PCT Journal 2014

Fred Allebach aka Zombie

2014 Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) Hiking Journal

11/2014

Chapter Index

p.1  Intro

p.2  Context

p.2  My Own Context

p.3  Ideals Situated in History

p.4  Community

p.5  Muddy River Country

p.6  Hike Your Own Hike/ Ultra Light Paradigm

p.7  Comparison and Common Sense

p.12 Original Dick Kelty Pack

p.13 The Book

p.13 The Last Great Adventure

p.14 Hiking Gear

p.17 Food Storage

p.18 Poor Practice

p.19 Maps and Digital Technology

p.20 Hordes, Population Growth, Mass Participation

p.22 Individualism and the American Way

p.23 The Times They Are a Changing

p.24 Corporate Corruption and PCTA Trail Days

p.25 Consumerism

p.26 Ethics

p.27 Memes

p.30 Status and Quantification

p.33 Minimalism and Purity

p.35 The Basis of Wilderness Ethics

p.38 Purity Revisited

p.39 We Arrive in Our Own Movie

p.41 Transformation

p.43  Desperada

p.45 Grab Bag

p.46 Appendix: A Hiker’s Creed by Kim D. Bartlett, aka La Contessa

Intro

This essay is reflective of my journal entries; things came up, I wrote them down. There is also a PCT Journal Essay 1 which is more of the day to day stuff. What seems to come up in every hike is a dissonance and tension I feel with thru hikers. Thru hiking, or: trying to hike from Mexico to Canada on the PCT in one hiking season seems to me to be more an athletic event than a wilderness experience. I feel a tension because for me, process is more important than goal. One project I have, over my many journals, is to deconstruct the long distance hiking world. I have a thesis: old style, traditional outdoor ethics that grew out of the 1960s, 70s and 80s environmental movement and the Transcendentalists before that, and this is giving way to a more me first, individualistic style, one that has less ethics, more convenience. Long distance hiking has become more an athletic event than a wilderness experience. Through the course of this essay I will examine this thesis from different vantages.

Ultimately I recommend that land management agencies, long distance hiking organizations, trail management entities and outdoor gear sellers all recalibrate the message of what is happening on the trail. I hope through this essay to help move the needle away from an extreme individual focus and back to community, conservation and preservation values.

In my journal I do a lot of idea work. What are the assumptions behind various hiking paradigms? I also address hiking at the level of practice and ethics.  Basically, I don’t want to be over run by a new, insidious paradigm, one that has taken over more and more; a paradigm I see as fundamentally counter to the wilderness, outdoors values I was trained and inculcated in. I’m pushing back against ultra light, convenience-based, and superficial goal-oriented hiking

Like Eric Hoffer said about his book The True Believer, some of what I say here may be plain wrong, some may be right on, as long as my points are compelling enough to get people thinking, that serves the purpose.

I want to examine the basis of stylistic and paradigmatic differences in the hiking community, to understand the history, culture, and demographics, while keeping an eye on what I see as the real bottom line, which is to honor and appreciate nature. I want to make my case, send this case to the PCTA (Pacific Crest Trail Association), LDHA (Long Distance Hiking Association), and various National Forests and Parks and be done with this, allow future journals to be about different things.

Context

On the PCT most thru hikers go from south to north, from Mexico to Canada. Thus, you can be in the pack going north and not realize how many there are ahead and behind; it may seem like there aren’t that many people around. If you are hiking north to south, as we did, you run into the entire pack. We met thru hikers who “flip-flopped”, i.e. did not do a continuous hike. A flip-flop example: hike half the trail going north, then jump up to Canada and hike the second half going south. When flip-flop thru hikers found themselves going south, even they said the sheer number of people turned them off, that the numbers of people, and their practices, were antithetical to any sort of wilderness experience.

My Own Context

I’m a hiker who came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I still have an old Kelty frame pack and I like it. I carry a bear-proof canister wherever I hike. I’m tired of trying to hang food where there are no good trees. I’m trained in safety, expedition planning for trail crews. I know wilderness ethics and low impact camping. I’ve read Transcendentalist and environmentalist literature and I buy into it. I’m sympathetic to native peoples takes for a steward-centered life style. These are my fundamental outdoors values, practices and biases. These are my sheep and I am their shepherd. I value solitude and, small group transformative experiences. I got started on all this at the Quaker Farm and Wilderness Camps in Vermont.

My Ideals Situated in History, Culture and Biology

The post WW2 economic boon and concomitant affluence bred the leisure time to produce the counter culture et al and anti-material ideals. Here I am, still animated by those type of ideals instilled and steeped into me as a youth. I give major credit to the Quaker Farm and Wilderness Camps as being the watershed event that set the course of my life. Thanks to Mom and Dad for sending me there. This is my fun territory that I explore the ramifications of over and over, a place of endless possibility and hope, a bright and shining moment, fused onto my youth, existing now as glowing plasma in my mind, locked into my synapses by good old Timothy Leary LSD I got ahold of in high school, right from the source in Millbrook, NY: Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Grateful Dead, Stewart Brand, Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, this is my ground, all spinning out as if a galaxy of inter-related, fundamentally hopeful possibilities, tempered by the potential of doom and apocalypse, nuclear war and man-made annihilation that was ever present up to my late 20s. Thank you Gorbachev! Glasnost and perestroika brought hope back to the front burner.

The America of my youth and middle age has been like a huge elephant carcass from which I can easily scavenge enough to survive, with barely working hard. I’m the happy jackal or coyote. The carcass is there. It’s huge, plenty of scraps to feed off of. I have been able to reach Maslow’s levels of self-actualization without having to work that hard at sheer survival.

That I am not focused on the goal and end result is par for the Fred persona; this is how I am with everything. This could be my temperament, in combo with my enculturation plus the good economic times of my youth that led to the space and development of habits to be able to live like I do: sustainably poverty, independently poor. My Dad said I always took the easy way and it’s true to the extent that I’ve been blessed with strong capacities, things come easy for me to understand; I get the gist of things quickly; I’m good at music and intellectual pursuits, my bread and butter, without having to work at fundamentals. I’m a natural in these areas. As such I love being an amateur, (from Latin via Spanish, amar, to love), I’ve cultivated a beginner’s mind my whole life, joying in a sense of discovery, whatever it is. And lucky for me, I’ve had the space to do it.

As society develops now, 40 - 50 years past the youthful impressment of my ideals, past the taking on of my particular ballast of memes, unintended consequences emerge. The trajectory has swung more to the individual, less centered on community and the commons. This makes it harder to bring concerted action to large problems in need of cooperation. The individual thrust ramifies out into diminished senses of social justice, environmentalism, land and wilderness ethics.  For hiking and public land, the ultra light paradigm diminishes respect for the commons by making it first all about individual convenience.

Things are now more individually focused than ever. Everyone is inside their own cocoon and echo chamber. Technology reinforces this along channels like Facebook, cell phones; look at me, me, me and my public person exquisitely tailored for pubic consumption. Don’t look at me, I have my ear buds/ headphones on, my private space trumps any social obligation of community.

The big wheels have been turning towards individual freedom of expression and exploration, liberation from binding, static social constraints, for a long time. This yearning for freedom of expression is probably native in us from the start, in the West traceable to the Classic Greeks, the Gnostics, the Renaissance etcetera, these wheels have now made an indelible mark on the ground, particularly in America where individual rights are enshrined as a holy purity of existence. It’s humanism; we get to exercise our capacity; yet we as individuals are isomorphic with society and culture, each of us a mini social world; from us as individuals the social universe is spun, and from society and culture we are enmeshed, part and parcel.

Isomorphic, yes, this above pattern is just how content and process are always enmeshed, hardware/ software, deep and surface structure, however you cut the cake this is all fractals of the same type of organizational pattern.

And so, the trail becomes more individual, less about the commons.

Individual convenience, as a prime mover, recaps the whole era of exploitation of nature, conquest, colonization; it’s there to use with no concern for sustainability. The possibility of transformation by immersion in nature has turned into an athletic event of conquest where gear, convenience and extensions of domesticity are the primary concerns.

The Clif Bar label says: “it’s about the journey, not the destination.” Right on. The Clif Bar people must be of my temperament and generation.

Community

The trail is a feel-good activity with a constellation of feel-good associates. In life it’s easier to swallow the sweet than the bitter. HIkers appear poor, appear minimal, appear in need, but it’s more apparent than real. Real need, real homelessness, real suffering, are way different. Hiking is a chosen, leisure activity mostly engaged in by white, relatively well-off middle class people. In this activity you do have hardship but it’s all by choice.

Like basketball has owners, fans, referees, trainers, coaches, players, the trail has, in addition to hikers of all sorts, groupings of associated people like trail angels, (people who give rides, free food, provide lodging, haul water etc.), people who map the trail, merchants who serve the needs etcetera. Long distance hikers and their associated groups think they are getting away from society. They are not. Society and all its hidden baggage is just re-reflected within the context of the hiking culture. The PCT long distance hiking community is not a refuge for solitude but actually a gathering place for people searching for community.

In real ways, the lack of genuine community in the modern, individual world provides the impetus to find any facsimile expression of it. The trail culture is perfect for that, provides meaning, belonging, satisfaction, happiness: community.

The trail gets all these human issues down to very simple levels. The same dynamics exist on the trail that are ramified out to larger, more complex levels in society and in the world. This human dynamic is brought to bear on the trail around a simple array of stuff and experience; our whole societal complexity is focused on where you are going, what you are carrying, where you will be staying etc. This is the whole nine yards of being human condensed onto all things hiking. It’s a great test case, a way for me to bring to bear my life-long hiking and environmental experience, my particular intellectual capacities, and social science interests and education.

Part of the scene is a cult of personality, a peer, social thing, who you know, name drop, a party, gossip. Facebook has taken over as a context for how people present themselves. Facebook now recaps the Appalachian Trail (AT) shelter paper journals where hikers get a sense of really being in the story. A long distance hike is an adventure and you find a built-in community to go along with it.

Given the “advances” in digital technology, this communications medium increasingly shapes how people frame and interact with their hiking experience. On the trail, community is something at once real, actually face-to-face, and then there is this whole other tech/ mechanistic level of virtual community, which legitimately, you’d think hikers would be trying to get away from.

There’s definitely a tension happening: in one hand an outdoors experience is supposed to be about the outdoors, and then there is this new technology that gives you a compass, phone, GPS, maps, typewriter, journal, music, movies, camera and more, all in one little easy to carry box. The smart phone is the ultimate gadget, one that at the same time facilitates communication/community and makes actual face-to-face community less real.

I see that long distance hiking was a genuine subculture community that has gradually been subverted by: popularization and digital technology. I’ll explore this more as I go along.

Muddy River Country

Culturally, a muddy river country place is antithetical to what most people are doing. In accordance with the master narrative, and with a survival imperative, down in the arena of life, most are trying to succeed and win the game. The bulk of people don’t cultivate a muddy river country place; they see things clearly in terms of goals and survival.

For me, I don’t care about money or success as objects in and of themselves. I only do as much as necessary to get by, the rest is time set aside for inner gravy. Since I don’t care about exterior signage, I’m not all wrapped up in the exterior goals of any hike. It’s the inner stuff that motivates me. Which is to say, my own interests are enough to satisfy me. To the extent that I do go into the arena, it’s because of my inner motivation to pursue interests, such as tree identification. Is that clear? Whatever exterior accolades and accomplishments may happen, those are not the reason for my interests. I am a dedicated amateur in all things.

This last hike I took an interest in David Douglas and have since read up on him. Douglas is a guy I really admire, driven by interests, not goals per se, and, he’s intimately associated with Douglas fir, sugar pine, ponderosa pine, Monterey pine, Sitka spruce, some of the fun trees I’ve made friends with in the trail. Plus, he visited Sonoma in the 1830s and camped out at Yerba Buena, by Telegraph Hill, before there was even any settlement in San Francisco.

I’m going where most don’t go in not caring about money, fame or fortune. I call this muddy river country. Yet in some things I don’t like muddy water, I want clarity, in relationships, food, and work; it is in the symbolic realm, in music and art that I find I’m able to blur the lines and appreciate transition zones and fusions, get into the refiner’s fire and meld a few liters of metaphorical muddy water. (You have to laugh at mixed metaphors!)

Muddy water or not, the most important quality to bring on the trail or in life, this never changes: keep a good attitude. The attitude is what is ultimately adaptive, not the skill set. Even with the changing gestalt of the trail, of Sonoma, I’ve still got to be me and take the approach I always have.

I think to a large extent I came this way; it’s my nature. My style could also result from nurture: the middle class affluence I grew up in, the times, the 1960s, the Quaker summer camps etc. Hard to say, there’s no signposts or markers inside my head from which to make a definitive call. 

Hike Your Own Hike and Ultra Light Paradigm

Going on the trail, you leave the world of city life and another outdoors world opens up. One aspect of this hiking world that opens up is annoyingly common: gear comparisons and gear talk. Generally if a hiker opens with a gear comments we know we won’t be much interested in them. Why? Because gearheads are on a proscribed autopilot they can’t see out of.

Any person in life has a narrative going that represents their values. Hikers have values, one set of which is found in the ultra light paradigm. This paradigm revolves around personal convenience, going faster and farther because you have less weight. The ultra light paradigm has mostly taken over the long distance hiking community. The reason the gear is so central and important is because a fundamental shift in the nature of a hike has been made: it’s become as athletic event versus an outdoors, immersion in nature transformational experience.

As people, an inner dialogue gets played inside our heads, based on our values narrative. What people end up saying is set to a particular values channel. Narratives operate mostly at an unconscious level, unexamined; it’s a form of autopilot. The world starts to appear as if it conforms with the narrative: this is called confirmation bias. After a while, on narrative autopilot, it’s all self-reinforcing, you find exactly what you’re looking for, you react through the lens of the accepted narrative rather than to who or what is in front of you. The script you are running substitutes for seeing what you actually see. (This is why early North American explorers in the 1500s thought they were actually finding the Fountain of Youth or the Seven Cities of Cibola filled with gold.)

The map is not the territory, on anything, any time.

What is in front of thru hikers when they meet Kim and I, are hikers who don’t buy the ultra light paradigm.  Our very presence, appearance and gear challenges the ultra light paradigm. Ultra lighters in most cases feel they need to say something about our packs because what Kim and I are representing is in clear tension with the ultra light script.

Contrary to what we encounter first hand as the rigidity of the ultra light paradigm, there is an hiking community ideal, one that seeks to honor diversity of hiking style. This is called “hike your own hike”. It’s a great ideal but practically speaking, the long distance hiking set does not practice it. If hiking your own hike was a central ideal, rather than ultra light at all costs, then we would not take so much grief for having frame packs and hiking with different emphases in mind.

Comparisons and Common Sense

What type of hiker or long distance hiker are you? There are section hikers, thru hikers, weekenders, day hikers, less than a week hikers. It’s just different ways to skin the same cat. Misunderstandings and judgments in the hiking community among different types of hikers are similar to those among liberals and conservatives or to gender differences in style of communication. Being heard is as important as whatever the content is, to be understood for what you mean and intend to say, for who you are. The potential to not be heard and understood is great when you layer on moral impulses to purity, respect for authority, loyalty harm and fairness. Value judgments about different ways to skin the cat are imbued upon you; the judgments come out of an unconscious place, deriving from the paradigm and primary assumptions about what is good, bad, desirable, acceptable etc.

Assuming that others would/ might recognize your assumptions concerning the purposes and goals of a hike; a “hike”, is heretofore equivalent to and a metaphor for religion, ethnicity, politics, philosophy etc.

To recap: The trail is a limited and simple context where people bring to bear all their social and psychological complexity.

On the trail, the ideal of  “hike your own hike” has upsides and downsides. On the upside, you live and let live. Implicit in this notion is doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, the Golden Rule, a translation of Christian and universal human values to the world of hiking. It’s kind of like automobile customization; even if you have a low rider, can you appreciate and enjoy hot rods? When it comes to simple stylistic differences, which loom large in the world of judgment and misunderstanding, hiking your own hike is to grant other hikers their world view their inner motivations and purposes, granting them their gestalt and weltanschauung.

On the downside an overly permissive acceptance of everything means hiking your own hike can open a world of substance abuse and poor ethical practices that can’t reasonably be tolerated as part of a liberal relativism.

“Ultra light”/ “faster farther” is a paradigm embraced by most thru-hikers, i.e. those who are attempting to hike the whole PCT in one season or those who do long sections. For what that is, OK, hike your own hike, but surely this is not the only type of hike, or the highest or the lowest. One does get the impression from thru-hikers though, that theirs is the highest value, the obvious best way to go; there is implicit judgment. The faster farther style is more individualistic, puts emphasis on the individual as the center of everything. Since faster/farther is more athletic event than anything, it lends itself to a lack of outdoor ethics and more of this individual, goal-oriented focus.

For all hikers, the baseline context of being out in nature is the same. The trail is the same; all hikers on the PCT share the exact same conduit, the same ground. Hiking styles, methods, strategies then are really just different ways to skin the same cat. We are talking stylistic differences here, not fundamental differences in kind.

What I see in the ultra light paradigm is that a more city-oriented style is being enacted on the outdoors ground. We’re seeing hiking commuters hurrying to reach personal goals of success. These guys don’t have time to smell the roses and they know it; they see what they’re missing, sense they have been locked into a program that is depriving them of the special moments and sense of place they could have. Why? It’s become a goal-oriented athletic event enacted on the holy ground of nature.

Paradigms, such as ultra light hiking, are subjective social constructs. There is no ultimate truth involved here, no indelible “facts”. What it’s all about is values of one kind or another. Paradigms then, are containers of ethics and morals, right and wrong, which are themselves relative constructs of content. The moral capacity itself is not relative; the process of having a moral ability is universal, and thus we have content (paradigm and assumptions) and process (brain capacity). Content and process influence each other in the same way nature and nurture do, there’s no clear dividing lines, no markers in our heads to show what is what.

Allow me to interject a simple example that ends up being a stylistic difference: Stopping for a water break. For me this is a ritual, time taken to appreciate, to notice, to smell, to rest, a pause. The current obsession with speed and efficiency makes it so hikers have their water delivery systems able to be accessed without removing their pack, without a break, without a ritual; hiking and being in the woods becomes like sports, less about the experience itself and more about time, efficiency, conditioning etc. What’s the hurry? Isn’t the whole point to relax and enjoy nature?

Everybody holds out for their flavor of construct being truer than others. The rub comes with perceived and actual harm done by one hike to another. This can end up as a house of mirrors of perceived slights, real, objective, subjective etcetera. Being able to define harm, on individual and collective levels, relative to hiking, is something that needs to get done. In my humble opinion, hiker behavior has gotten out of balance, too individual, not enough consciousness of and respect for wild lands; camping practices and ethics have suffered from too much emphasis on convenience, not enough on resource conservation and preservation. Harm as I am framing it here, relates to the sustainability of the trail environment. What I see now is an unsustainable, unsafe yield of activity going on. I see a city ethic taking over where once there was a wilderness ethic. These ethics need recalibrating.

Public lands rules for outdoor behavior have become necessary because certain harms have been done. Rules have been put in place to reduce or eliminate those harms. As a result of these harms we have ethical, behavioral and practical guidelines like Leave No Trace or requirements for bear-proof containers in certain high use areas. The reason for these rules and regulations? Individual behavior counter to the public good has gotten out of balance.

Going back to the community/ individual, Public/ Private debate so prevalent in national politics, what do we do when no one will back down and there is a stalemate, a checkmate of assumptions? When it is my way or the highway? In politics, the Private group rejects even the idea of the commons. I see this type of Private thinking bleeds into how people approach hiking and wilderness experience. The overwhelming focus on individual prerogative comes to effect how people conceive of their wilderness and hiking experience.  The Private/ individual auto-pilot memes all add up and unconscious scripts and narratives get acted out, to the detriment of nature and our public lands.

One thru-hiker philosopher we met named Chinese Rock broke up hiker styles into athletes and artists, into those concerned with quantity or quality. Thru hikers, she said, started out with these differences but by the end, all were athletes. The goal of finishing the hike overrides being able to be present and enjoy what is in front of you. She had a good observation though, hikers have the impulse to approach a hike artistically, through an in-the-moment, process-oriented focus. This is the focus I believe practice and ethical recalibration needs to shoot for.

Having fun with numbers and quantity is not in itself bad. But what’s it all about?  Numbers are one way to signify and describe your experience. On a long distance hike you have your bookends, the planned beginning and end. Within this you have to make a certain number of miles a day. For us, this is just the beginning of what we hope to find, not the end-all purpose. Pack weight, miles hiked, cost of gear, these things are superficial, not the purpose itself; these numbers and quantities are props; the activity of going to the land, to nature, to live outside simply with self-reliance, this is the implicit purpose in mind for public lands recreation. People go to re-create, via whatever props they have: boats, ATVs, hunting, campground camping, swimming, surfing, day hiking, kiting, whatever. And so, hike your own hike, live and let live, and if you have harm arguments, go ahead and make them as best you can. Defining harm opens up values, and an honest shot here will require a fair amount of introspection. Anybody can talk numbers and “facts” but we’re spinning our wheels if we compare only that and not the underlying values we want to emphasize and why.

What outdoor, hiking props do you prefer? To classify these as better, worse, higher or lower, is a debate over fundamentally subjective social constructs. These constructs have some basis in comparability, stuff is involved and stuff can be compared.  Value judgments about quantity and quality and some mixture of the two get to be the auto pilot thing.

Not everybody likes the same gestalt of hike or the props that go with them. All hikes are not pure varieties some are fusions and hybrids. Quantity (weight, miles, distance) becomes the quality sought? Like Chevy vs. Ford, there are fundamental similarities in any hike.  Yet like the difference between a car and a truck, there are actual advantages and disadvantages for one hike or the other, depends on your purposes. In stuff like this, small differences loom large. You get an intimate enemy type phenomenon going; people make a big deal out of little things.

Some people like clear boundaries, they gravitate to purity. Purity however, in the subjective world of social constructs, in hiking styles, is a recipe for trouble, as there is no way to really prove anything other than how much you believe it. People compare but there is no basis other than preference. Everyone appeals to purity arguments, even Mr. Muddy Water. Purity and perfection are ideals, not realities.

Allow me to extend some of these purity and boundary metaphors further: there is a putative line between montane and subalpine zones, but there is never an actual straight line, ever. People speak as if such a straight line exists when in fact transition zones are what constitute the boundary. A transition zone is a fusion, it’s muddy water, a combination plate, unclear boundaries are what we have between montane and subalpine climate zones. Preferences for understanding musical styles are similar, some are purists and hate fusion, some love fusion and see purists as limited snobs. The point: there never a clear, pure line in nature or for social constructs.

As mentioned, things shake out so some enjoy muddy river country in one area and not another; it’s a question of taste, preference. I’m a liberal politically but conservative with backpacking. What I’m driving at with all of this is to gain some sense if transparency as to why Kim and I have to deal with constant judgmental comments from other long distance hikers about what our packs look like, how heavy they may appear etc. To a good extent, I feel we are dealing with purist snobs who unconsciously foist a paradigm and set of assumptions on us, assumptions we fundamentally reject.

We can talk about facts and particulars but unless we understand first-cause-level-differences, the primary assumptions we’re making, it will be wheels spinning around, apples and oranges comparison type troubles without understanding the nature if difference, preference, values, morals, style.

A practical question: what is better for what and why? What’s the goal? Does better equal easier, cheaper, lighter, heavier, more comfortable? This all depends on knowing what you’re after, knowing your values. Comparisons have to take into account knowing the goal and purpose of particular hikes. Comparing without knowing the logic of why differences are there gets you into apples and oranges territory. Different purposes are represented in form and function. It’s not right to compare apples and oranges. You don’t need to compare apples and oranges as they are obviously different!

One major divisive stumbling block to bridging gaps in comparing different style, is literalism, a simple hewing to purity without being able to see out of it. Low riders and hot rods are both cool. With literalism you never see it, you never get out of it. If you never get out of specific car customization, with literalists it gets to be an intimate enemy thing, an intractable dispute over the same material, wide or narrow. Yet a simple wider net view shows that low riders, hot rods have different forms and functions. Trucks, Ford or Chevy is more of a pure stylistic preference rather than a form/ function issue; a truck is a truck.

Me being judged by the size and look of my pack is the same as me judging a BMW or Mercedes exterior. I carry a lot of baggage about class, rich people, social justice etc. and a BMW is the symbol that elicits all these feelings and stereotypes I have. No matter that some of my great friends who are excellent human beings have BMWs.

Here I am fleshing out matters of sensibility and style. It’s a courtesy to not assume your sense is the only common sense.

Everyone in life is sold a bill of goods with associated rationales; things aren’t just that way; they are framed according to certain presumptions. This is received knowledge, consume at your own risk. With a little moxie and maturation, maybe a person can plot their own course, see outside of the received, shine a light on the values and consciously construct their own take. I’m not trying to recapitulate the rat race when I come to the woods. I’m looking for transformation, to swim, meet trees, find magic, experience the mystic, to get away from normal stuff and open up the new. Transformation is something I and many others have been about in the woods; this is now a cliché from the book and movie Wild, but the sense of it is old, not a cliché. When Hollywood gets a hold of things, you know to watch out, don’t get spoon fed infotainment by Ph.D. hot shots in cognitive manipulation. Don’t look for wisdom from other people’s stories as filtered through the Hollywood profit/ propaganda industry.

Original Dick Kelty Pack

Wearing the big old style frame pack makes me a lightning rod, I stand out, I become a gateway for opening up the dynamics of social construction and comparisons thereof.  When I was a kid of 12 years old my parents took me to new York City and bought me an original Kelty pack; I’ve kept the same style pack ever since. I love my old Keltys.

For a long time the debate was about internal or external frames, on the basis of comfort and maneuverability. The weight was essentially the same for equivalent volume external or internal frame packs. This was like an SUV vs. large station wagon or min-van controversy, whatever. Today, for a lightweight pack that has equivalent volume to carry 35 or 40 pounds (which you need to do on occasion after a resupply before a long stretch with no resupply), there still is not that great a weight difference between my old Kelty pack itself and the new stuff. My point, the old gear still serves, sure it’s a bit heavier but so what, am I supposed to go buy a new $300 dollar pack every year because it weighs .3 pounds less? What about all the wasted material, plastic, metal and consumerism involved with that?

One assumption run into: new is always improved or better. As technology changes former things get recapped with the new; the same underlying functions are restated in new ways. A pack is still a pack you know, it still has to go on your back, still has to carry weight. The fundamentals don’t change.

Sometimes new is gratuitously created for a consumer market, through a process of planned obsolescence. The function of every car ever made is the same; did we need all those different forms, each with different brakes etc.?  No, many products are simply foisted in us through consumer inertia and then we are supposes to think it’s better because it costs more or it is new. My pack is perfectly serviceable and weighs about the same as an internal frame or frameless pack that can carry 40 plus pounds.

The Luddites didn’t want textile handwork to be replaced by machines. They resisted change because it meant their jobs were becoming obsolete. I don’t think any technological change in hiking gear in the last 40 years rises to the level of what the Industrial Revolution did to handwork. In fact, the ultra light paradigm loses you weight in the exact proportion to how you are then exposed to discomfort and being unprepared for safety and weather issues.

The Book

The trail has become like a tourist town, popularized, too many people coming; the essence of the original special qualities is diluted, diminished. The book and movie Wild: Lost and Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, by Cheryl Strayed, has brought tons of people to the trail that would not have come otherwise. This is too bad, as what was once a genuine community of under the radar long distance hikers, has now become a stereotype, a mass image, commercialized, the sincere has turned to spurious. Bill Bryson’s book about the AT did the same thing. Look for another one soon about the Continental Divide Trail. The Hollywood movie with Martin Sheen about the Camino de Santiago was another genuine community buster.

So far everyone who has seen the movie mentions the transformational aspect, but shit, so what, there are 1000s of hiker journals online that already have this. The transformational potential was known in the genuine subculture, now it’s a cliché.

Last Great Adventure

I’m working a certain angle in dissecting and deconstructing what I see is a negative influence on the trail and on outdoor behavior. I can still see that beyond all this, beyond my thesis in this journal, is the impulse for people to go have a great adventure. This is in many respects an American and human tradition. Go find yourself through an adventure.

Lots of thru hikers congregate at resupply points. More than an athletic event, a thru hike is an adventure, a chance to follow the circus, follow the Grateful Dead, be a member of a tribe, to party and fuck outside the control of society and Mom and Dad, a chance to join the story, be in the book, to live a modern Canterbury Tales. IN this sense, wanderlust and taste for adventure is transposed onto a wilderness, nature context and subtext.

In a world of modernizing trends, that has inextricably led to more and more individual isolation and alienation, joining a group of like-minded people on a big adventure has got to be exhilarating.

Over the millennia, an impulse for individual trajectory always sought to be free of numbing social constraint. The boundless creativity inherent in each one of us was held down by autopilot cultural dogma and status quo tradition. Eventually, in the West, the humanism of the Classical Greeks, the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the 1960s and now the Internet and personal digital devices, all added up to blasting the modern American out into the space of near pure individual volition.  It’s ironic that once achieved, it turns out that this space is antithetical to our strongest suit as a species, group orientation and cooperation. The pendulum has swung too far; now we are out on the edge of too much individual and not enough family and community.

Thus, joining the thru hiker herd is like coming home to where a hiker and a person needs to be, belonging, a group member, exercising our great social capacity, and the associated status symbols, narratives and memes are all like precious water in the desert of modern American alienation. No wonder people don’t examine it too much; it feels great; who cares what the props are, it’s just fantastic to be inside of a meaningful movie.

Hiking Gear

I’m not advocating the 50 pound pack here or that folks bring everything along on a hike but the kitchen sink. My advice would be to strike a middle of the road posture, where adequate prep is taken for safety, weather and for ethical practices, and where excess weight can be lost.

A big part of the current gear paradigm harkens back to the new minimalism, ultra light hiking, and this makes it so food storage has become a problem for lack of options. The only option left is one no one will advocate in public: store food in your tent and/or sleep with it. Hikers are also exposed to more preventable safety issues by not having enough clothes, shelter, food, first aid, map info etc.

Another aspect of understanding hiking gear is the role of planned obsolescence. No industry is above it. It seems ironic to call camping gear an industry, as the whole point is to get away from mechanistic industrialization, yet you are at the same time enabled by that…

Lighter in camping gear is analogous to faster in the digital tech industry.  At this stage of the game the gains are really marginal both for lighter gear or faster computers. What we have now is hype, making gratuitous product for consumption based on a newer-is-better mythology.  And if gear gets so light, what about any work or challenge? Engaging a hike starts to become about quantifying and reducing numbers as an obsession, like diet and calories, like sin; it clearly plays on impulses to purity. My point to hikers: become conscious of the advertising net you’re spun into, wake up, question the assumptions, weigh the implications, look beyond industry implanted narratives, see the big picture, where are you going and why? Do you really need the new stuff?  Find desires and goals that are congruent with wilderness values more than personal convenience. Don’t be seduced by wave upon wave of new gadgets and hype. The hype to spend is just as much for minimalist gear as it is for gratuitous gear.

The idea that all is fun, convenient, faster, farther, is a party line; it’s a marketing and rhetorical concoction, a paradigm people have bought into; it’s stoked by producers, and consumers, for an outdoors, hiker market.

I’m fairly conservative when it comes to fads. I’m Mr. Pad Thai, I get the same things at restaurants over and over. I see the hype to get useless new stuff: insoles, hi tech walking sticks, stuff you really don’t even need but a narrative has been created about a product, desire is stoked, stories are repeated until no one knows where they came from. Sales people repeat industry-sponsored memes; consumers suck it up, want, need, necessity, all rolled into a pitch. As with anything, you have to take your own measure of it, assess the lay of the land; see where you want to fall out. Question the assumptions.

Did we come from nature needing insoles on our footwear and thus need $50 after-market insoles? When did shoes stop being sold that were stand-alone OK as they were out of the box? Were we born unable to balance and walk straight and thus in need of $150 titanium walking sticks? If we wanted to cross-country ski, why didn’t we just do that?

We meet Joe from the Army’s Fort Sill in Oklahoma; he is totally on the gear. OK, we have to talk about gear, might as well again, revisit Leopold, Thorstein Veblen, a certain fascination with stuff, beholden to the gratuitous, conspicuous consumption of stuff to make the economy go; stuff, new stuff, the old gets sloughed off, no wonder McLuhan saw the regeneration of the old in the new, it’s the same shit repackaged to make it sexy to buy again; the upgrade, got to have it. This is what they call hype. And people are profoundly susceptible to it, to being seduced by a new, novel thing.

Gear is stuff; stuff is what marks status. To ask people to step outside that context is to ask people to transcend something they are conditioned like baboons to respond to. Conditioned by genes, memes and culture, by advertising hype. Advertising uses cognitive science; the narratives you hear are indeed, conscious manipulation.

Practically speaking, there is form and there is function. Form is what status gets pegged to, art, any sort of social construct. Function is separate, but, to what purpose? Form and function are intertwined, difficult to separate, how many ways can you make a scissors? They can be separated when you see that the form of car body styles, or some such is just an endless dangling of the new over the old. We get bored, new stuff wakes us up for a minute, entertains us.

Same as any business and industry, demand for new product is stoked from the shadows. You get a calculated seduction, planned obsolescence, new useless gadgets like hiking poles, insoles. REI and Backpacker Magazine stoke the fires in a haze of green-washed, pseudo-science hype. A whole lot of assumptions get made based on the premise that more, new and different is better, that a new style is desirable, that value is somehow being added.

Just like the way cars all started to look alike, tents and gear are now all the same. There is a certain herd mentality to play off against, among the makers and users. There is a tendency to come into the field and want what all the other guys are getting. And like Windows 98, you spend 1000s of dollars and then in two years they make it obsolete. Victims of planned obsolescence and gratuitous product changing should get a rebate. The older you are, the more rebate you get for a lifetime of spending on the sane type of products.

Being all about gear and weight is one iteration of the hiking experience; you have to suffer these guys, as we do others, in other areas of life, who want to externalize experience, focus on the material end, those who lack imagination and an inner life. Like the analytics movement in sports, using numbers to describe the game opens up a micro-quantification, which is something entirely different than knowing the flow of the game, or a hike. The game, basketball, is about more than analytics, and likewise hiking is much bigger than the goal, the miles per day, the gear; that stuff is for beginners. Great players and coaches don’t confuse analytics for being good, numbers are only a tool, not the end all object. Likewise there is a lot in hiking and outdoors experience to move beyond and towards.

What the seduction of numbers reveals is an autopilot devotion to Enlightenment rationalization, that facts can be known, that Reason is all it takes. Truth exists and our rational minds only need to tease it out. The only trouble, there’s no heart to this, no authenticity; this is the breaking point where the Romantics and Transcendentalists pushed back, said “no, we’re not billiard balls” in some mechanistic universe. The essence of what hikers hope to find in nature, in the wild and outdoors, is not quantifiable. Those who make numbers the primary thing are missing the boat; they are not transformational hikers, they’re athletic event hikers for whom nature is just a stage and a prop for an exercise program or conquest/ goal-oriented behavior.

The outdoor industry comes up with a lot of self-serving hype. Below are a few examples.

A: the water is all bad and contaminated with giardia and therefore you need all these expensive filters and purifiers, never mind that a pitifully small number of people actually get sick

B: in the rain you get wet and therefore there are magic fabrics that wick moisture off your feet and body, there are water-proof fabrics that “breathe” and get the wet off the inside, never mind that when it’s raining, you get wet anyway and with 100% humidity, nothing “breathes” or “wicks” anywhere

C: you need hiking poles, because somehow there is a shortage of sticks in the woods these days, and since you need them, they might as well be ultra light, never mind the metal, rubber and plastic consumption or that no one needed these things before sticks came into such short supply, and sticks are too heavy anyway

D: you need aftermarket insoles, because why? Because God made human feet in need of special supports? Because shoe manufacturers can’t sell a stand-alone product? Because you need “cushioning” and “support”? 

D1: a corollary here is the paleo shoe: you need no support but we’ll still sell you something for that

E: the ground is cold and hard and therefore you need an endless supply of new and lighter sleeping pads of all types, never mind that the old style Ridgerest closed foam pad is still the lightest and has entirely adequate R-value

It’s always some new shit. Everyone who is selling has the narrative, the story; but that’s all it is. Challenge the narrative; fight the power. See clearly what the functions are that you need, what may be driven by hype and want, and don’t get sold a bill of goods.

According to Marshall McLuhan, whatever technology there was before just gets recapped in new ways, the essential underlying activity, hiking in the woods remains unchanged. It’s the subtle twists and tech that changes. Change for change’s sake is a lot of what we are seeing today.  This is what has driven the American economy for a long time, consumerism, the creation of artificial needs to keep the money flowing. And if you think the outdoor industry is not part of this larger trend, think again.

Some of the thru-hikers and their wannabes have a real keep up with the Jones’s feel about gear, appearance and trail gossip, who knows who; it’s the most petty level of involvement, one that would be clearly seen as superficial and small-minded in town. It’s like taking an automobile tour of the USA and having it be all about your car and not the landscape. There are those who have bought into trail culture hook, line and sinker; this will only stand to get worse after the movie Wild comes out; the book has already cheapened things. We see them coming, when the first comment is about gear we start tune them out.  

Food Storage

Food Storage Practices on Public land: No agency, group or equipment manufacturer is on record anywhere as endorsing storing hiker food in one’s tent or and/or sleeping with your food, yet today this practice is so common as to be taken for granted.

How is it that this has come to pass? For one the ultra-light hiking paradigm has fused with a modern trend towards individual focus on all things, to make it so hiking is less about wilderness values and more about personal convenience.

Novices emulate the thru-hiker style and end up with inadequate storage options; they end up exposed to safety hazards just to hew to a style.

The surest way to protect your food, to honor nature and not let animals get food habituated, is to bring a hard-sided bear proof container or an Ursack everywhere. There are frequently no trees or inadequate trees to hang food from. For 2.2 pounds and $300 a hiker can get a Wild Ideas carbon fiber canister with enough volume to carry 10 or more days of food. The trouble? The new ultra light, ling distance style is to carry almost nothing, to save weight, so as to hike farther and faster and thus packs now are not big enough to fit a bear canister and the whole food protection scene is seen as one big inconvenience. Food protection has major dissonance with the ultra light paradigm.

If bear canisters are not required, hikers ditch them immediately. Well listen, hurrying is not required either. The moral of the hare and tortoise comes to mind. Slow and fast. These are values relative to underlying assumptions; the assumptions then affect the gear, the structure of a hike.

Ecclesiastes 9.11 ‘the race is not to the swift’; “I again saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift and the battle is not to the warriors, and neither is bread to the wise nor wealth to the discerning nor favor to men of ability; for time and chance overtake them all.” This opens up tons more metaphorical potential: enjoy your time under the sun, you don’t know when it will end or why, slow down, smell the roses; a hike is not a race in the first place!

If you store your food and cook in your tent, what else gets fudged too? If one rule is bullshit, they all are. The veneer of ethics has been broken. Leave No Trace is passé, widely ignored. What is needed is a concerted effort by land management agencies and trail organizations to tighten up the food storage protocols. No agency, manufacturer or group will advocate storing food in a tent, for animal safety reasons, for food habituation reasons and for burning up the tent reasons. Tent food storage is a convenience move by faster farther types who are too lazy to hang their food or protect it otherwise. Never mind that in most high country you can’t hang food anywhere anyway. This fudging if food storage all to save weight, and time, everyone is in a hurry.

In-tent food storage and cooking is aided and abetted by tent manufacturers. They will not say the design is for cooking and storing food in the tent, but the design clearly shows it is. I saw thru-hikers using the new tents just this way; I saw tent manufacturers at the PCTA Trail Days selling just these conveniences.

Poor Practice

Trail switchback cutting is an example of ethics blurring that has resulted in a rule. Cutting switchbacks is now a fineable offense on public lands. The writing is on the wall for other similar hiker/ thru-hiker effects from lack of ethics: illegal fires, stripping of wood biomass for fires, rogue camp spots near the trail, trash buried instead of carried out, improper food storage, swimming in pond/ lake ecosystems covered with DEET and sunscreen.

It used to be that Boy Scouts and hunters were seen as the purveyors of high impact, poor practice. Now plenty of hikers fill the same bill. In spite of the Leave No Trace suggestions plastered everywhere, hikers have come to ignore these ethics as just more signage, as a pro forma line that gets tagged onto all the other rules and regulations.

Too much rule breaking always ends up with more regulation. With the increased numbers of users; the writing is on the wall: quotas, limited access, reserved campsites, no fires, pack out your shit etc. Unfortunately the current political environment has resulted in a progressive cutting of funds for public lands. This means there is no enforcement of any rules. Hikers have figured that out.

In 650 miles we saw one public lands employee in the trail. The upshot, with increased levels of poor practice, more and more people and less and less management; the outdoors environment will be progressively degraded, wildlife and other natural resources more highly impacted.

Maps and Digital Technology

Map-wise, the new thru-hiker-driven style is delimited by a narrow scope focused only in the trail corridor. The maps are online, free, from multiple sources, with pictures of the camp spots, reviews, all spoon-fed from the smart phone.

Some thru hikers had no idea what Mt. Rainier was, Mt. Adams, Mt. St. Helens, if it is off the trail corridor, it doesn’t exist, there’s no identifiers. The map is not the territory and it never has been. We met Half Mile, doing his first thru hike, getting data for a new series of maps; nice guy.

The trail-only type maps amount to looking for your evidence under the streetlight. There is a whole territory adjacent that is never explored or known. A more comprehensive set of maps is not carried because that would weigh too much, take up too much memory; the specific goal of doing the hike puts blinders on at many levels. As such, you see a lot of hikers who can’t identify Mt. Rainier and who haven’t a clue what Forest Service road to take if needed to get off the trail.

Tech changes result in at once: more convenience but make hikers more exposed to risk and danger. This is like the losing practical know-how to industrial production in many ways. What if you needed to make shoes or butcher and preserve meat? If you run out of battery, voila no more maps. Kim always carries paper maps, regional to specific, she wants to know how to get off the trail and where we are in the big picture. Sure it weighs more; but weight of maps is not our primary concern. At some point, willful lack of information and access to that information is stupid.

The smart phones, headphones, music, make it so hikers are turned into themselves; they walk by in a bubble, unavailable. It’s actually weird, and this type of behavior has become normal, the retreat from being present. Click a button and see from the GPS where you are, how far to the next campsite. You meet someone face to face and their dumb ass is on the phone, not present, this is the new normal.

Smart phones and trail map apps makes it so many people can come out less prepared, less invested, too easy, same as Everest, without the tech, no way so many people could do it. The real project takes a lot of work and prep. I look to see a lot of crashing and burning after the new me-phone-generation plus folks who read the Wild book and saw the movie all get out there and find this is no computer game.

Hordes, Population Growth, Mass Participation

At Goat Rocks Wilderness, outside Seattle and Portland, there were hordes of people around the Packwood glacier, the jump-off point to a spectacular, dramatic knife-edge ridge hike with Mt. Rainier as a backdrop.  With these hordes quantity starts to outstrip quality; the wilderness raison d'être, solitude, is lost in mass fervor of alienated ants swarming out of Seattle to get a taste of dramatic natural honey.

They ought to close some national parks for a year or two at a time, an Abbey-esque prescription, solitude for solitude’s sake alone, minus the people.

The conscious hawking of a destination or activity, for profit, for fun, for whatever, cheapens it; it’s the tourist paradox, let the cat out of the bag, no more mystery, same as Sonoma, Aspen, Woodstock, VT, the hordes destroy what it was they were coming to see, it becomes superficial, about exteriors, about gear, stuff, exteriors.

Because they come individually, thru hikers and tourists don’t realize the overall effect and impact of the hordes they bring. The people who glom on, the trail angels, the people who organize, the PCTA et al, also don’t realize the collective negative impact. As my friend Larry Barnett said, cachet turns to cliché. The very qualities that are supposed to be found end up being lost. For hikers, greater numbers means greater impacts. To get away from the hordes, to find solitude you have to go and create new camp areas, either just off the trail or in entirely new areas. Get-away camps just off trail on the PCT are then used by others. If you don’t try to get away you are over run by hikers at all the common spots.

Just like new products have to constantly be hawked for material consumerism, these magazines and entities have to constantly sell new and undiscovered areas. Adventure consumerism. More pristine places then get popularized, impacted and cheapened. Find the next great destination by Backpacker Magazine and REI! Impacts get magnified. This is how quantity, numbers and hype destroy inherent quality.

You need a certain amount of solitude to open up a transformative space; with too many people, you’re constantly sucked back into the normal social, cultural stuff that you’re trying to get away from. There are a lot of people on the PCT, with a growing percent all about town themes transposed onto a trail context. Goal orientation, materially focused, superficial, appearances, status, commuters, in a hurry, saw the movie, want to be transformed. Shit, this stuff is what the woods are supposed to cure, not enable.

If you’re looking for solitude, don’t do a thru-hike or be around the PCT on any simmer weekend or when all the thru hikers go through, avoid that scene. We discovered that many thru hikers don’t like thru hikers; they see the annoying cookie cutter aspect.

The Appalachian Trail (AT) is known for being a more social experience, more towns, more shelters, more paper journals in the shelters. The PCT was known for being more of a wilderness hike, less social. This is changing fast. Those wanting solitude will now have to focus on more off the beaten track areas, off trail, and unfortunately, this will mean overall less and less places to go to find the inspiration offered by more or less wild nature. This will mean what little is left of unspoiled nature in the lower 48 is fast on the chopping block for spoilage.

Late summer weekend in Sisters Wilderness, people, people, people. The trail is less special now. Too many people have spoiled the genuine culture of it. Mass media has corrupted it. The Wild book and movie have brought out the hordes. Same as in 2005 with Bill Bryson’s AT book, sane as the Camino de Santiago movie. I don’t like it.

Wild the book is more about transformational themes than about any wilderness ethics. As such, Cheryl Strayed is more in line with the type of hike Kim and I do, transformational hiking we call it. And while we support the transformational theme, we don’t support that 1000s and 1000s of new people will be drawn to the PCT, without any training, background or wilderness ethics, we can all reasonably expect there to be increasing unacceptable impacts, hiker-caused forest fires, poor behavior. The former sense of the PCT as a more solo, wilderness-oriented hike will go by the wayside. Thanks Hollywood and Oprah.

The PCTA magazine a few years ago had and article on Billy Goat, an emeritus senior statesman long distance hiker, where he had a similar message to what I’m saying now. I guess the message is just not catching on.  

I have a sense that population growth overall, in the big cities adjacent to the PCT and AT, has a correlation with the increased trail use we have seen. Indeed, Portland and Seattle are among the fastest growing cities in the nation, to the tune of 25,000 new people each every two years, many of these young, recreational enthusiasts. No wonder we felt over run in all the attractive, Cascade areas outside these cities, in the summer season. The trick: go to places where no one is attracted to, places not advertised in Backpacker magazine (and don’t tell anybody if it is nice), learn to appreciate the mundane forest, cultivate an interest in that (trees, mushrooms, lichens, ferns) things that can be found in less spectacular areas.

When people all say, you’ve got to go here, we know that is exactly where we don’t want to go. For example, don’t go to the Enchantment Permit Area.

The US is the third most populous country in the world, 318 million people. Up until 2008 the US population was growing at a decent clip. The higher numbers of people are here now, they want recreation, to get outside. The simple fact: there are too many people over all to find solitude in the public lands set aside for such purpose. The more fun, attractive places get advertised, the more they will not provide the very qualities people go there to find. We saw this on the John Muir Trail (JMT), outside of LA and San Francisco, people, people, people, 50 or more per day. Don’t even go to the JMT and not expect total hordes. The only way to find solitude is to go way off trail and at that time, the animals are saying, “can’t we have any peace from these things?!” Conclusion, the wilderness experience is being diluted and destroyed by too many people. This is beyond public land management agencies ability to deal with, they can have quotas, but then they are de-funded and have no staff to enforce anything. Just like humanity is doing to the globe, Americans are doing to their parks. As a species we’re a scourge, and like thru hikers, we come individually, not knowing the cumulative effect we bring. 

From the era of the 1964 Wilderness Act, where the idea was to set aside areas ‘untrammeled by man’, what we see today in 2014, 50 years later, is one butt load of trammeling. Kim says “people are starving” for something real, for nature; they are obese, they have too much and yet not enough.

Individualism and the American Way

Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it. Most easy characterizations of the US and Western civilization, individualist trend present it as a simple zero sum game between individual and community. Nothing could be farther from the truth. What we have is a whole, a symbiosis, anything individual has to be enmeshed in the community it emerges from. One without the other does not exist or make sense.

The US preoccupation with individual things has gotten to be a problem. Just as we achieve tremendous freedom to shape and make our own personal worlds, we need to cooperate to solve large common problems. The preponderance of our goal, individual freedom, then makes the ground of necessary cooperation impossible; irony of ironies; an ultimate Greek tragedy for the ages; just as we arrive at a beautiful space of freedom and volition, it’s all undone by the very same value it was supposed to support.

The US has become a country of what can you do for me. The JFK and MLK communal idealism, killed by forces of 1% power and control status quo. Things have swung to the individual. What a great way to divide and conquer! Make cooperation impossible at the meme level. Today there’s a loss of consciousness of class, unions, group solidarity. Cell phones are a salient marker of the trend. Me is the critical component, not any community-based movement. Sure a crowd source demonstration or action can be produced, but then all go back home and it’s over, a one off.

As noted, the individual trajectory started way long ago, the Classical Greeks, humanism, Martin Luther and the Reformation, read the Bible yourself in your own language, the trajectory now comes to ripe fruition, reap the harvest of this pendulum swing, everyone is the Prince of their own private kingdom. This, however, is too far out of balance, individuals cannot be isolated from the community, from the social matrix that supports them in the first place. The current milieu is a crazy house of cards that can’t last.

Where are the values? What can you do for me? This not a good value to base the solving of large problems on. Every dog for himself, herding cats, is no way to invoke the type of cooperation needed to solve major socio-economic-environmental justice issues. There has to be some sacrifice of individual prerogative in favor of the commons. On the trail this means cooling it on the hurry and athletic event hikes, bring it back to better practice, smaller more high quality bites.

I love the new freedom, the whole world at my fingertips, right now as I type. I notice where things have gotten to: we have these incredible devices that suck us in, the mega-super typewriter that’s a full encyclopedia, map set, science text, world literature and on and on all rolled into one. I can’t quite make out how my past community enculturation, knowledge, and possible wisdom will fuse with this hyper individual present dynamic; I’m acting it out as we speak. I have to trust in my joy of transition zones and fusions; that I’ll find a way that will work.

Where is the counter culture, civil rights, union, women’s and environmental movements today? Apparently nowhere. The Occupy movement faded out, too short an attention span, too individually oriented, too hike your own hike oriented, no Muir, no Leopold, Abbey, Carson or MLK, no leader to define the common thread, no Ghandi. With Occupy, worshipping individual choice trumped strength in numbers. Gay marriage, an individual choice issue, is OK but class, group issues and global warming are not? Who’s got their eye on the ball from the younger generation? I don’t see it. I see sleepwalking, hope for business as usual, no worries.

Maybe somehow the hyper individual stuff will morph, in ways that can’t be anticipated now.

The Times They Are a Changing

Unfortunately hiking, which started out as appreciation of nature, has turned into one more avenue of exploitation and commodification. Yet as mentioned, there are few great adventures left; society has no good jobs; no wonder they are out here looking to find themselves; it’s more about that than about appreciation of wilderness values.

As such, I can’t argue with the transformational aspect. That’s what I value too.  A long distance hike is inherently transformational along personal and social levels, and maybe some wild nature seeps into your soul in the process.

However, I see that community and Transcendentalist values have been lost in the move to convenience and quantity, in the swing of the pendulum to individualism. What’s needed is to swing that pendulum back, away from tech, gadgets, gear focus and convenience and more onto a focus on the commons, on biodiversity, on nature itself. What’s needed is to find some respect and get the focus off the self and onto the bigger picture. The PCTA and LDHA can help steer this through de-emphasizing the thru hike and promoting section hikes with better practice, with the focus on appreciating nature and its value, not getting from one end the other with some type of quantified achievement as the primary goal.

In a socially constructed reality there is no Truth, only values; “facts”, inherently biased, merely reinforce the values of a particular paradigm.

Any group is defined by its lowest common denominator. For thru hikers the bar needs raising for multiple reasons: the behavior is at odds with established wilderness values and low impact practices, the activity doesn’t mesh with what people hope to find in wilderness; hiking has gotten to be more of an athletic event. An athletic event is fine for what it is but when you are enacting it on public lands, in wilderness contexts, that brings to bear other responsibilities and values.

People are drawn to the immersion in nature that you get on the trail; older folks and some young appreciate the many faces of nature, the forests, the subtlety; most goal-oriented hikers see forests as a green tunnel, as a lesser expression, they want to get to the sexy stuff. And so why are they even there if they don’t like it? Because of the pressure to do the whole thing. It’s a way to accomplish something cool, an outside the box thing that just happens to be overlaid on nature and a tradition of wilderness values. So people hurry through, get bored with California, bored with the Oregon green tunnel. You just have to ask why then, why are hordes of people on the trail if the actual nature where they are is just a prop to getting a certificate?

It’s clear that the trail has become less about nature and more about something else.

One of the coolest parts of California is the Klamath Mountains, a range with tremendous geographic and biological diversity. If there is any mountain range to appreciate, this is it. And yet by the time thru hikers get to the Klamath, they are sick of California and can’t wait to get out. Case closed: 1000s of people found in a great natural area and they don’t want to be there.

Corporate Corruption and PCTA Trail Days

We stop at Cascade Locks for the PCTA Trail Days, a 3 day event. It is very clear from the Trail Days sponsors that the PCTA is in bed with corporate America, particularly Backpacker Magazine, nemesis of solitude, wilderness and special places. I remember when we went to see Gipsy Kings at the Sonoma Jazz Fest and a big Chevron logo was behind the stage, entirely obscene prostitution. The people who have the money and who are antithetical to wilderness values, they are the sponsors? To do what, diminish their sin? REI is in bed with US Bank, an ultimate vampire squid. No, you don’t have to do that, principle is more important than money. Fuck the money PCTA, keep your values, don’t get muzzled and co-opted by corporate sponsors whose primary agenda is profit.

Trail Days was mainly about a bunch of 20 somethings getting stoned and drunk to excess. This is the hike your own hike philosophy sanctioning alcohol and drug abuse. For many a thru hike is one big party and blowing your brains out in every town and resupply stop. This sort of style by extension ends up with people violating baseline outdoor ethics.

Hike your own hike shouldn’t go down the Yellow Brick Road of no judgment at all, to a complete relativism.

My end impression of Trail Days was that the interpretation provided by public land management agencies, the PCTA and LDHA, this was overshadowed by commercial hype and partying. The event mirrored how things are on the trail, focused on gear, a party adventure.

Consumerism

I checked our Sierra Designs at Trail Days and talked with their representatives. What I saw: in order to sell, something novel had to be generated, a problem had to be created and then solved. What is the problem? Mummy bags are a problem. The consumer needs more comfort and convenience; a new novel design is necessary. Are we this easy to manipulate? The salesman said they consciously want to make other products obsolete. What about all the gear people already have? Is that supposed to go to the dump? Where is the money going to come from to have to buy all this new gear every year? The strategy is really nothing more than a quest for novelty to keep selling product; propose a bogus problem, then fix it/ sell the solution. See the Leopold quote about gadgets and sporting goods dealers.  Consumers buy this stuff hook line and sinker, even the hippie-like long hairs.

The once something catches on, everybody has it on the trail and others start to want it. This is all supposed to be actual added value, supposed to be “lighter”. I’d rather be a few pounds heavier and not be swept away by commercial hype.

Consumeristic hype layered in top of outdoor experience that inherently emphasizes inner transformation is a non sequitur, to hype it ruins it, defiles it, brings civilization to the wilderness, brings all the things you’re trying to get away from into the core of what you are doing. One thread of hype gets to be about individual comfort and gadgets vs. meeting the wild on its own terms with some sense of self-reliance. This is supposed to be a challenge, not all about comfort, not about bogus, artificial goals as the defining purpose. Another thread of hype, minimalism scoffs at comfort yet requires a set of very expensive gear, gear that fluctuates by style and planned obsolescence year by year, requiring the hiker to always buy more new stuff.

An interesting note: ultra light gear means that a hiker will have less stuff, and so for marketers to make up for the loss of revenue on volume of gear, ultra light gear has to cost about $300 a pound. The less of it there is, the more it costs! Yes, son, we need to charge you more for less, because that is where the value is! You don’t see many ultra lighters with dumpstered, homemade, thrift store gear. This is a middle class enterprise. An enterprise that plays on status and a submerged convenience/ individual comfort narrative.

I have to hand it to the minimalists though, they suffer a lot of discomfort, and not because minimally adequate comfort is not available, but because they choose to suffer, to save weight. You know David Douglas would have had more comfort if he could have. Who wants to sleep in a wet blanket? To boot, the minimalist imperative puts pressure on scarce natural resources.  The immediate trail area gets over used; trailside wood gets stripped out, small fire pits multiply for trailside one night stands, more wood is needed for fires as ultra lighters are not carrying stoves or fuel.  

With the constant hype to buy new camping stuff, a stream of trash is generated from the old stuff. New resources have to be used to produce new gear, yet the old gear is perfectly serviceable. So what if the old stuff weighs a few more pounds? What about the trash, the consumerism, the resources? Can we keep on consuming endlessly to satisfy each year’s new hype? What are we doing here folks?

Ethics

Break one rule, break them all. Once the dam is broken, the floodwaters of tolerating less ethics are released.

The pressure of the long distance hike as athletic event rather than wilderness experience makes it so normal protocols such as camping on durable substrates, adequately protecting food, safeguarding watersheds, fire safety, not cutting switchbacks etc., are routinely broken; people pull in late at night and sleep wherever they are, durable substrate or not. A whole new set of late night/ right next to trail camp spots are now facts on the ground. These sites violate common practice rules, like camp such and such so far from water or the trail. These sorts of rules are in place precisely because of high use and over use, which result in ugly unaesthetic effects, such as these frequent camp spots right on the trail. I call these campsites thru hiker Motel 6s.  

Having to camp right next the trail is an artificial need, an artificial pressure stemming from the over-riding need to go faster and farther to finish the trail in one season. Pretty much, insane goal-oriented, commuter, rat race, conquest behavior is being brought from the city to the wilderness and has in many ways, supplanted the environmentalist ethos of my youth in the 1960s and 70s. If you weren’t hiking until 10:PM, you would be able to find an appropriate camp spot. If you didn’t need to hike 25 miles a day, you could carry a bit more gear and enjoy the ride.

There is real necessity and artificial necessity. It is wrong to disrespect and abuse nature out of an artificial pressure to hurry through and cut corners on proper wilderness ethics. This is wrong. The powers that be need to address this.

The athletic event frame puts pressure on scarce resources, for more fires, fires to cook because there is no stove or fuel carried, from pressure to lower the pack weight, because enough clothes to stay warm are not carried.

In 2014 you had 1300 long distance hikers start from Mexico wanting to go all the way to Canada, 1300 times however many nights and camp spots. This is a lot of impact. Incrementally impacts from poor practices and low ethics add up and start to create the impression that the trail is not a sacred place; it has become high use. Out of such high use scenarios and unaesthetic consequences come increasing rules and regulations. Too bad the public land agencies have no enforcement presence and too bad hikers have figured out they can get away with just about anything.  This all represents the degradation of a wilderness ethic.

Any social group, such as thru hikers, is defined in public by its lowest denominators. Plenty adhere to some ethics. Many are great. It is the lowest denominator that defines the whole lot of them, just like any human general impression of a group.

I suggest the PCTA and associated Long Distance Hiking Association take away recognition for completing a thru hike. Section hikes can be emphasized, better practice, clean up, lower impact emphasized. Take away the kick-off event, change the channel, take the rat race aspect away, bring back solitude, quiet, values of preservation. Consciously emphasize quality over quantity. Carry a little more weight, use your old gear, be prepared, be less exposed, enjoy what you do, don’t hurry.

Memes

We met Holy Holly on a rainy day in the woods; we camped near each other; she came over and we started to chat. She’s a fire and brimstone Christian. You can’t really develop a conversation here, just a stalemate, a dead end, a point/ counterpoint, horns locked, narratives repeated over and over, literalism; no room for any nuance, an extreme example of the same type of literalism we see in politics and also what you can get on the trail vis-à-vis hiking and its values and purposes.

Regardless of faith and literalism, anyone with a well-defined line bears an implicit judgment on those with different lines; it’s a psychological geometry of open and closed doors, of how values define the territory. This is the anatomy of social construction, culture, symbolism etc. Some examples of socially defined territory, worldviews and paradigms: conservative, liberal, fundamentalist religion, secular humanist, ultra light hiking.

Memes are packets of signficata. They get transmitted culturally, in a social dimension.  From Wikipedia: ‘A meme is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture." “A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.”

Come along with me here into a small excursion into metaphor. What might a meme look like? These symbolic structures and units of meaning could look like atoms and molecules. As we know from the atomic chart, some elements are compatible and others not. Some are more inclined to bond than others. Atoms need the right valence electrons to join together in complex molecules. Memes are the same way, social valence electrons determine what can be heard and known, what people lock onto. This falls back to the feet of content, to paradigms and primary assumptions, and also to the context of physical brain process and structure, to hard-wired brain pathways. And so here on the trail, a lot of interactions transpire where people share their memes through chat and gossip and there isn’t the valence to connect.

Valence potential may have more to do with temperament and personality than actual content, depends.  It could be that once content blazes the pathways into your brain, the structure then guides the content and it becomes progressively harder to see outside your own box. If Kim and my hike was a molecule, it would be a ‘conglomerate’, not pure quartz or pure anything. ‘Truth” as socially constructed, is nothing more than purity and congruence with the meme, a stasis within a particular house of mirrors that all reinforces the habitual and desired imagery and values.

An encounter between different hikes, with different memes sometimes becomes a matter of volume and repetition, vs. listening. Listening may not be possible as the metaphorical symbolic molecular shapes just don’t match up. Hikers with different values, like us and Holy Holly keep trying to put square pegs in round holes.

Lots of people have a wellspring of interesting, quality stuff to share, the trick is to tap into their meme shape to allow it out, allow the expression of it, without opening an oil and water, square peg/ round hole dynamic. Thus, effective listening can be a conscious tactic to lubricate the bonding of dis-similar materials. Knowing the lay of the socially constructed land helps too, how men and women/ genders differ, how liberals and conservatives differ, how Mexicans and US differ, how thru hikers, section hikers and weekenders differ.

We differ along socially constructed levels that are fundamentally unprovable. We differ along avenues of preference. This goes for hikes and everything else. Preference for a certain type of hike just is, there is no need to prove it or compare it; it just is. Therefore, appealing to facts, truth, common sense, that goes nowhere. What will go somewhere is knowing how we work, and making an effort to see the preferred values underneath.

There is a limited set of variations people come up with for memes. In all societies and cultures people cover the same sorts of ground. On this ground there is a lot of cross-over of values, overlap, the overlap areas open up apparent inconsistencies, people notice right away if someone has a serious purity-based line and then their molecule gets a crack in it.

The inconsistent application of principle and value is seen as unfair; we’re starting here to crack open how we tick as a species, how moral capacities for stuff like purity and fairness are running our show. But, we are all crooked trunks. We might aspire to be straight, pure quartz; it’s inevitable we are not.

Meme shapes are such that we save up the flavor of former combinations and reactions, we then unleash the stuffed memory of it each time, each tie we repeat the narrative and lock it in even more; this is not tapping a possible opening point of commonality.

Even Christians get into doctrinal disputes, nearer my God to thee, this disputation dynamic never ends. It’s not the memes themselves at stake here, it is what underlies, something about the quality of the nucleus, the primary assumption, that determines what can stick on or not. It’s the gravity, the mass, the weak and strong nuclear forces, these are what set the boundaries for how meme shapes come into being. It’s an organic whole, one that we are a part of, one where content and process are inextricably interwoven. And what underlies memes? Feelings? A deeper sense of being beyond words? Values? Whatever it is, we feel it, a need to be right, to stick up for our space, our shape in the universe.

Ultra light hikers have certain values: faster/ farther, convenience, and so all is made to fit those assumptions.  

In a relative sense, values are like software, they’re just a program. In an ultimate sense, values are universally shared: thou shalt not steal etc. But we know “universal values” are typically applied only to our own in-group. People kill and disrespect out-groupers all the time. Any value can be fudged through necessity, or preference, be that group or personal necessity or preference.

What underlies memes is maybe just survival. Survival cannot be had alone for we are a social species. Hence, memes are themes that reinforce the needs of the in-group, the critical survival unit. This dynamic we have adapted to, is then transferred to hiking and all sorts of other modern activities that are not about survival per se but elicit the same behavioral dynamics we have as a species. 

Back to square pegs, round holes and socially constructed valence potential. In many contexts it is frustrating to not be heard for what you mean to say, relationships, politics, hiking. It’s just that there are many different prescriptions for the same condition and not everyone will take the same pill. Do we then want a one size fits all, regressive-type medicine or a nuanced, progressive prescription? This also depends on our software model of causality, direct, systemic? Some hikers like things more black and white, others are more comfortable in muddy river country. Molecular meme shape.

With religious fundamentalists, the prescription was so strict I had to give up engaging them. It went nowhere; no flex at all, one way only. Political and hiking fundamentalists are similar. It’s a Venus flytrap, a meme cul-de-sac. 

I’m at a level of wanting to know how houses are built, what are the materials, what’s the purpose, the goal? When I run into people who don’t care about that and rather insist that their house is the only true house; I just have a hard time engaging.

‘Every man’s way is right in his own eyes.” Proverbs 21.2 This is like Thomas S. Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, with memes, all “evidence” is shoehorned into the paradigm. The rubber meets the road where memes and paradigms converge, in the damp, dripping woods under a tree with Holy Holly going on like a broken record and me wanting to play jazz. It turns out that the literalism of the re-born Christian fits like a glove with the whole purity narrative of ultra light hiking.   

Status and Quantification

Who am I with all these values and ideas? Who am I to think my ideas might be worthy of some type of status? I’m a hiker who came of age in the 1970s with certain paradigms set in place. I’ve seen the emphasis change, re: values in outdoors, wilderness contexts and I don’t like it. I think the status re: behavior in wilderness/ outdoor settings and through ultra light hiking has been set on the wrong markers. Am I right? Are status and style changes just inevitable? Have I made a case? That’s up to the reader to decide.

Hiking the whole PCT in one season is like getting a Ph.D.; it’s an arbitrary benchmark that quantifies what? With schools much is clearly about status: Harvard, you’re going to pay for that. There is a whole presumption of elite, and of run of the mill. Hikes are the same. In the end however, a person educated at a state school or a JC can be smarter, more present, more intelligent etc.; a person’s fundamental qualities are not about numbers or the superficial status markers. Quality exists at interior levels beyond quantity. A quality hike for Kim and I is the same; the ground covered inside is what matters, otherwise it’s not a hike it’s an athletic event.

The status marker is an impossible to ignore visual sign. Hierarchical creatures that we are, status markers are impossible to entirely escape. Status is a stigma for the smallest, the lowest on the Totem pole, those with the junky house and car, for the scrawny chicken or baboon. On the trail, a big frame pack tends to be judged low by the minimalists, the high status folk.  

Status on the trail has an inverse relation to typical markers of more being better; on the trail, less is supposed to be better. Better compared to what? On one sense, ultra light is an extreme paradigm proposed in reaction to another extreme: autopilot heavy. Both have ended up as unconsciously perpetuated memes.

Status is really about dominance, a place in the group hierarchy. In a world where individuals predominate, status in any one group becomes sort of irrelevant. In the modern world, the individual is the measure, not the group.

The social camouflage of status came about in the context of small, and then larger group survival. In the modern world we have the opportunity to see through this game. In the modern world the individual has an opportunity to be freed from such constraints; all that is necessary for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is that one discovers who they are and to be congruent with their own interests and innate capacities. Status then, suffers a blow when there is no community to measure against.

Still, within any one group, exterior markers signify the game of status. Status is supposed to be something all in that group want to go for, that all will respect and buy into.

Given that the modern individual has been freed from small group survival constraints, happiness and fulfillment is basically an inner thing, not contingent on traditional status markers or upon group membership. (Or we could say that group membership has become much more diffuse, a disembodied thing, an abstraction in the mind rather than a face-to-face reality.) And now, in 2015, if one were to not examine the roots of aspiring to higher status markers, for example: the fancy car, Harvard, the minimalist pack, then one is just being run along by assumptions, paradigms and memes, like so much unconscious software.

That I have even got to this place of being able to consider any of this, is the fruit of modernization itself, of the secular humanist trajectory, where I have the privilege and opportunity to make the whole world out of myself, for good or ill.

Claiming territory with no status or neutrality, is a status of its own, no escape from the human house of mirrors I’m afraid; an honest reflection always has to put one’s own image into the pool’s surface, and then there you are in an endless sequence of looking into contexts, one above the other, until you get to… what? How many selves do we have looking over the shoulder of the other ones? When you see past your inner board of directors, who is that there seeing them? Who sees that watcher? By what measure?

What I see on the trail are many who appear to be all about quantification and numbers; this sense and status and style is transposed onto a wilderness context which is then diluted and made over into one more superficial, exteriorized, objectified modern human activity. This is old style status behavior laid onto a modern milieu where we are all free to not buy into status schemes generated by Hollywood and Madison Avenue. This type of status has nothing to do with survival, of the group, it’s about stoking the fires of consumer capitalism. Numbers and exteriors get folded into status issues and what we get on many trail interactions is an automatic pilot type discussion and series of comments that represent an unconscious unloading of an unexamined ultra light paradigm and its associated memes.

Sorry, it is not necessary to buy into that.

On the trail, according to the herd, the less you have the more status you have. This is the inverse of town where BMWs and more shows of wealth mark more status. On the trail, like with town life, there are exceptions. The question then gets to be, if you don’t buy into a particular status marker world, how do you deal with people everyday who are throwing it in your face? In town I just don’t care, there is enough space to ignore people with a lot of jewelry and make-up and fancy clothes, markers that set people off. I know I usually will want nothing to do with them: a Darth Vader giant truck with black rims and a Confederate flag? No thanks. I don’t go to upscale restaurants, costs too much. I don’t go to the cocktail parties or read the local gossip column. On the trail though, hikers of all stripes are all funneled into the same narrow corridor; interact you must; the cumulative effect of so many comments disrespecting Kim’s and my style has added up to a negative impression of thru hikers. Many thru hikers are really great, fun, perfect folks with all the same assumptions about life as me. For our overall impression: the lowest denominator prevails. The lowest denominator is: hikers lost in an unexamined status hierarchy.

Status gets to be about defining membership, the markers set off boundaries which you identify and join in with, or not. My tribe in town tends to be the North Bay, West County, scruffy, bearded, T-shirt, jean-wearing older folk who show by their costume what they generally do and don’t buy into. This all signifies a general milieu of what is valuable to pursue in in life.

As with any type of poser and wannabe, the exterior is important to emulate. Some dilettante hikers adopt the ultra-light gear but don’t really know how to use it, and they have even less ethics. This is like 10% yuppies who get pushed by the 1% to spend beyond their means to keep up status appearances. The richer top dogs drive the equation and the underdogs struggle to keep up with the cars and remodeling and coppertop fence posts. Likewise some hikers get pushed into territory where their exteriors get them beyond their appropriate natural boundaries. Wannabes are in over their head. It’s an over reaching for status without having the innards to back it up.

So then, is status really superficial and all about exteriors? Or is it earned with actions and inner work? As mentioned above in my muddling through human species developmental differences in the expression of status relative to small group survival: old style status is about exteriors; modern status is made by individuals themselves. For modern individuals values are not given on a silver platter to be taken without question. It is incumbent on us to question values and discover from whence they come and if they are worthy of holding.

Status manifests mostly as a competition within one class of people. Who cares about BMWs if you are into work trucks and tool racks? Who cares about Hindus if you are Christian? Who cares about surfers if you are a rock climber? You are not touched by people who are so different that their status markers don’t register with you. It is the competition within a group of fundamentally similar actors that leads to status competition issues and makes for a potential intimate enemy phenomenon, i.e. that people argue about the small, similar stuff, the fine points of doctrinal difference.

Interests, as opposed to status, are interclass or intergroup in nature. Interests can align across class and group boundaries, fundamentally or on a case-by-case basis. This is all to say, people are not cut clean and dry and may hold a variety of values, statuses, assumptions, interests etc. Exceptions can always be found to large generalities.

When status remains as a hazily bought into comparison of gear and style, when purportedly lower status hikers meet higher status ones, many say “we’re just section hiking”. No one ever says “we just thru-hiking”. But who is it that is determining what is higher or lower and why? People are profoundly sensitive to status and who has it marked how, especially if you feel disrespected as in ‘just section hiking”. The slights come out in the subtlest if ways. This is intimate enemy stuff. It helps to be centered in what you values are and to be able to articulate them.

It is monotonous and boring to be around people who define themselves only by the trail, gear, minimalist status, and Facebook cell phone connections all about them and their hike; no wider horizons; just another brick in the wall. It is rude to comment on our packs as if we buy into unexamined autopilot presumptions, rude as it would be to comment on someone’s car, house or clothes.

As you can see, I am not escaping civilization by running into so many bone-headed hikers who bring their autopilot presumptions to the woods. The coolest ones are the ones who never say a word about gear or where they are going or why. The coolest ones are just who they are and we talk about whatever. This is a meeting of minds.

On the trail everyone has a chance to be equal; all are in the same boat, it doesn’t matter if you design giant cargo ships, if you are a CEO or a millionaire; out in the woods it is just you and your stuff doing whatever hike you are doing. To manifest the hike your own hike ideal, status stuff needs to be left behind.

Minimalism and Purity

Minimalist is just minimalist, not purest or best or most ethical. There are always minimalists, in art, music, literature, religion, psychology; it’s a method and a style, not a proof of any hard truth. We can trace minimalism back, on one branch, to the Classical Greeks who mapped out a range of different philosophies and methods to decipher the world: Stoics, Skeptics, Epicureans etc. Beyond the West the impulse to purity and minimalism seems to be pretty well a universal human value. Think of any tradition of deprivation: Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, Indian holy men. At its best minimalism represents a disengagement from unexamined memes; it shoots for a refinement to essential simplicity, at worst minimalism takes on an autopilot flavor and goes on through sheer inertia.

How does minimalism catch on?  We have a moral capacity that is deep structure wired into us, like the capacity for grammar in language. We have the capacity to engage moral, behavioral issues.  The brain is structured, ready and willing to absorb this type of values stuff. Once the moral content is locked in, like language acquisition, the content and structural process all run at an unconscious level.

Minimalism is a narrative that has certain primary assumptions; once the narrative is internalized all that is left is to improve the fluency of it. There is a certain blinders-on aspect to it all. Minimalism is so compelling is because it rests squarely on a natural moral grammar we have for purity.

Morals represent essentially instinctual-type behavioral capacity adapted to the peculiar intelligent and conscious manner in which humans interact socially. These moral/social dimensions pan out as: purity, harm, fairness, loyalty and respect for authority; the same type of things baboons deal with, we deal with as well.  Baboons have instinctual content, we have cultural content layered on top of instinctual impulses. (In a more comprehensive model here, I could blend in dominance hierarchy, status, blend in the evolution of the brain, that cultural content resides in our great encephalization etc.), Morals then, are pretty much behavioral instincts that get brought to a cultural level. The capacity for morals is a built in process we come with, an operating system level thing. Morals play out in the context of purity, reciprocal fairness etcetera and the content of them differs culturally.

To sum up, moral capacity is a hard-wired process, moral content is the stuff of culture, of memes, is socially inherited and relative to the cultural molecule.

On the wall of the hostel is the Desiderata: “… if you compare yourself to others you may become vain and bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.” And “… do not distress yourself with imaginings…” See Kim’s Hiker’s Creed based on Desiderata, in the appendix.

For gear and minimalism, purity issues get opened up and the Desiderata quote comes in. Who is doing with the least? For food, who has the proper ingredients? Is there any refined sugar? GMOs? No frame in the pack is more ascetic, lack of comfort is more noble, willful deprivation is going to show God you deserve heaven. Indulgence in weight is sloth, calories, sin. The privation as pure thing plays right into sin, fat, light weight: the same exact configuration. It fits like a glove. This is why that reborn Christian lady we met, Holy Holly, liked ultra light so much, it’s the exact same purity gestalt.

If you’re on the PCT, you implicitly accept that the beginning and end of the trail are Mexico and Canada. The trail then has sections, which have their own beginnings and ends. But in the end the boundaries are all artificial; you can get on and hike from all sorts of places and the whole thing is really all that you feel like doing. It’s all arbitrary as to whether you are a section hiker, thru-hiker or what, contingent on various levels of purity as to whether you flip-flopped, blue-blazed, took any short cuts, whether you had any indulgent extra weight, whether you drink lake water or even treat or filter any water at all etc. Purity, purity, purity.

If the bottom line of what you hope to find is not well articulated, it’s easy enough to get swept along by memes force fed one, in the trail blogosphere and two on the trail corridor. Minimalism is a style that plays upon an instinctual capacity humans have; once you buy into it, you’re locked into that particular house of mirrors and from that vantage, there is no baseline truth; it’s all illusion.

Better to not compare illusions as if they were the truth. Personally I find more beneficial space in being for things rather than against things. If the primary motivation for purity and minimalism derives from negative comparisons, that’s a script worth some self-examination. If you want to be pure, be pure, but don’t drag my hike down by comparison to do it.

The Basis of Wilderness Ethics

Here is a collection of Wilderness thoughts gleaned from various interpretative signs and texts along the trail: Wilderness has benefits, preserve and protect it, no pollution, value wildlife, primitive recreation, being part of something larger than yourself, rejuvenation, self discovery, reconnect with self, self-reliance (no digital tech). High use threatens the untrammeled, natural quality; local and regional economic benefits; haven and refuge from fast-paced society; outstanding opportunities for solitude; an indispensible part of our heritage.

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as life lasts… there is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature, the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter. The lasting pleasures of contact with the natural world are not reserved for scientists but are available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of earth, sea and sky, and this amazing life.” Rachel Carson

Wilderness: a retreat from civilization, reconnect with the earth, find healing, meaning and significance in the natural order, I see it kind of like Rachel Carson said. What we end up seeing on the PCT is not wilderness in the true sense of it being wild, untrammeled nature, that you are in the food chain, like in Yellowstone, or Alaska. We are in a place on the PCT where nature largely sets the tone, yet it is not really “wild”, and it is less and less untrammeled.

Wilderness is a place you go to be non-mechanized, to slip the bounds of technology and culture, to open up to nature, to diminish the centrality of the ego and society, to find some humility. Ironically now, digital technology is so prevalent, how can anyone escape it if it’s constantly referred to through the smart phone?  

Wilderness inspires, it’s inspirational, filled with the breath of nature: spire = breath, respiration of nature energy into our soul, fill the soul with the breath of nature. Spirit: the essential, unseen aspect.

Wilderness has multiple definitions of wild depending on your position and what you want to emphasize. Forest Service wilderness is not a sanctuary; hunting, grazing, dogs etc. are permitted. It’s an oxymoron, how can it be untrammeled with such fundamentally trammeling activities allowed?

From the era of the 1964 Wilderness Act, where the idea was to set aside areas ‘untrammeled by man’, what we see today in 2014, fifty years later, is one butt load of trammeling. Kim says “people are starving” for something real, for nature; they are obese, they have too much on one hand and not enough on the other. Modernization is a multi-edged sword giving us tremendous freedom yet cutting us off from our social roots. People go to the woods for some sort of healing and salvation; here is a timeless, unambiguous order where all your personal and cultural shit doesn’t matter. The longer the time spent out in the woods, the more the social crap falls away and the more you center-in to a facsimile of a natural state. This is the value of real simplicity (versus autopilot minimalism); it strips you of the bullshit and leaves you at an essence, just being.

The younger generation gets all of today’s wilderness with no sense of the struggles of what was at stake to obtain it; they take it for granted; they focus in their own use, their convenience; the trends are to the individual, in ways detrimental to the commons. Any open space you see has had major fights to keep it that way from development and extractive use; wilderness is the expression of values of nature for nature’s sake, and what we as a domesticated species can find there. We set aside certain public land to be able to find certain non-material, spiritual benefits we have lost in our own civilizing, domestication process.

There is a developmental context to what wilderness means and to the activity and meanings of hiking. I’m a product of Western Civilization, so my take is West-centric. Start with our domestication as a species, with agriculture and sedentism, increasing group cooperation, increasing socio-economic hierarchy. This separated us from the animistic spirits of the forest and plain, headed us down the path towards agriculture and worship of the feminine, sow the seed, goddesses of the field, then as things go on, divorce from the feminine to engagement with angry, jealous male gods, then Romans, Dark Ages, Vikings, Renaissance to Age of Discovery, Reason, Enlightenment to Industrial Revolution. Somewhere back in the past we were more “natural”. As we developed as a species we lost that, we got domesticated as we domesticated the world around us. Wilderness then, what wild means, is really just our primary context in nature where all our domestic stuff does not rule. Wilderness is where nature rules, beyond human culture.

Romanticism was a conscious pushback against the sedentary, civilized, macho human controlled and molded industrial rationalization of life, against a progressive separation from our natural heritage. Over a period of 10,000 or more years we have become more and more separate from nature and, we have impacted nature and the earth in serious, consequential ways.

Romanticism was called Transcendentalism in the US: Thoreau, Muir, Walt Whitman, later taken up by Aldo Leopold and his Land Ethic, Edward Abbey poetic anarchism/ nature for nature itself, Rachel Carson/ what the fuck are we doing to nature with this DDT? and Edward O. Wilson/ sustain the diversity of life itself. This trajectory spawned the US Park Service and values of preservation.

Hiking: people are acting out of an impulse. Hikers are all on the same ground literally and figuratively. The impulse comes from? What? A need to experience our roots in nature? What does hiking mean? A supplanted, industry created narrative with a goal of conquest, with all the right gear and status markers? An athletic event? Does it derive from a Romantic, Transcendentalist notion to find God in nature, outside the bounds of our full-fledged domestication?

Kim and I get pegged as old style and traditional in the hiking community. This pretty much means we don’t go out every year and buy all the new stuff. We don’t even study gear very much, we just keep using what we’ve got; our thing is: nature is our church; we go to find something way bigger than us; we’re about the Transcendentalist values imbued into us as we grew up. Beyond any Transcendentalist script, we find stuff on our own, the magic of it seeps in; we discover human universals over and over again. All we have to do is put ourselves in place and it happens. This is what we’re after. Getting from Point A to Point B is just a prop for this deeper project.

This is much like studying and experiencing music, new fusions come but all is derivative of the primary stuff. It is useful to know the actual roots, the family tree as it were, the lineage of what you are hearing. In hiking, our style is immediately descended from the Transcendentalists as well as from Native cultural concepts and life ways.

There have always been tech changes and pressure for the new. Gadgets come and go. There were wood frame packs, metal frame packs, internal frame packs, heavy gear etc. It’s useful to keep in mind Leopold’s admonition: the reason you’re out there is not for the gear itself.

"Then came the gadgeteer, otherwise known as the sporting-goods dealer. He has draped the American outdoorsman with an infinity of contraptions, all offered as aids to self-reliance, hardihood, woodcraft, or marksmanship, but too often functioning as substitutes for them. Gadgets fill the pockets, they dangle from neck and belt. The overflow fills the auto trunk, and also the trailer. Each item of outdoor equipment grows lighter and often better, but the aggregate poundage becomes tonnage. The traffic in gadgets adds up to astronomical sums, which are soberly published as representing 'the economic value of wildlife.' But what of cultural values?"

As we can see from Leopold’s quote, the ultra light paradigm is simply an extension of a long-existent type of convenience oriented, consumeristic thinking. Thus a central point in my thesis: watch out for unexamined assumptions stemming from commercialism and consumerism, narratives centered in gear/ athletic event/ ultra-light paradigms, covertly placed by the outdoor industry. Ultra light may be minimalist and profess to increase self-reliance but it sure comes with the need for a lot of expensive gear and, it results in plenty of high impact, low ethical practice.

No one wants to carry fifty pounds of stuff. My point: this type of outdoors, hiking experience, the one I find myself in on the PCT and the AT, is not about the gear anyway.

What is happening in the hiking community is a warped ethos of sleep walking people acting out unexamined behavioral and ethical priorities. The gear has taken too prominent a place, hype, money and objectification have insidiously co-opted the narrative of what people want to do and think they are accomplishing by going to the woods. This is like people playing blues music but not even knowing who Robert Johnson was; like being derivative of a style and not even knowing where that style comes from.

People of succeeding generations are the beneficiaries, or the victims of, received knowledge. The ultra light, faster/ farther, convenience first paradigm is one that needs questioning and examining, especially in light of how the impacts of this style have increasingly negative consequences for the very natural ground upon which the style is enacted. 

You get the picture, Kim and I are old school, Robert Johnson, Leopold, Muir, Cro-Magnon; we are going to church out there; we’re contacting the Divine firsthand in a mystical experience; we’re seeking transformation. Getting from Point A to Point B is just a prop wherein we realize the larger goal of the Transcendentalists, of our own human souls, to consciously pushback against Reason and Industry, push back against the rat race, to get to the roots of rock, of life, or to at least open up a lot more than how much our fucking pack weighs.

This is all to say there is developmental aspect to hiking and outdoors adventure. There’s a context there that’s pretty deep and worth knowing. The years bring on a maturity that cannot be shared with the young; there gets to be a wall of mutual non-understanding, in different places; knowledge is one thing, wisdom only time can tell.

Purity Revisited

Purity is tied to less; chastity, deprivation, minimalism. The poor, therefore, are more virtuous naturally, monks, taming of the base impulses, the notion of higher chakras, more pure, more human and less animal drive. What is best, higher, desirable, more fully human, this blocks out to a lot of different molecular meme expressions, all of the same purity type.

Bottom line, people get used to applying purity type sensibilities to all sorts of experience. One of these is hiking. On the trail, hiking is all there is; the trail is a flavorful reduction of the full boat of society and culture.

Virtue is from Indo-European: man, vir.  Virtuous, having high moral standards; virtue: valor, merit, moral perfection; virile: having strength and energy. And who is it that can command Fate and Fortune? The goddess Fortuna likes to be commanded by the brash young man, he who is unafraid to shoot the three pointer.

Virtue is macho, masculine, tough, and consistent with the particular minimalist, purity line and narrative.

How we get to virtue then is like the old saw of many diff ways to climb a mountain, many paths to the top. You can get there by deprivation and purity, you can get there by ostentation, by sheer brash youth. Whatever way is analogous to hiking your own hike.

Virtue then, is really maybe just being OK with wherever you are, wherever that it is. Virtue is being true to yourself, aligned and congruent. It’s pure you, not pure compared to outside measures you go along with just because they are there. Virtue is being conscious of your own values and proudly expressing them.

Weekenders are more refreshing for us to meet on the trail as they have more of a beginner’s mind. With a weekender, a beginner, you are not hearing a tired script told over and over; you get the awe, the exhilaration, the sense of meeting someone who is defined by more than just their gear.

Amateurs then, people who love what they do, are a breath of fresh air: inspiring. When I ran trail crews for SCA, the best kids were not the Eagle Scouts or the ones who listed how great they were on their applications. The best kids simply had the beginner’s mind and a willing attitude; these kids were more resilient and adaptive, more present; they were real amateurs.

We Arrive in Our Own Movie (like we knew we would)

When things quiet down, in the Fall, after the bulge of thru hikers has gone through, after the boys of summer are back at school, after summer vacation weekenders are all back at work, you find what you’re supposed to be getting out here, quiet, solitude, peace, reflection, tranquility, depth, unity with nature. The quiet is fantastic.

The stages of fighting through the trail culture get less and less, we arrive more and more into our hike and what we like and are comfortable with. Leave the comparisons. Desiderata. Yet every time we see another person, the ripples of their comments and tone are impressed on us and we have to deal with that social bow wave coming into us. The longer we are here and stay in our movie, the less the waves and wakes of others infiltrates our hike; the stronger we get in our flavor and purpose.

In town, the rich have more and they are easy targets for their ostentation. On the trail, our big frame packs are more as well. We are an easy target for comment. We get so many comments. We represent an alternate paradigm that is counter to the ultra light paradigm, ultra light hikers are challenged by the mere sight of us. We don’t buy into what they buy into. It’s too compelling for them not to say something.

It’s hard for the folks locked into their paradigm to note that maybe some people aren’t trying to get from one end to the other as fast as possible. They can’t imagine what we are getting because the paradigm doesn’t allow them to conceive of it. In Flatland, lines cannot conceive of circles, they never get that a circle is way more than two intersecting points on a line.

I reflect on my own value judgments then. I see that my knee jerk condemnation of the rich is the same as how Kim and I get typed for our large packs. Who is sleep walking here? I judge accumulation yet I have the same tendency to accumulate stuff just on different scales. I’m bigger on the trail, as if I was the rich, yet I’m as pure and minimalist as any in real life relative to consumer lifestyle. These values get mixed up. The content and personal history is deep in any one person, best not to judge a book by its cover. The progressive condemnation of any one group leads to bubbles of stereotyping that eventually we can’t see our way out of; we get convinced that our bubble is the way it is, we confuse our memes and concepts with Truth; we get lost in a house of mirrors.

Simplicity is the way out; an exit point. The trail gives us that in spades. We plug away at finding inner clear skies, yet always have to deal with the weather, rain and clouds that come by, social and natural. The stars, the stars, they are out when no one else is. When you see the stars, you are beyond people; you’re on the direct pipeline to nature; you’re getting a pure hit. A man, the world, the universe. Just beautiful, perfect, great. All we have is carried on our back, perfectly simple.

And now, at home, writing this up, those same stars are out there every night and where am I? I’m inside not having my papers blown away, typing away at my fevered projects, my active life of the mind, trying to move the needle of socio-econ-enviro justice in my community, dealing with the same sorts of stuff, of paradigm differences, how to cut through the fog. I’m in the Combine now, as I type, wondering where the fog machine is and who is running it? Can I get to a place where I can control the fog, see a vista, get the lay of the land and make a report? Is it even the report that matters, as if controlling the facts and describing things exactly as they are will be my magic elixir. Shit, the map is not the territory after all. I see the project, I have to go into the source and bedrock of values and morals, beyond assumptions that facts and reason will take the day, into the muddy water of primary assumptions of what is good, bad, desirable and why. This is where the keys are, to unlock the door I want to see behind. There is no Truth here in socially constructed reality. The best I can do is perhaps make a clear statement about a particular thesis. The main thesis of this journal: wilderness ethics need recalibrating, back to a centering in the commons, consequences of the individual trajectory need to be put on the table, consciously challenged and realigned.

In the balance, the trail restores a sense that people are good. The resupply people at stores and stops, the trail angels, the local color, the percent that aren’t sleepwalking, that aren’t in an athletic event, they all add up. It’s simple, the bulk makes a good impression, and bad impressions leave an outsized mark.

You see a thru hiker, rude, elite, fast, in a hurry, headphones, stoned, no contact. It’s hard to keep in the movie I want when there is constant interaction with people who have such a different focus. As said, the weekenders and section hikers are much more pleasant, they are fresh, have a beginner’s mind; they stop, like to chat, aren’t all about the gear, aren’t in a hurry, the outdoors is special because they’re only getting a little slice; they’re not on auto pilot and sleepwalking.

Trail Angels really do good for hikers, the ones who leave water in dry areas are not just hangers-onners. These people are benefitting others that they will never meet or see. This is paying it forward. This is it takes a village. This is the nurturing family model primary assumption that lies at the base of a liberal world view. This is the sense that people are good, the real community you find on the trail.

The strict father family model is the conservative way; here the individual dominates; it’s all about discipline and punishment, every dog for himself and somehow social good shakes out through the work of an invisible hand. This kind of go it alone individualism is antithetical to the best social qualities found on the trail. For all you quantifying, goal-oriented hikers, be careful what you look for, you just might find it, in a style entirely antithetical to the bulk of what the outdoor community represents.  

Transformation

For some people a long distance hike represents a huge risk. It takes courage.  You leave your apt., house, family, have no job, it’s outside the box of normal civilized comforts, outside of what a common “success” track is. For some it may not be seen as a risk at all but a welcoming back to the way things should be, where everyday life is simple and apparently under control. In any case, going on the trail is an invigorating change of pace and this is in itself transformational.

Immersion in nature changes you, transforms you. The solitude, being with yourself, breeds self-reliance, centering in your own values and personhood, in having to deal with yourself, there’s no tech distractions. This is another transformation. Welcome back to yourself, in a milieu with no facile distractions; it’s a primal human context. And what are humans but animals with a particular set of capacities? The trail brings out some of our natural abilities perfectly: reason, spirit and physicality. This feels transformational because we have been domesticated so much that to be even in any approximation of “wild”, feels fucking great. It’s like taking off all the masks, seeing beyond the shadows in Plato’s cave metaphor.  That’s a trans-forming, a re-framing.

Since we have such a clear idea of what we want out of a hike, and transformation is a big part of it, it does make for some dissonance with hikers who don’t get this approach. It’s hard to explain if you don’t value it yourself, if your antennae are not tuned to receive the signal.

You develop a skill set of outdoor living which gives a direct sense of self reliance. After months you master the skill set, you handle the adversity, everything is taken as it is. You’re like John C. Fremont, David Douglas, any of the explorers and pathfinders. You’re in that great artery of human experience, adventure, self-actualization, discovery. The PCT trail adventure is proscribed by the trail itself, by the resupplies, it’s bounded and contextualized yet it provides enough of a taste of adventure as to open up that whole world of inspiration and invigoration that goes along with it. Transforming.

One aspect of trail transformation cultivated by Kim and myself is allowing the game to come to us, move as way opens, cultivating a Beginner’s Mind, an amateur space not stifled by patterned, know-it-all preconceptions. This is great for us. We love it. It’s transformational; we look for this to emerge as we are out there, it grows, we walk back into this space as we know it’s there to find. We try to keep it alive back in civilization: spontaneity, synchronicity, all as it should be, after a while it is just like jazz in that there are no wrong notes, everything you do is right and OK, fits the flow; once you are your authentic self, there is no way to go wrong, you’re already there, no goal, all in the process.

One example: we get to a road, we say, we’ll hitchhike for 5 minute and if we get a ride OK, of not we keep going. We’ve had just great serendipity experiences. Open to the moment.

Being cold, wet, dirty, uncomfortable, passing dangers of all kinds, having fears, facing mortality, has to be a challenge; getting through it is transformative. You’re cut, bleeding, chapped, chafed, carrying a heavy load, blisters, sunburned, tired, sprained, alone in the dark forest at night, got to deal with all of that. It happens to the best. There’s rattlesnakes, bears, lions, bulls, ticks, poison oak, bad water, lightning, rockslides, steep cliffs, frost, snow, ice bridges, steep snow fields, rain, raging glacial river crossings, snags about to fall on you at night, hunters and leering men to scare single women. Plenty to have to handle. Self-reliant and confident, yes. You start to get it; the natural animal capacities assert themselves. You make your call and let the cards fall where they may.

The people that succeed, i.e. who have fun, who can play the life jazz and find joy in the transition and fusion spaces and zones, are the ones willing to adapt, who are resilient, who can change the channel without a lot of whining: if you can’t adapt, you don’t make it, or it’s not fun. There’s different ways to make it; we go with the surrender to win method, rather than trying to be the professional, master, Eagle Scout; when we keep a beginner’s mind, we are already there, transformed at just the flavor we both happen to like and value.

Desperada

We run into a girl sleeping beside the trail, half under a log, sleeping bag wet, highly exposed in cold, wet weather. We found her near snowline. She had hiked until late in the evening, hiking in the rain to stay warm and then stopped when exhausted. She read the Cheryl Strayed book. She had no sense of when to stop, when to get off the trail, didn’t have appropriate gear, no tent. She was looking for meaning in the woods, meaning for an increasingly alienated and unprepared group for whom the trail is like another video game. And so we notice unsafe and poor practice. We later found a fire she left burning, in a place with no water to put it out.  We knew it was her, from her tracks. We named her Desperada.

The trail is getting trampy, more low-life hangers-onners, drug dealers with dreadlocks from Humboldt County, regular tramps and street people infiltrate the scene, it’s a way to make it, they Yogi food, they glom on, posing as trail angels and hikers. The trail has become popular over all, not just to yuppie kids. Here’s a place where people are dirty and living outside, where a hobo, drifter style is cultivated. You learn dumpster diving, a panhandling mentality and even glorify it with bumper stickers trumpeting members as “Hiker Trash”. The thing is, this is lark for most of the kids. Real hobos, bums and homeless aren’t doing this for fun. Kids can be taken advantage of by real drifters.

Personally I don’t want to associate with desperate homeless beggars, perhaps like the nobility doesn’t want to associate and deal with the servant class’s desires and wants. You have to have a certain level of affluence and gear to do the trail, or know how to be independently poor, go for the quality and leisure even though you aren’t secure, take your retirement up front. As Strange Bird said, being homeless for real is a whole other story.

Slim is a good example, a part Indian, obese guy from Placerville, CA who is actually poor. He’s not a middle class white guy. He found hiking as a cure for the obesity. For him long distance hiking was a lifestyle choice. He has crappy gear with paint on it; he hikes long and hard to get to free boxes and eats that way, he begs food; he’s at the very bottom of what you can do economically to still make it on the trail, with as little money as possible. We’re similar to Slim, just bumped up the scale a little. We have no real cushion to rely on; we lay it on the line, all money spent, we buy the time, should something happen, we’d be on the street. We’re Aesop’s grasshoppers while the ants are all preparing for winter.

Slim is looked down as real trash by the white guys, not the glorified “hiker trash” they pretend to be.  We met Slim in 2008 on his first long distance hike; he had lost a bunch of weight and was very happy about it; we sent a picture of him to his mother.

Contrast Slim to the people with home dehydrated organic dinners, smart phones, all the latest gear, who read all the journals on Facebook; it’s a different class of people. Got to give it to the hikers of all stripes though; the common denominator is that to do long distance hike, you have to do your time in the woods; that time spent has to seep into you, some inspiration from nature has to creep in, even to Blackhawk Down, a crusty and endearing fellow who was hiking just to lose weight and get himself back to an exercise regime.

Long distance hikers start to appear homeless, they smell like dirty hippies, tramps, and hobos, but they are not, clean them up, talk to them and they are well-educated, articulate people with middle class sensibilities. Hence the bumper sticker lauding hiker trash, a play on white trash, as most hikers are white, but this is a game, a time out, a place for adventure, to find transformation and quality, not a full time lifestyle for these boys and girls of summer. The Fall, Winter and Spring are long and hard in the mountains; there’s only a short window to go out a take it on as a novice. People all get concentrated into a small window of time, all the hikers, townies, trail angels, hobos, ride givers, water haulers. It’s a scene that gets cranked up and looked forward to on a yearly basis.

It was more of a genuine community before popularization by books and movies. Once genuine kernel is lost, that’s it, cache to cliché.  

Shelter is a necessity in the Fall. The girl under the log was a victim of the ultra light paradigm. Another ultra light guy had no way to make a fire, no matches or a lighter, no fire starter. They are ignorant of the cold hard facts of survival; it’s a game, a summer activity; the phones give a false sense of security. These folks are more highly exposed to bad fortune, although Fortune likes to be led by brash young men.

Trampy? The trail has changed, become more of a Mecca for lost people that want meaning, more about the person and individuality. The PCT itself, nature itself, gets to be a prop for something other than a natural showcase. This could be the structure of modern America, lack of meaning, lack of community, lack of significance, no way to plug into basic human capacities; the trail provides all this. The trail exercises fundamental human capacities: spirit, reason, physicality.

Kim puts out the fire left by Desperada. Kim uses her carried water to put out this fire and then later goes down to a spring to haul water for our drinking. Who’s in such a hurry that they can’t be responsible with fire? This is the second unattended fire Kim finds and puts out. We find Desperada’s fire smoldering just north of Six Horse Springs on the PCT at 9:AM. Agencies and the PCTA better prepare for thru hiker caused fire next year after the movie comes out, prepare to step up ethics education and reframe of the whole scene for a bunch of people who have little idea of what they are doing. PCTA, LDHA, land management agencies: Don’t let Hollywood define the scene for God’s sake!

We met Carolyn Davis again, the Assistant Retail Manager of the Mazama Village Store near Crater Lake. When I walked in I remembered her from 2008, she took care of forwarding our bug suits to us then and was very nice. She was very nice again. Carolyn says there has been a change in tone of the hikers this year, presumably from the book that came out that drew so many new people to the scene. She had to throw some hikes out of the store. She said they were “rude, mean, ugly, nasty, cruel”. She had to call Rangers for enforcement, for bad camping practices, for drunk punks who were not about nature, not about beauty, not about the experience. The trail is not just another place to bring city practices, not giving, just taking. Carolyn should know; she loves the hiker scene and has participated in it for years. We are all dreading what things will be like after the movie Wild comes out.

We may just have to figure how to mostly avoid the hordes and thru hikers, which may mean avoiding the whole long distance hiking scene altogether, or doing sections when the least number of people will be there.

Grab Bag

Factors can be multiplied and divided, all as part of arriving at an equation. All depends on the axiom, whatever the numeric system is. You don’t start with the conclusion and then make everything fit. (This is the difference between socially constructed human thought and math, with values people do start with the conclusion and make the rest fit.) Factors have to be dealt with. I’m always returning to a pie diagram method of thinking, this is my systemic way, to see the big picture, my preferred focus and view.

Pond life, ripples of water striders, cloud reflections, all the precious little creatures to protect with good practice and ethics: don’t swim with sunscreen and DEET bug dope all over you, don’t get any soap in the water.

2011 Sierra snow pack, crazy exposed and unsafe, for what? In service of what? Sure people can pursue extreme thrills, but don’t rescue them, don’t risk other’s lives, make the people ay the full cost of the rescue.

Why do the nations so furiously rage together? I guess because there aren’t any standards to measure by, and the struggle for power and control is all consuming, in all spheres, in all ways.

Trail stories are like bear stories, there’s a certain dynamic of not really listening, the stories are less about the trail and more about who is doing it, more self-centered. Even thru hikers get sick of thru hikers, the peer pressure, the stereotyped look and feel. We saw so many of them just tired of the whole thing but they were compelled to finish; they weren’t having a good time.

Most thru hikers are 20 somethings who are known developmentally for posturing and acting too cool, they don’t know themselves yet, they’re not as fun as teens or older people, more stuck on appearance and airs, they haven’t grown into substance and perspective yet; they’ve lost the beginner’s mind and are short on wisdom.

Appendix

A. Hiker’s Creed

Hiker’s Creed

(for all time/humanity)

Kim D.  Bartlett

As I walk the miles I’ve chosen

My aim and destination shall be

not just for me by also

for the earth itself and all upon it

With the consciousness and knowledge endowed me

I shall remind myself

what a miraculous adventure life is

I choose to revere it (no matter how

happy or sad; comfortable or miserable;

able or broken I may be)

I am one of the few

I am one of the many

sharing these miles

to respect & appreciate those

whom carved the trail through

mountains, valleys, across streams

and rivers, deserts, & forests

to silently say thank you to those

who gave that we may have;

going beyond the simple path we walk

to all the life that has preceded us

to the wonder of the beginning of the universe

we find ourselves in

We are not alone even if in solitude

there is a difference

although we seem separate we act in a whole

This truism cannot be escaped.

As we watch the butterfly flap its wings

Let us know this is us too

Our actions, thoughts & words effect

time & space beyond us

Let us realize our humanity

it’s good, it’s bad, it’s beauty, it’s ugliness

let us challenge ourselves

to allow others to hike the miles they’ve chosen,

in the fashion in which speaks to them,

knowing

it is a journey, these miles, this trail

we are given a gift which wants to be shared

the peace & beauty, the rawness & embrace

of nature is too great to bottle

it must be free

As we too yearn to be