John McKinney

The idea for a Hiker’s Dictionary came to me a few years ago when I was speaking to the annual California Recreational Trails Conference, a gathering of the state’s top trail-builders and advocates. One of the points of the talk I was presenting was that we trail enthusiasts have a jargon of our own. If we want to communicate effectively with each other—and the general public—we need to define our terms.

We all had a long laugh when I read a mock press release about the grand opening of a new trail that was chock full of incomprehensible-to-the-layperson language about stakeholders and staging areas, VDs(Visitor Days) and viewsheds.

Ridiculous?

Of course. But it occurred to me that as “hiking writer” I had for the past thirty years used a vocabulary that was particular to hikers and likely peculiar to non-hikers, but had never been defined. So began my compilation of a hiker’s dictionary and eventually Hiking from A to Z: A Dictionary of Words and Terms Used by Hikers.

“If you wish to converse with me, define your terms,” declared Voltaire, the great French writer/philosopher. And as a cautionary note to those blazing new trails, Voltaire also wryly observed: “Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.”

My academic qualifications to edit a dictionary for hikers?

Absolutely none. As an undergraduate at the University of Southern California I studied broadcast journalism (and helped start a hiking club) and later earned an MFA in film at California Institute of the Arts. My academic training has helped me talk about hiking on radio and TV and make nature films and hiking videos. It did not lead me to continue in academia by working for a PhD in Hikerology or any scholarly writing about hiking.

I’ve written two-dozen or so books and a thousand articles about hiking and nature but confess that not a single one of them is footnoted. I’ve delivered talks to a wide variety of groups from health care providers to the Sierra Club but have yet to be asked to deliver a paper at an academic conference. And I’m not holding my breath for an invite from academia.

My work in the field of hiking has been in, well, the field. It’s my hope that this considerable field research will add to the hiker’s fun and knowledge of hiking. So take a hike.

And then look-up “take a hike” in the hiker dictionary.

When Abraham was 99 years old, the Lord appeared before him and said: “I am God Almighty, walk before me and be blameless.”

According to Genesis 17, the Lord assigned old Abraham some enormous tasks; he was to become the father of many nations and to take everlasting possession of the whole land of Canaan for himself and his descendants. Further, in order to keep covenant with the Lord he was to circumcise all the males in his household as well as all other males in the area.

Abraham complied with all of the Lord’s commands but was taken aback by one last request: Create a son with his wife Sarah.

At this point in the conversation the Bible reports: “Abraham fell face-down and laughed.”

“Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old?” asked Abraham when he pulled himself together. Then he remembered his wife—at 89 not exactly in her prime childbearing years. “Will Sarah bear a child at the age of 90?”

Virility and fertility proved not to be problems and a son was born a year later, as the Lord had promised. Abraham not only fathered Isaac, but founded the Jewish nation.

As Abraham demonstrates, there is old and there is old; that old adage “you’re only as old as you think,” has been proven time and time again since Abraham was born about 2166 B.C. Recent studies confirm that older walkers are far more fit and of far more cheerful disposition than their sedentary counterparts.

Many older folks are wrongly convinced their need to walk diminishes with age, a survey conducted by the President’s Council on Physical Fitness reports. Many seniors are also apt to exaggerate the dangers of walking and their inability to walk.

Walking is a way for seniors to stay out in the world. To best resist the many paralyzing effects old age, seniors would be wise to combine the body, the mind and the heart—keeping all vigorous by continuing to walk, to learn, and to love.

Almost anyone at any age can walk—and will feel better for it. At God’s request, Abraham began walking among his people, among the lovely oak grove of Mamre, and across the desert plains of the Holy Land. Abraham, who did not receive God’s call to walk until he was 99, lived to the ripe old age of 175.

Walk until you’re 99—or older!

Footnotes

* Who are the oldest walkers you know? Why do they walk? What puts a spring in their step?

* Early sport-walker Edward Payson, at 22 years of age, caught the nation’s attention when he race-walked from Boston to Washington, D.C. to the presidential inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. More remarkably, he was still walking fast some 50 years later; when he was 71, he walked from New York to San Francisco in 105 days.

Is hiking a sport?

During a long tenure as the Los Angeles Times hiking columnist, my weekly column, titled “Hiking” was published in three different sections of the newspaper: first, in View (California lifestyle) on Thursdays; next, Calendar (what’s happening around town) on Fridays; and finally, Travel on Sundays.

Over the years editors of all these sections of the paper explained why hiking could fit into their particular purview: readers want to get out into nature.

One Los Angeles Times editor, though, was dead certain he didn’t want Hiking in his section.

“No way is hiking a sport,” longtime Times Sports editor Bill Dwyre told me. “A sport has to have competition.”

I was thinking fondly of Bill Dwyre, who recently retired after writing a three-times-weekly sports column for the Los Angeles Times since 2006. I enjoyed his columns–even if Dwyre did not consider hiking a “real sport.”

Doubtless most sports writers and sportscasters, along with most fans of the major sports, would agree with the old school sports columnist, though the word “competition” is nowhere to be found in the dictionary definition of sport. In fact, with sport usually defined as “any activity that gives enjoyment or recreation,” hiking is a sport according to Webster’s and other dictionaries.

Sport or not, admittedly, there’s little competition in hiking. Hikers sometimes race each other up a mountain. But that’s really trail-running, which is really running which, at its most competitive, is definitely a sport. Likely there are record-holders for completing various trails in the fewest number of hours or days, but neither hikers nor anyone else pays any attention to such feats.

So, is hiking a sport?

Recently one of my jock-ish friends spelled out the difference between “real sports” and a recreation like hiking: “Sports take place on fields and courts and so on that are made by man; hiking is something you do way out there in nature.”

And hikers wouldn’t have it any other way.

Hike On.
John McKinney

P.S. Just like any other sport, hikers have their own language. Check out my hiker’s dictionary: Hiking From A to Z: A Dictionary of Words and Terms used by Hikers

“What’s wrong with this trail?” the perspiring young sportsman in the Boston Red Sox baseball cap complains to me as I catch up with him at the one-mile marker on Echo Mountain Trail. “It doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere. And it’s got too many of those…turning things, those—”

“Switchbacks,” I offer.

“Don’t you just hate them?”

Caught between the urge to lecture him and the urge to whack him with my hiking stick, I do neither, and simply stride past him with a smile. “I like switchbacks,” I call out over my shoulder.

“Yeah, right,” he mutters.

As I zigzag along on a perfect winter day, savoring the alternating vistas of mountains above and metropolis below, it occurs to me that lately I have encountered a great number of people who are unaware that the switchback is the hiker’s best friend and one of the West’s greatest inventions. Worse, there seem to be increasing numbers of hikers like “Sox” who hate switchbacks.

Perhaps such bias arises from ignorance, I muse. While most hikers can define a switchback (a trail that follows a zigzag course on a steep incline) and know one when they see one, it’s obvious detractors don’t grasp why the switchbacking way is so wonderful: it’s lots easier zigzagging up the shoulder of a mountain than taking a straight line up it. California’s recreation trails are ranked among the world’s best, in part because they use so many switchbacks to reach so much beauty.

Ah, the beauty. Switchbacking up Saddle Peak in the lovely Santa Monica Mountains. Switchbacking up Mt. Whitney on those 97 superbly graded switchbacks hewn out of granite —one of the finest examples in America of the trail builder’s art—at sunrise when the switchbacks slowly turn pink, then a magnificent fiery orange…

The sound of a cell phone ringing ends my reverie and draws my attention down to Sox, two switchbacks below. As I zig north and he zags south, I overhear Sox tell his caller: “This crazy guy I met likes these *#$@@% switchbacks.”

Switchback haters like Sox seem to be divided into two camps: some would prefer to eliminate them altogether in favor of straight Point A to Point B style pathways; others regard them as an unavoidable necessity that gets you up a mountain at a maddeningly slow pace. Sure you gain elevation, but so slowly that the trail becomes repetitive and the trudge becomes a drudge.

New England Switchbacks

You don’t know what you’ve to ‘til it’s gone and even I never fully appreciated the switchback until I hiked in the eastern U.S. A decade ago I was commissioned to write a book about the great hikes of New England and before I hit the trail wondered: After ascending the West’s great mountains, how difficult could it be for me to summit a piddley, 3,000-foot peak?

Very difficult, I discovered, because New England trails lack switchbacks. In fact, New Englanders take a perverse pride in the steepness of a trail. Slogging up a trench-like trail eroded down to the bedrock straight up a mountain is true hiking because it’s such hard work. Apparently, switchbacks would add ease and pleasure to the journey and run contrary to the Puritan ethic. Idle feet are the devil’s playthings or something like that.

Switchbacks in the Western U.S.

I feel blessed to have been born west of the Rockies, where trailblazers took a different approach. Many now-popular pathways were first prospectors’ trails constructed with switchbacks for the use of pack animals. This switchbacking tradition continued when trail use changed from business to pleasure. Traditionally, western land has been cheap and there’s been plenty of room to roam, so that a trail builder can afford “the luxury” of long, meandering switchbacks.

A few switchbacks from the top, my thoughts drift to friend and fellow Californian Greg Miller, now president of the American Hiking Society and stationed in Washington D.C. “I’m going through switchback withdrawal,” he confessed recently. “Where are my beloved switchbacks? Philosophically speaking, what’s wrong with hiking back and forth in a never-ending zigzag pattern?”

Yes, that’s it, switchbacking is a philosophy. Sure I appreciate, more than anyone, the switchback, the noun, the thing, but it is switchbacking, the intransitive verb, the process that literally and figuratively gets my heart pumping. When we talk of the trail switchbacking over the mountain and hikers switchbacking up the trail, we are talking about a philosophy that values the journey as much as the destination.

You see, Sox, switchbacking is more than a better way to build trails; it’s a philosophy, best studied and practiced in the West’s wide open spaces. California is all about creative movement—in the performing arts, on the football field with the West Coast Offense, and on the hiking trail.

Sox?

Far, far below, I see Sox in rapid retreat back to the trailhead. Guess the switchbacks got to him.

Sox, you need an attitude adjustment. Switchbacks don’t force you to see everything twice, they help you view the world from every point of the compass.

Switchbacking, like life itself, is not all about getting from one place to another as fast as possible; it’s about getting there the best way possible.

What happens when we hike with gratitude? Amazing things!

“God has two dwellings: one in heaven, and the other in a meek and thankful heart,” declared Izaak Walton, the 17th century English writer now regarded as the “patron saint of fishing.”

Walton’s walks by the river Dove and along the banks of many other brooks and ponds, inspired him to write “The Compleat Angler,” still regarded as the greatest book ever about fishing. His book combines practical advice on the art of angling with some highly moral and spiritual passages. Walton’s gratitude for God’s gifts, the beauties of pastoral England and the companionship of his fellows shines right through in his book, as admired now as it was when published in 1653.

“Nobody expresses their gratitude about anything or thanks me,” you say. Likely as not, you’re probably right. Try to remember the last time anyone thanked you for anything. It was probably a “Thanks-and-have-a-nice-day,” at the check-out counter from a supermarket cashier or a “Thanks for your order,” from a fast-food franchise. Such gratitude!

Now try to remember the last time anyone thanked you for anything important. It’s a dispiriting cycle: we rarely get thanks, and we rarely give it. Even those of us who try hard not to be thoughtless are often thankless–except perhaps for the one hour a week we spend inside our house of worship.

Action Item: Hike with Gratitude

My suggestion: On one walk—better yet one hike—a week use a few minutes of your time to exercise your gratitude while you stretch your limbs. List everything in your life that you are thankful for, and everything that you enjoy. Contemplate this list on your hike.

Warning: this exercise in gratitude might require considerable spiritual effort, may stretch, to the point of strain, a rarely used muscle. Expressing thanks might seem ever-so-saccharine; to the most curmudgeonly among us, it might elicit a gag response.

And yet hiking with an attitude of gratitude takes us someplace special. The way it helps us is by bringing our life into balance. Just as hiking integrates the body and mind, expressing gratitude integrates what’s all right with our world with what’s wrong.

Giving thanks brings our life into harmony. No wonder scripture, such as this passage from Psalm 92, often describes gratitude toward God as “singing praises.”

We can be thankful for possessions and money and yet for the freedom to walk the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our creative spirit, our life and health, we consider ourselves under no obligation to express any gratitude.

By expressing our gratitude, we can hike from feeling stressed to feeling blessed. A grateful thought toward heaven is the simplest of prayers.

Hike with gratitude.

Hike On,

John McKinney
The Trailmaster

Maybe it’s the outwardly stern image of the serious exercise-walker, striding with erect posture, a jabbing arm swing, and unsmiling face that suggests walkers can’t walk and laugh at the same time. Ha! A good laugh and a long walk are two terrific cures for what ails us; in tandem, they are doubly powerful.

Humor is a barrier-breaking, rapport-building, mood-elevating, healing and revealing exercise.

Like walking.

Perhaps those who take the long walk through life a bit too seriously should consider that God most certainly has a sense of humor. God made the porcupine, the rhinoceros, the banana slug. And God made you.

I’ve always liked that description of the Almighty found in Psalm 2:4: “The one whose throne is in heaven sits laughing.”

Genesis records that when Sarah gave birth to a son at age 90, she said: “God has brought me laughter and everyone who hears about this will laugh with me.” She and her husband Abraham, then 100, named their son Isaac, which means he laughs.

An ancient Eastern Orthodox Church tradition relates that the raised-from-the-dead Lazarus laughed for years after Jesus commanded him to “Rise, take up your bed and walk.”

Ever since Norman Cousins’ landmark book, The Anatomy of an Illness, health professionals, as well as many ministers and rabbis, are rediscovering the healing power of humor. Research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association actually scientifically proved what Cousins and countless generations of anecdotal evidence had pointed out: laughter is useful in fighting serious illness.

How laughing improves our health

During a hearty laugh, the diaphragm, heart, lungs, thorax, abdomen, and even the liver and kidneys are given a gentle, even therapeutic, massage. Cousins calls laughter “Internal Jogging.” With all due respect to Cousins, who wrote his book in the 1970s at the height of the jogging boom, perhaps we should instead call laughter “Internal Walking.”

Walking, hiking and humor have one more use in common: each fights pain. Laughter, like walking, activates the human brain’s secretion of morphine-like molecules called endorphins, which in turn override pain, perk us up, and can give us “athlete’s high.” The retreat of pain is accompanied by an increase in mobility. So the more we walk and laugh, laugh and walk, the better we feel.

Only when faith falters, when heart and step are unsure, are we afraid to laugh in God’s presence. A person without a sense of humor is like a tender-footed walker, wincing at every pebble in the path.

Walk with laughter.

Footnotes
• What makes you laugh on a walk? What do you think would make you laugh?

• Want to make God laugh?
Tell him your plans.

Limerick Rut
By Madeleine Begun Kane

A woman was stuck in a rut.
She’d tripped, falling down on her butt.
She was wedged in so tight,
She might be there all night.
Seems its risky to text while you strut.

P.S. Interested in more reasons to hike for your health? Check out HIKE for Health & Fitness: Slim Down, Shape Up, and Reconnect with Nature

P.P.S. How about some funny hiker gear? Check out our t-shirts

Brothers and Sisters. From the time Adam and Eve were exiled from Paradise, humankind has mourned its lost relationship with the natural world.

Adam took a fall for us all. Never again would he or Eve or any of the billions of humans who followed them walk the Earth without sin against God, against one another, and against nature.

Adam’s fall corrupted nature. Adam’s fall corrupted human nature. Adam’s fall was the hiker’s fall.

Hikers fall. Rarely. Frequently. Softly. Seriously. All hikers eventually fall. And just as we fall when we are hiking in nature, we fall and we fall short in our care of nature.

Listen now to the cry of Creation.

Today we are more disconnected from nature than ever before. We chop down the great trees of the world—in the cold forests of the north, in the tropical rainforests, and in the woods near our homes. We foul streams and rivers, lakes and oceans. Every day another species of plant or animal is lost from earth for all time.

We want more than we need, and take more than we need from nature. We fail to moderate our desire for material things, which causes us to view nature as a commodity and merely as a collection of resources to be used as food and fuel. We refuse to acknowledge nature is more than the sum of its resources.

To reconnect with nature, reconnect with God, and remember that it’s you, not another, that is the cause of the despoiling of nature. The hiker’s contribution to halting the abuse of nature is for each of us individually to correct ourselves.

Do not seek more control over the holy forests, the holy mountains, or the holy waters. Do not seek more control over other people.

Instead, control yourself. Learn from the monks: Take personal responsibility for your own thoughts and actions toward nature. Avoid blaming others for the abuse of nature, and do not hide behind broad excuses about corrupt politics, a perverted economy, and immoral humanity.

Begin the restoration of nature by restoring yourself. One fitting time for self-reflection is during Great Lent, which should be a period of repentance and reduced commercial activity. But no need to wait for Lent; bring a little bit of Lent on each hike. Give up blame. Set aside anger. Give thanks for God’s many blessings, for friends and family, and for the natural world around you.

Make nature the stuff of your prayers. Bring the tall mountain, roaring river, and singing bird into the sanctuary of your heart. An appreciation of the beauty and power of nature adds to appreciation of our Lord. When we are right with God, we will do right for nature.

Hike as children of light. Leave ego and arrogance at the trailhead and you shall see and hear nature in all its glory. In nature, find refuge from cities full of idols. In nature, find yourself. In nature, find the Holy Spirit or allow the Holy Spirit to find a way into your heart.

Blessed be the one who loves to hike and blessed be the one who hikes to love.

Remember the words from the Holy Mountain of St. Silvan the Athonite: “The heart that has learned to love, has pity for all creation.”

Love the red dawns, golden sunsets, and sky of many colors.

Love the still waters, burbling streams, and thundering waterfalls.

Love the ancient oaks, the cedars, and the palms.

Love the sandy beach, rocky shore, and tide pools.

Love the desert dunes, slot canyons, and badlands.

Love the lupine, the lilies, and the daffodils.

Love every day of God’s light. Love everything in nature, and you shall discover the heavenly mystery in all living things. And once you have discovered it, you will come to feel it more and more, as you hike mile after mile, and with each passing day and week and year of your life.