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 folks to protect our nation’s open spaces, he argued that America’s wilderness was a place that “formed character,” was “good for spiritual health” and offered  a “geography of hope.”

For Henry David Thoreau this wilderness always lay in the West—“I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe—We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.”

I guess picking one region over another could be considered ethnocentric. But I think Thoreau’s point was more like Stegner’s. He preferred the West because he preferred the wilderness. And, interesting enough, 160 years later 95% of America’s national parks lie in its western locales.

Which, by the way, are where most of my long hikes take place.

More about that in my next blog: