Make Room for Mistakes and Surprises in Your Sport

It was surprisingly chilly this morning so I switched from a mountain bike ride to a hike down some canyons, right outside my trailer door, on some BLM land near Torrey, UT. But what if they turned out to be nothing more than uninteresting gullies? 

Some rather ordinary Utah/Martian scenery outside my rig, and just outside a national park. Would this hike turn out to be fun?

This must be a surprise to the other hikers in our camping group, since I squirm out of just about every hike that they propose. But this is the right kind of hike. And once again it worked beautifully, but with a gratifying twist at the end. 

At the risk of sounding like the Judi Dench character in "Room with a View", here is the exact science of an interesting hike:

1. Start from the the trailer, early enough for chilly weather. Don't drive an hour to some trailhead; by the time you would get there, you are already lost "spiritually."

2. Choose ordinary scenery, not some tourist attraction that is written up and photographed to death in a guide book, probably entitled "Top Ten Hikes in Capital Reef National Park."

2b. As an aid to #2, consider taking said book, National Geographic-branded maps, and your GPS device; and then pour gasoline over them, and light a match.

Starting any project right is half the key to success. For a hike this means renouncing your expectations. Recall the famous line from Charles Dickens's David Copperfield:

'My other piece of advice, Copperfield,' said Mr. Micawber, 'you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the god of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and--and in short you are for ever floored. As I am!'

By performing #1 and #2 you have corralled your visual greed and lust; you have abandoned seeing nature as a type of upscale shopping experience: your hike is more like shopping at a thrift store or a garage sale, at least at the beginning. Of course it might surprise you, and the surprises will all be on the upside.

3. Walk off trail; that means walking down arroyos in desert country. If you see a brown stake bearing the imprimatur of some land-use bureaucracy, turn around and try something else.

4. Bring your dog of course. Even better, let the dog's wild joy infect you. Aspire to doghood, as the ancient Cynic philosophers did in Athens. 'Cynic' means 'doglike' in Greek, rather than what the word means today.

5. Don't surrender to the craven safety-worship of the modern Nanny State.  Take prudent risks, i.e., ones in which higher benefits accompany higher risks. Spice things up a bit.

6. Don't hike like a puritanical donkey, plodding away for long distances through the heat. Change course as your mood changes. Investigate. Let yourself be distracted from your goal.

If the first half of the hike is descending arroyos, and the second half is ascending back to the starting point, you are more likely to get lost than when ascending first and then descending. Put it like this:

Descend first/Ascend second = hard.
Ascend first/Descend second = easy.

That is because one route becomes two at each confluence when you are ascending back home, and you will forget the correct one. Oh sure, you could mark the route in various ways, but why not develop a sharp eye for your own hoof prints? From time to time I turned around in order to remember some navigational key.

I was sure that I would pop out of the final branch right at the front door of my trailer. But by the time I hit the road, I was off by about one mile. Magnificent!

This is one of the tricks-of-the-trade. It seems discouraging and unnatural to descend a canyon system during the first half of the hike, but it actually can be turned to your advantage.

Nearby national park scenery. (Yawn.) My Nikon camera has been repaired since it was less than one year old. They outsource this to a firm called Luxtech. The entire process was pleasant and confidence-building. I never would have believed it if I didn't experience it first-hand.