“Walking gives us back our senses,” wrote Sussman and Goode (The Magic of Walking). “We see, hear, smell the world as we never can when we ride.” That’s because our vehicles trap us, they explained. The doors and windows isolate us from things we would see, hear or smell if we were walking.

Long before Henry Ford made his Model A, another Henry would exclaim “Ah to be able to get drunk on the air we breathe” (Henry David Thoreau).

I get it, and I’m betting you do too. I’m thinking of the smell (or is it taste?) of a cold November morning or the intoxicating aroma in the wake of  a spring thunderstorm or the seductive fragrance of a pine forest luring me further up and further in to the Rocky Mountain high country.

Yes, I have been drunk on air—air I would not have tasted were it not for the walks that led me there.