How Not to Die When Hiking

            The most important decision I make when hiking in the wilderness concerns how many risks to take.

            If I stay on the trail, odds are good that I will survive. And I’ll survive if I have enough water for the trip and I’m physically in shape to hike up and down mountains for hours on end, and if the trail is clearly marked even when it goes over bare stone so that I don’t go off in the wrong direction, and the weather doesn’t change and turn beastly hot or frigidly cold, and it doesn’t snow and hide the trail, or freezing rain makes everything so slick that it’s impossible to continue on or go back over the ice. And I’ll survive if I don’t surprise a hungry bear or mountain lion, don’t trip and sprain an ankle, or fall down a ravine and have a boulder pin me down so that I have to cut off my hand in order to survive, like Aron Ralston, the guy portrayed in the movie. These are the common, everyday cautions.

            But I ratchet up the risk by pushing on the limits of my luck and doing things like hiking alone, which the rangers say never to do. Yet I do because I haven’t found anyone willing to get up before dawn, hike for twelve hours, eat fistfuls of nuts and raisins, and come back to camp at dusk. And I’ve discovered that I relish the quiet of a long hike by myself.  Forgotten matters rise to the surface from my subconscious that I think about, and I listen to the woods, the rivers, the birds, and the wind flowing through 200-foot-tall Sugar Pines, making them sing. When I’m in nature’s world, I like to pay attention to it. If someone were hiking with me, we’d talk and I would be thinking about what to say next. We’d be listening to each other, not to the outdoors. While this is valuable, it’s not what I go into nature to find. 

           There’s also part of me that likes to see if I can survive by myself in the wilderness, even if it’s essentially just walking through a strange forest filled with unsocialized animals for a really long time. Sometimes I take a shortcut between two trails, end up in a place that isn’t on the map, and have to figure out how to get back. Sometimes a bridge over a fast-moving creek is gone, and I have to find a way to get safely across. I like to sit quietly for an hour and see what animals show up.  Coyotes often come by, as do chipmunks and red-tailed hawks. I also like to stand on the edge of mountain peaks and look straight down below my toes, and to do things like hang from a tree that is leaning over the canyon just to have a better view of a waterfall because experiences like this put the taste of death in my mouth.

            What I want to find is what life is made of and to see how I react when I’m challenged and there’s the possibility of death if I make a mistake. I want adventures that remind me how glad I am to be alive.

-- Mark Liebenow