Hiking With Nature Alone

When I hike by myself I’m not alone. Nature goes with me.

Nature is a companion who walks at my pace, and hides surprises along the trail, like yellow fungus on the backside of a tree. Sometimes nature talks so loudly that I can’t hear myself think, like when I’m standing at the bottom of a waterfall and feel the earth vibrate from the pounding water. Sometimes it murmurs so quietly that I have to get down on my knees and lean in close to hear what it’s saying.

I don’t have to hike far to feel nature’s presence. I can sit down anywhere and let nature come to me. After half an hour, the birds and animals will set their caution aside, resume what they were doing, and I can watch them go about their daily lives.

I can also hike on and on without ever stopping, taking in scene after scene until my senses overload and my eyes glaze over from the onslaught of stunning images.

But I have a problem. I want to see everything. I start at dawn on a hike that I’ve mapped out to maximize the number of scenic destinations I can fit in and still get back to camp before it gets dark. This means that I don’t leave any wiggle room to explore a ten-foot waterfall I find that I didn’t know existed.

The rock climbers are helping me slow down and enjoy being in the moment. Most of them don’t value the speed climbers who use a stopwatch to see how fast they can get up the face of El Capitan. My friends feel that climbing is an art. Speed climbing, to them, is just a stunt.

In my early days in Yosemite, I would hike as fast as I could to Nevada Fall to see if I could beat my previous record. How well I did told me what kind of physical shape I was in. Yet I couldn’t tell you anything about the patch of red flowering something I saw on the hillside by the bridge, other than it was red. Were they flowers or tiny leaves?

Once I hiked to the top of Yosemite Falls, crossed over the bridge, and was following the trail along the edge of the canyon toward North Dome. My plan was to have lunch there, wave at the people on the top of Half Dome across the valley, who would wave back in a dome-to-dome greeting, and come back down in time to cook a late dinner.

But soon after crossing over Yosemite Creek and passing the Lost Arrow, a view along the rim enchanted me. So I stayed there, watching the valley for a couple of hours, especially the ravens who soared up on circling thermals of air, went down, and circled back up again. It was a delightful day. I didn’t accomplish anything, but I had an experience.

I want my relationships to move like this, to be spontaneous and not planned out for the next decade, which never works out, anyway. I want to do work that nurtures me as much as I nurture it. I don’t want to get to the end of life and realize that I haven’t lived at all, just checked items off my schedule. I want people to be really sad when I die, and not just sigh and cross my name off their holiday card list.

Nature meets us where we are, and encourages us to go further. When we listen, we hear the wilderness within us respond.

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“Waiting for Owls,” a short reflection published by River Teeth Journal. http://www.riverteethjournal.com/blog/2016/02/08/waiting-for-owls-