, it cools rapidly, resulting in a fine-grained stone because there is little time for crystals to grow large. I now see what I have been traversing in a different way.
I pause and ponder. I drink some water. The sun is bright. I am far above the forest; a few manzanitas cling to the slope, their wine-dark branches twisting beneath their low canopies. I nibble at a chocolate bar. I haven’t hiked that far. But the day has turned to afternoon, and the stillness to wind: I hear its susurration in the forest below. I decide it’s time to go.
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I am heading back, downslope. I unship the trekking poles from my pack. I got them several years ago to save my knees during steep descents on rocky trails. And they were great for that. As I’ve gained experience, I find them more and more useful. Now, when I take them out, I feel as though I am putting on a different body.
If I am walking on flat ground, they mirror my stride, the right pole touching down in synchrony with my left foot, creating a soft tapping rhythm as I walk. If I head downhill, the rhythm syncopates, with the pole tip touching down just before the foot, serving as a shock absorber. If the slope is rough, the poles – which seem to take on a life of their own – slow my descent by seeking purchase against any nearby surface: a boulder, a stump, a wall. Similarly, if I am crossing a stream, they give me two extra points of stability, and transform a precarious transit of stepping stones into an easy one. I’ve read that octopuses have separate brains for each of their legs, and it feels a bit like my trekking poles have minds of their own.
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It is late afternoon. The light slants through the trees. I have returned to the Ahwahnee Hotel.
It was a good hike. How far, I don’t know, but far enough. My body is still very much in the foreground of my awareness. My feet are a bit sore, slightly swollen; they feel the press of my boots on all sides. My shoulders are happy to be free of the pack; I feel lighter. My hands feel alive; they’ve been sensing the world through the trekking poles, and are still awake. Every muscle feels taunt and yet limp, perfused with a deep languor.
I am in the hotel bar. This is another thing I love about hiking: having a beer afterwards. I’ve made my way out of the bustle, and found a secluded table around a corner on the west side of the building. I am not quite ready to return to the blooming buzzing world of people. Later I will chat with people. Later I will mull over what I learned, and how it fits into the larger patterns of the world. Later I will pursue some of the questions I encountered. But for now I stretch my legs out and gaze over the meadow to the forest, and enjoy the way I feel.
Gradually the shadows have made their way towards me; now they are pooled at my feet. It’s time to go inside and have dinner. I am not John Muir, but if he were here I think we’d have things to talk about. And he’s probably hungry, having skipped breakfast.
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