The Art of Hiking Slowly
On the second weekend of July 2022, I ran the Sinister 7 50: a 50-mile trail race through the valleys and ridges of the Canadian Rockies in southwest Alberta. It was my first ultramarathon, and the grand culmination of how I’ve recently spent most of my time in nature: moving fast, going far.
The days following the race demanded a necessary pause. Aching legs and blistered toes meant going slow to nowhere much at all. But by the end of the week, I was up for going a little further than couch to fridge. I planned an overnight trip to the first backcountry campground I ever stayed at, back when I was 12 years old for a middle school field trip. This time, my hiking party includes my wife Allison, and our dog Luna.
On that first trip, nearly 20 years ago, spark met tinder, and I was alit with mountain madness. That yearning smoldered in underbrush through most of my teen years before repeatedly erupting into blazes that consumed my twenties. The peaks would call, and I would quit jobs to drive to Alaska or to live in a van at trailheads and in mountain towns, chasing big treks and running adventures in high places. That passion continues to burn today — though it is becoming more tempered, more sustainable.
The campground — Point Backcountry — is on a jagged tooth of land extending into Upper Kananaskis Lake in Peter Lougheed Provincial Park, deep in the limestone front ranges of the Alberta Rockies. Only two miles from the trailhead, surrounded by lake and mountain vistas on three sides, it is a beautiful and unintimidating backcountry objective: perfect for families, backpacking newbies, eighth-grade outdoor education classes, and trail runners with semi-functional calves and quads.
It was a gentle way to ease me back onto the trails and to give Luna her first taste of backcountry camping. The stakes were low, which excited me. Moving slowly, going not very far. The antithesis of what my time outside had increasingly become. It was a hike, and, as writer Camille Dungy says, “A good hike is an exercise in mindfulness, not just racing up and down a hill.”
While I would argue that racing up and down a hill delivers its own worthy brand of mindfulness, her point is well taken. When running, there is no time or mental space for tuning into specificities. I often do find a state of mindfulness, but always with movement as the undercurrent. Nature becomes internalized: breathing changes in harmony with rising mountain slopes; rocks and roots on the trail demand a zen-like awareness of every footfall. Ultimately, mindfulness of the environment is mostly in relation to my effortful experience of moving through it.
While hiking, mindfulness blooms beyond myself. Details on this short hike expand into infinity as I give them appropriate attention: perfect jumbles of blue-green juniper berries; yellow, green, and grey lichens that I now take the time to identify (jewel, horsehair, rock tripe); ground squirrels and round-eared pikas flitting through scree; Boisuval’s blue butterflies dancing around Allison’s like-colored shoes; paintbrush and Alberta wild roses giving red and pink flourishes to the airy white spruce forest. All of this dappled languidly in the high summer sun.
Though I’ve lived most of my life in Calgary, where the foothills meet the prairies, it is when I am on these trails, an hour or two to the west, that I am truly home. This week, I’ve remembered how good it feels to slow down, to tune in. On the rocky spine of this continent, every exploration unveils a new subtlety of topography or habitat or angle of light that nourishes a sense of intimacy, compassion and belonging. Full as I often am of wanderlust for more exotic locales — the French Alps, Patagonia, the Himalayas — that lust is slaked any time I am in these mountains. I could travel nowhere but here for the rest of my days, endlessly learning and listening, endlessly full of wonder and awe.
If I could find the place I could find the poem, Richard Hugo wrote. I have found the place, my life the poem that leads back to the place again, and again, and again: each journey a line I previously couldn’t find, each line a gift. This poem has no end in sight, fortunately. I’m in no rush to find it.
