Strap on your boots and get out on the trail! Drawing from personal experience, Michael W. Robbins describes what to expect when hiking in various terrains — from forests to fields and lake edges to mountains. Informative and fun, The Hiking Companion combines tips for trip planning, equipment, navigation, and safety with exciting stories of once-in-a-lifetime adventures. Whether you’re an expert hiker or setting out on your first overnighter, this inspiring guide is full of practical advice to make your next outing a success.
Strap on your boots and get out on the trail! Drawing from personal experience, Michael W. Robbins describes what to expect when hiking in various terrains — from forests to fields and lake edges to mountains. Informative and fun, The Hiking Companion combines tips for trip planning, equipment, navigation, and safety with exciting stories of once-in-a-lifetime adventures. Whether you’re an expert hiker or setting out on your first overnighter, this inspiring guide is full of practical advice to make your next outing a success.
The Hiking Companion: Getting the most from the trail experience throughout the seasons: where to go, what to bring, basic navigation, and backpacking
136
The Hiking Companion: Getting the most from the trail experience throughout the seasons: where to go, what to bring, basic navigation, and backpacking
136eBook
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Overview
Strap on your boots and get out on the trail! Drawing from personal experience, Michael W. Robbins describes what to expect when hiking in various terrains — from forests to fields and lake edges to mountains. Informative and fun, The Hiking Companion combines tips for trip planning, equipment, navigation, and safety with exciting stories of once-in-a-lifetime adventures. Whether you’re an expert hiker or setting out on your first overnighter, this inspiring guide is full of practical advice to make your next outing a success.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781603421935 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Storey Publishing, LLC |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2014 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 136 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Rewards of Hiking
Ever wonder what's over the next hill? Or beyond the horizon?
Why go hiking?
At the level of just "taking a walk," motives are few and obvious: Get out of the house. Get some fresh air. Exercise. Take in a change of scenery. Most of these itches would be scratched by a walk around the block. But for many Americans, taking a walk around the block isn't as simple as it once was and ought to be. Many suburban neighborhoods are so committed to the primacy of the automobile that they are an obstacle course to strolling humans. Sidewalks are scarce, roads are narrow with blind curves, and traffic moves quickly. In such places, taking a walk is not a soothing experience but an anxious one. Walking feels dangerous. And even if the proximity to fast-moving traffic is not directly hazardous, the onslaught of noise and exhaust fumes offends the ears and pains the lungs.
In some suburban locales where the houses are attractive, the landscaping is appealing and varied, and the roads are safe but walking is not a common activity, walkers may be regarded with not-so-subtle suspicion. (Not to mention the hostile dogs barking ferociously as you pass or, even worse, venturing out for a closer examination of your ankles.) If for whatever reason you don't look like most local residents, homeowners may wonder who you are and what you're up to in their neighborhood. While out walking — in a neighborhood I once lived in — I've been stopped by policemen in radio cars for no reason other than the fact that I was walking along a residential road, and to the police officers that constituted odd and suspicious behavior.
There are much more rewarding places to be than on suburban sidewalks. Venture farther afield. Take a hike.
When you change your thinking from "walk" to "hike," you open yourself to a new range of experiences that this book will elaborate upon.
Hiking, to me, means getting into natural surroundings. We're talking here not of simple greenery (golf courses are green, botanic gardens are green, Astroturf is green) but of actual nature, that is, a locale where the hand of man has not relentlessly shaped every space, every surface, and every vista. Hiking also means making a commitment to a certain significant distance. You don't need to measure your mileage and consider your hike a success only if you're setting some kind of time/distance record, but you should be moving along at least for a couple of miles or a couple of hours. To me, a hike happens when you can see some different vistas and work up a sweat. The point is to give yourself a chance for an experience with nature.
Of course, a truth so obvious that it almost goes without saying is that hiking is good exercise. When I have not hiked or bicycled or otherwise exercised for a while (I can't claim to hike and write at the same time), I always notice that in the first 30 minutes or so on a trail I feel every muscle working, feel my breathing start changing. If it's a steep trail, I always wonder whether I'm really up to it this time. Then I walk right through that feeling, and within an hour or so I'm moving easily, whatever the type of terrain, fully warmed up. When that happens, I feel that I could hike all day.
A hike opens the door to adventure. It is a step into the unknown. Even if you are traipsing through a nearby and well-used state park, even if you are taking a familiar trail that you and your friends have traversed many times, a hike is an adventure simply because you cannot know in advance all that you will see and hear, whom you might meet, and what might happen. Of course, there are so many hiking trails within an easy drive of where most of us live that you could hike a new trail every weekend for months at a time before having to repeat a trail. And let's not forget that trails change with the seasons. A trail hiked in spring is not the same trail in early winter. The element of surprise is always with you.
Once, in the rugged high desert region of northern New Mexico, my wife and I decided to strike out across a sage flat to a nearby butte and hike to the top. It was just a whim, a matter of simple curiosity. We had our day packs filled with the essentials — including lunch for two — and we wanted to see what was on top and what the view might offer. We were then on a back road in Rio Arriba County, northwest of Espanola and probably within the boundaries of the Carson National Forest. We set off on a direct line across the flat toward what appeared to be a simple, flat-topped, red-rock formation rising up maybe 300 feet from the desert floor.
When we reached the flank of the butte and looked up, we got our first surprise. Much of it was not rock at all but, rather, a pale, crumbly, deeply furrowed substance that seemed to be an aggregate of soft sandstone, caliche (a type of calcium carbonate), and plain old dried mud. The butte was steep but not sheer and, as crumbly as it was, still readily climbable. We figured out a zigzagging route and started up, thinking that we'd reach the top in 20 minutes.
Our next surprise was that the butte was taller than we thought, and the going was far slower. It took the better part of two hours of scrambling and clambering and sending down showers of dirt and rock for us to reach the summit. Part of the problem was that we could not see from below how much the top third or so of the butte's sides sloped back and away from us. It wasn't as steep as it looked from below, but there was a lot more ground to cover. When we looked back, pausing for drinks from our water bottles, our white van parked alongside the road looked very small and very far away.
The flat summit was as distinctive in shape as a tabletop, and when we pulled up over the edge and stood up, we got another surprise. This was no isolated small butte a couple of hundred yards across, as we'd expected. It was a mesa that stretched for miles back toward a line of higher mountains to the northeast. The flat ground was grassy, even lush, with patches of trees here and there. And it rose to another level nearby, a mesa atop a mesa, that we had not seen from the road below. We walked for a while through the grass and noticed cattle grazing in the distance toward the mountains. Quite a lot of cattle. Then we noticed some buildings far off in the haze of the afternoon heat. There was a ranch on this mesa. The views in all directions, of red and orange and purple rock, buttes and other mesas, dotted with dark rabbitbrush and streaked with slickrock, were as cosmic as we'd anticipated. But the sheer size and scale of the formation we'd climbed was so different from what we had anticipated that we kept feeling as though we had clambered into one of those rhomboid rooms in a fun house where all the angles are wrong and gravity seems to pull from a wrong direction.
When we flopped down in the grass in the shadow of a cluster of scrubby pines to rest and devour our sandwiches, we were joined by three enormous black birds. Ravens. They showed an intense interest in our sandwiches and beat the air over our heads, hovering. I didn't know ravens could do that. The afternoon silence on that mesa was so complete that the loudest sound by far was the rhythmic whooshing of those ravens' wings.
Ever since that ascent to the mesa top, we have carried with us a sense that the country we are looking at from a moving car or from a hike down on the flats may be quite enticingly different from what's up top.
Surprises of another kind came my way during a much wetter hike in Maryland. Years ago, when I was active in the search for physical, on-the-ground — archeological, that is — evidence of the Colonial-era iron industry, I spent a lot of weekends exploring streams near tidewater in Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. In the eighteenth century, ironmaking, whether by means of furnaces or forges, required waterpower to drive the blowing engines that kept the charcoal fuel burning at high enough temperatures to smelt iron ore. Early ironworks, therefore, were always located close to dammed or falling water and often nowhere near modern-day roads or trails. So I took to hiking upstream, in the streams wherever possible (but only in warm weather). I wore short hiking shorts, carried the usual pack and some dry socks, and waded the streams in old sneakers and no socks, and — predictably — I made some unpredictable finds.
At the mouth of Antietam Creek, near where it empties into the Potomac River not far above Harper's Ferry, a thriving iron business called Antietam Ironworks got underway in 1765 and a furnace on the site began supplying heavy iron cannons to the Continental forces. George Washington himself wrote a letter in 1779 underscoring the importance of renewing a contract with Antietam Ironworks for 30 eighteen-pounders. Ironmaking on lower Antietam Creek continued through the following century. But the whole works had essentially vanished by the time tropical storm Agnes hit the Northeast in June 1972, dumping up to 15 inches of rain in the Susquehanna River drainage and causing flood levels not seen in the area since 1784 and not equaled since then. Antietam was one of the creeks that was scoured by an all-time record flood.
A few weeks after Agnes had spun off into oblivion, I decided to have a look at the freshly altered banks of Antietam Creek and some of the other streams that once hosted ironworks. I got my hiking gear, including my old amphibious sneakers, plenty of insect repellent, my camera and lenses, and a strong walking stick — a must for keeping your balance on slick stream-bottom rocks and for general probing — and drove out to Washington County. The water level in the creek had fallen dramatically since the storm. While it still showed a strong flow, the creek was shallow enough that I could wade along its edges.
Quite a bit of assorted detritus had been delivered downstream by Agnes. I hiked upstream, staying close to the southeast bank where the furnace had once been located, examining the largest hunks of limestone for signs that they'd once been part of a building (iron furnaces of the time were constructed as stone stacks in the shape of a squat truncated pyramid). Eventually I came to a place where broad flat rocks lay in the streambed with only a thin sheet of water flowing over them, and I spotted what appeared to be a small human body lying in the shallow water. It was facing me and I could see its eyes, which were open. It was dressed in a dirty, sodden wrap. I froze, then made myself advance and look more closely. It was a doll, not a baby as I'd feared. Its straggly hair and round eyes were, in this setting, too lifelike. After I steadied myself, I sensed that other people might not find my disturbance credible, so I shot some photographs of the wet doll. Even in black and white, the pictures are pretty unnerving. (For the duration of my post-Agnes exploration in the region, I remained on high alert for almost any sight. Indeed, several weeks later, on a similar midstream reconnaissance in northern Maryland, I rounded a bend in neardarkness and almost stumbled over a genuine dead horse sprawled in the center of the stream. It looked to have been there since the hurricane flooding, weeks before. It was then too dark for photographs. No more hiking that evening.)
Wading upstream from the doll, I scanned the banks and examined the streambed. I noticed one unnaturally geometric shape in the muddy bank and poked at it, then began clearing around it for a better look. It was heavily rusted and tapered, clearly a piece of cast iron. I tried to pull it out of the mud bank but could not. So I dug with my stick and with my Swiss Army knife and after a time was able to drag it out. It was so heavy I dropped it in the water. Staring at the shape, I finally realized I was looking at an iron "pig" — that is to say, a crudely shaped slab of cast iron. Casts such as this were made by running out the molten iron from the furnace into a channel in the casting sand on the floor of the casting house. The channel was dug in the shape of one long line joined to a series of three-foot-long grooves that were usually made by an ironworker simply dragging the heel of his boot through the sand. This particular shape allowed the formation of iron bars that were of a convenient size and shape for sale and shipping to customers, such as blacksmiths. The overall configuration of the one line joined to the row of smaller shapes reminded ironworkers of a sow with suckling pigs — hence the general term, "pig iron."
The cast was an exciting find. It was a genuine "pig," of a type not manufactured since the time of the Civil War. I had seen a few such pigs in museums, but I'd never found one on a site. Time for photographs. And a renewed sense that you never know in advance what you're going to see on a hike.
I'm a historian, and for me, the material clues, the three-dimensional stuff, from the aforementioned iron pig to a rutted old stagecoach road, a gold miner's lost steam engine, a log barn, a stone bridge, a railroad right-of-way, an eighteen-pound muzzle-loading cannon, a grist mill, a lime burner, an oil well pump, an amusement park ride, or a Ford Model T — all of which I have stumbled across while hiking — are the most evocative and revealing evidence of history. Accordingly, such nonwilderness areas as Civil War battlefields, whether formal and preserved or abandoned and half-forgotten, are among my favorite places for a hike. When I can set foot upon and see the actual grounds of an important historical event, the past becomes more vivid, more convincing, more human.
South Mountain is a long forested ridge that runs north-south from Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, to the Pennsylvania border. The Appalachian Trail (AT) runs along its crest for 40 miles. This is a beautiful, accessible stretch of the AT, with views of the bucolic valleys to the east and west. There are several state parks and natural areas along the way, all with easy hiking trails. Here the AT is more than a simple hiking trail, however. Along the slopes and passes of South Mountain in western Maryland in mid-September of 1862, a series of small bloody battles took place between Lee's Confederate army and McClellan's Union army — a prelude to the more horrific clash that would unfold just a few days later on the cornfields at nearby Antietam. When you hike here, you cross the numerous passes that were tenaciously defended by badly outnumbered Confederates under one of Lee's generals, D. H. Hill. Sharp fighting also took place at Crampton's Gap, Fox's Gap, Turner's Gap, and Boonsboro Gap, some of it at night, as Lee's men sought to hold off the Federal cavalry until the Confederates could capture Harper's Ferry and then reunite.
South Mountain is one of those battlefields that has not, under the necessity of accommodating millions of visitors, become a hushed and manicured tourist park. When you hike through these now peaceful remote passes, it takes scant imagination to look around and visualize the shooting and charges and flashes of artillery, and the shouting and dying. Union commander Major General Jesse L. Reno, who'd survived a dozen previous battles, fell here. He was just one of the 5,000 men who died on this mountain in those autumn days. An hour of hiking on these trails is far more evocative of past realities than any number of television documentaries.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Hiking Companion"
by .
Copyright © 2003 Michael W. Robbins.
Excerpted by permission of Storey Publishing.
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