{"id":3455,"date":"2025-01-12T18:37:32","date_gmt":"2025-01-13T01:37:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/?p=3455"},"modified":"2025-01-12T18:37:32","modified_gmt":"2025-01-13T01:37:32","slug":"walk-in-places-that-are-good-for-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/?p=3455","title":{"rendered":"Walk in Places That Are Good for  You"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Robert Moor (<em>On Trails<\/em>, 2016) once said that we not only make trails, but &#8220;trails make us.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>If that\u2019s true, perhaps we need to be more careful about the places we choose to walk.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019s open spaces, he argued that America\u2019s wilderness was a place that \u201cformed character,\u201d was \u201cgood for spiritual health\u201d and offered \u00a0a \u201cgeography of hope.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>For Henry David Thoreau this wilderness always lay in the West\u2014\u201cI must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe\u2014We 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I guess picking one region over another could be considered ethnocentric. But I think Thoreau\u2019s point was more like Stegner\u2019s. He preferred the West because he preferred the wilderness. And, interesting enough, 160 years later 95% of America\u2019s national parks lie in its western locales.<\/p>\n<p>Which, by the way, are where most of my long hikes take place.<\/p>\n<p>More about that in my next blog:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Robert Moor (On Trails, 2016) once said that we not only make trails, but &#8220;trails make us.\u201d If that\u2019s 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3455"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3455\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3456,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3455\/revisions\/3456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikebellah.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}