Hiking – The Road to a Still Mind

Hiking has to be the most prolific of outdoor activities. It’s one of the few sports out there that is accessible to just about anyone with a pair of running shoes and provides an easy way for people to enjoy the outdoors. For myself, I’ve never really been a hiker. I’ve hiked, sure. A lot. But hiking has always been something of a means to an end for me. Hiking to a remote surf break; a massive approach to a climb; hiking to the snow line to ski. Hiking has never really been something I’ve done as an end in and of itself. But this summer I thought I would change that. Maybe it’s age, or maybe it’s the fact that my need to conquer things just isn’t what it once was.

I’ve noticed this change ski touring. For so long, every time I went ski touring, there was some objective. Often it was to ski pow, which is fine. But most of the time I would tack something else on to that. Skiing a specific line or summiting a specific peak. There always seemed to be some goal I was trying to conquer. It’s the same with a lot of outdoor sports and I notice it among my peers as well. Living in a mountain town, we tend to head outside a lot. We live outside and in some cases, many of us work outside and make our living doing the sports we so love to do. But I find our need to always be conquering something took a little away from the experience of just being in the woods.

It felt like every time I went climbing or ski touring or mountain biking or paddling, there was always this undercurrent of ambition among myself and my peers that everything we did was not so much for the experience itself, but to drive us further, deeper or higher. Don’t mistake me; I fully understand and see the need for this and most of the time, the actual enjoyment of the moment, while doing one of these activities, wasn’t lost on anyone. Those of us that live in the mountains are pretty good at taking the time to savour our lives, to savour those spectacular moments of rugged beauty and gratitude for existence that so often come to us in the mountain environment. But even then, I have started to feel that our need and drive to always go the next step somehow takes away from what we’re doing.

Enter hiking. In its simplest form, hiking is just walking. The great American writer, Henry David Thoreau, wrote about hiking as sauntering. He talked of a saunter as an act of rebellion against a life spent inside, in ignorance of the forest. And so this summer I’ve started doing something different. I’ve started going for hikes. Sure, I have an idea of where I’m going or what trail I’d like to see, but I’ve made the effort, so far, to leave the house without a firm agenda or need to conquer something and instead let the saunter take me wherever it feels I should go.

So far, it’s been fantastic. I’ve done short hikes, long hikes, slow hikes and fast hikes. I go prepared, too: food, water, some extra clothing and a camera. But the interesting thing is I have yet to even look at the photos and so often, when I do take those photos, I stop, put the camera away and just marvel at what’s in front of me. I stop a lot. Any little perch I find or viewpoint along the way, I stop and sit. Sometimes I drink coffee from my thermos, others I just sit quietly and listen to the world around me.

Being in the woods, and I mean really being in the woods, is liberating. It’s allowed me to slow everything down and spend lots of time just appreciating and marvelling at the world around me. Yes, I get to do this when I’m skinning up a ridge or building an anchor midway up a climb. But with those activities, there are so many other factors at play. Risk, exposure, danger. These things make me feel alive but in a weird way, they only serve to occupy my brain and take away from what’s around me.

Learning focus, presence and stillness in a calm and breathtaking environment with no agenda and no thing I want to conquer is difficult. Learning it hanging on a cliff or out on the ragged edge is easy. But with enforced stillness, like that I get on a hike, my mind wanders and my thoughts go all over the place. But slowly, ever so slowly, I am starting to calm inside. Hiking through the woods is becoming more and more enjoyable every time I go out. My need to conquer or win at something is just a whisper in my mind and I no longer require risk or the threat of a fall to help me focus. Instead I require only placing one foot in front of the other.

Be safe, walk calmly.