Years ago my wife visited her sister who lives in Vienna, Austria, and I got to tag along. It would be my only trip to Europe, and I learned something important. Europe is seen best on foot. That is, we traveled by plane, train, automobile, bus and riverboat, but the sites I remember most I […]
Not all mountain summits are above tree line. If your body can’t handle the elevation but you still want to reach a top with great views, here are some of my favorites: For a nice, short hike in the Land of Enchantment, try the Atalaya Mountain Trail, which starts near St. John’s College in Santa […]
Walking in the mountains can turn hazardous—like the time I climbed New Mexico’s Wheeler Peak with three of my students. The hazardous part was caused by freezing fog, not something I expected in early September and a condition that made the footing slippery and the temperature bone-chilling (think of a cold shower using ice water). […]
“The mountains are calling, and I must go,” wrote John Muir. How do mountains call us? Thoreau said it’s in the air: “There is something in the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires.” So what is that “something”? I suppose there are as many answers to the question as there are people who […]
In his essay, “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau recommended walking in the American West. But it wasn’t so much the direction he was recommending but the condition of the region. “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild.” “I am leaving the city more and more and withdrawing into the wilderness,” […]
Robert Moor (On Trails, 2016) once said that we not only make trails, but “trails make us.” If that’s true, perhaps we need to be more careful about the places we choose to walk. Wallace Stegner, a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, historian and cutting-edge American environmentalist said the same. In a1950 piece designed to influence […]
I’m thinking about Ouray, Colorado. If I believed in reincarnation, I would say I must have once been a Ute Apache. That would explain the connection my spirit has with this former hunting ground of Chief Ouray and company. For me, it was love at second sight. I first came here with the family in […]
Fall is my favorite season. Always has been. I love football games on cold Friday nights, pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, crisp autumn mornings. And I like the color, something one notices on fall walks. Last October Charlotte and I got to spend a couple of days in Lewisburg, West Virginia, a place where fall foliage […]
Of all the seasons, writers seem to like summer best. “Everything good, everything magical, happens between the months of June and August” said author and screenwriter Jenny Han. “In summer, the song sings itself” wrote poet William Carlos William. “Spring being a tough act to follow, God created June” concurred actor/writer Al Bernstein. I suppose […]
“The world’s favorite season is the spring,” wrote Edwin Teale (North with the Spring, 1951). “All things seem possible in May.” Nearly a hundred years earlier, another American naturalist, Henry David Thoreau, took the same view. He said that we find in spring “the principle of renewal of the eternal—the year beginning with younger hope […]