Hiking January 13, 2020

It is really quite late in my life that I have come to appreciate the wonder of hiking.

A few years before I retired, I got it into my head to walk the Bay Area Ridge Trail, and I asked my buddy Barbara to join me. This discontinuous circuit falls along the crest of hills that circle the San Francisco Bay to the tune of ~350 miles, and it takes car shuttling over ten counties to complete it.  Filled with spectacular views and as-spectacular weather, the Bay Trail is one of the many jewels of the Bay area.  Barbara and I managed to make it through all of Marin and Sonoma Counties before fizzling out for various reasons.

Indeed, I got distracted from the Ridge when I signed up for a trail-hiking challenge in 2012 to celebrate the 50^th Anniversary of Point Reyes National Seashore.  This was a far easier enterprise logistically because very few car shuttles were required. Still, to keep myself going, I roped in friends weekend after weekend to complete my goal, and by that October, I had been on at least part of almost every trail in the Seashore.

Now in full steam, I booked a trip for the Milford Track, an iconic hike on the South Island of New Zealand, for daughter Annie and me during her Christmas break from college.  As a warm-up, while still on the North Island, we did the Tongariro Alpine Crossing Track, a 12-mile hike across an occasionally active volcano.  It turned out to be way harder than the Milford Track itself, mainly because the first few miles were steeply uphill, including several flights of steps.  It is eerily beautiful, if not a bit disconcerting as one encounters lights that flash in case of an eruption. The Tongariro track – which I hiked at age 60 – taught me that my years of hiking were limited.  It was time for a bucket list.

First on that list was the Salkantay Pass in the Andes, one of the routes to Machu Picchu.  Again, I wheedled Annie into my new-found obsession with an REI trip over another holiday break.  I hadn’t appreciated that the pass was more than 15,000’ high, and as we made our way over the ridge, in a stiff, cold wind and some precipitation, I asked her whether we might cross Kilimanjaro off the bucket list.  “Cross it off, cross it off!” she enthusiastically concurred.

I have a few more trips in mind for the next few years – the Laugavegur Trek in Iceland, the hut-to-hut in the high Sierras, the W route in Chilean Patagonia, to name a few – but for now, I’m back into the Bay Area Ridge Trail with some new recruits that live around the Bay and with the hope of completing that before I turn 70.

How important hiking has become to me, and how surprising that discovery!  A few years ago, when my daughter was in the depths of her addiction, my friend Julie walked a long loop with me in the National Seashore.  She listened to my grief, and step by step, I felt myself healing.  It was as though the act of walking, the slow but steady and determined pace of it, gave me the slow and steady strength I needed to get through the horror of those days.

Now that I have more time, I am trying to walk for an hour each day.  I have my own little route of trails right behind my house, up on Mt. Sutro and another set of paths in Golden Gate Park down below.   I don’t listen to music or a podcast, I walk alone.  I think, I breathe, I hope for Annie’s health, for mine, and for a better world for all of us.