Tag Archives: Hiking

Daily Bath

She is the type of girl who thinks a daily bath is essential to survival. Never mind if it is cold water, warm water, hauled water, stream water or the lake. It hasn’t always been that way, of course. As a child, like most children, she was required to take baths – one on Wednesday before midweek church service and the other on Saturday night in preparation for Sunday services. Sometime in junior high, daily bathing became a ritual of choice. It gave continuity to her schedule and provided the confidence that results from making one’s best effort to look nice. It also caused her parents to chide her for wasting water and to expound on thrift. Nevertheless, the bathing habit remains her eccentricity. She considers water from the tap an essential. She luxuriates in hot water, whether hauled and heated on a woodstove or available via a simple turn of the faucet handle.  Hot springs are an ultimate extravagance provided just for her by Mother Earth.

When Forest Bathing became the new trend and buzz word in 2016 (the idea of shinrin-yoku-a taking in of the forest atmosphere – had been around since the 80s in Japan) she took to it like a duck to water. To get out and take in the forest atmosphere, bask in the great outdoors, soak in the beauty; that too became an almost daily habit. And what a luxurious habit it is! One day a ponderosa forest, the next replete with aspen, a third day piñon-pine.

Forest bathing does not have to involve splashing about or getting wet in water, though it frequently does. The best days are those she hikes for miles and returns to a hot bath or shower. No substituting one for the other; she will have her bath and forest bathe too – every last day of her life if possible.

Her ultimate daydream includes a long hike followed by the almost delirious indulgence of a hot-springs dip surrounded by mountains and conifers. Throw in a piano by the fireside and a savory meal cooked by someone else and she will know she has died and gone to heaven. But that hasn’t happened yet. So, for the time being we’ll leave her with a daily hike and a clawfoot tub filled to the brim with Epson salts.

Ponderosa Forest
Ponderosa Forest
Aspen Forest
Aspen Forest
Mixed Aspen and Pine Forest
Mixed Aspen and Pine Forest
Fall in the forest
Fall in the forest
A trail through the forest
A trail through the forest

A thirst for writing

You know that feeling when you think you are hungry and you eat something – and then something more – only to find you were really thirsty and a glass of water would have sufficed ?

She rose with the sun in a remote motel, brewed a cup of tea, started some oatmeal in the microwave. It was still a few hours before work. She tried to check her email by laptop. Not enough bandwidth. She tried to open it by phone. Fluctuating bars. She ate a few bites of oatmeal and tried Instagram by phone. The image remained frozen. She sipped her tea, polished off the oatmeal, experimented with a hotspot for laptop. Tried Facebook via hotspot. Wondered what the rest of the world was up to. Tried every alternative. Email by phone. Instagram by hotspot. Facebook by phone. Nothing.

So she gave up on finding out what the rest of the world was doing, filled her water reservoir, strapped on her sandals and headed out to explore the landscape.

But what she really craved was her leather journal and pen.

When Sunday restores the soul

Do you take a regular day off each week? One out of seven? Two out of seven? What do you do with that day off, totally off?

I grew up in a home that went beyond luxuriating in Sunday as a day of relaxation. My family of origin enforced Sunday as a day of rest. No sports. No games. No reading of secular material. Just attendance at Sunday School and Church, preparation and cleanup of a large family meal. Yes, Sunday was an enforced day of rest and as such, a day marked by ennui, often headachy, making me squirm with a longing to get something done.

These days I am still prone to that extreme of getting something done. There are always things that somebody has got to do. If I don’t do them, who will? I am guilty of checking things off the list at the expense of not taking a day – not even one of seven – for rest. My soul shrivels. My vision is constricted.

My spirits were on the brink of shriveling when I woke in a motel room, 200 miles from home, having successfully completed a vendor fair the evening before. Nothing to do? No excuse for not taking a day of rest.

Posey Lake is 18 miles up the Hell’s Backbone Road from Escalante. It was mid-September and the colors, oh the colors, were glorious!

IMG_2379poseylakeOnce I got to the lake, I sat on the boat dock for some minutes, just wasting time. Then, I did the logical thing and took a hike all the way around the lake, startling myself and cattle along the way. Once on the other side, I noticed a trail leading to a lookout. However steep, who can resist a trail? A trail leading to a CCC built fire lookout in Dixie National Forest? Even more delectable.

At first, I took only pictures. The aspens and the conifers were ravishingly colorful.

IMG_2384tallredaspenThen, a few more paces along the trail and I began to shed the layers of photographer, writer, or analytical business woman. With wild abandon, I went on a tree-hugging spree. I sniffed out a Ponderosa (searching for that faint vanilla). I hugged the ponderosa. Then I hugged an aspen. Then a very young blue spruce. And finally I ended up in the arms of an Englemann.

And, at the top, at the lookout, I found an entire colorful panorama stretching for hundreds of miles.

It was Sunday. I had a day off. A day to relax. A day for spiritual renewal. I went further up the mountain.

And my soul, o my soul, was refreshed

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For the Beauty of Nature

I saw him get out of the car and make his way carefully, painfully toward the glass visitor center doors. The interpretive ranger desk is situated ideally with a view of the five nearest parking spaces and the handicap space. It is not a sit-down desk, it’s more like a bar, really, with shots of information on tap and rangers dispensing topo maps instead of steins.

Creeping slowly up the sidewalk, slinging one foot ahead of the other, he greeted the all-sport 30-year-olds in their jeans and crack climbing gear who were returning from the restrooms. Nice restrooms. The kind with running water where you can actually brush your teeth and wash your armpits after a few days spent camping with the Anasazi.

He took his time coming in the door, feeling for the adjoining wall as a support. I took my time welcoming him and offering a map. I was waiting for the rest of the family to join him before commencing information. He took a drink of water from the fill station. Then, leaning heavily on the desk, he followed its curve to the cash register.

“What I need,” he said, “Is one of those walking sticks – a cane to lean on.” I hurried to the telescoping hiking pole display, selected a pole, extended it to what I judged to be his proper height and handed it to him. He tried it out. “I’ll just see how it works as I tour the visitor center,” he said.

“Would you like to use the wheeled chair while you are enjoying the exhibits and the bookstore?” I asked.

“What?” he said.

“Do you have a park pass?” I asked.

“What?”

“Park Pass,” I enunciated clearly.

He showed me a vintage Golden Eagle Park Pass.

“I’m eighty years old,” he said, “I can’t hear very well.”

“Can I get you a map and directions, or shall I wait until your family arrives?”

“What? Oh, I am traveling by myself.”

He asked about the campground. Did it really mean what it said about the combined length being 26 feet? His motorhome was only 24 feet. He thought he might be able to park his tow car beside the motor home. Would that be all right? Eventually he bought the hiking pole and a couple books, made his way back to the car and drove the eight-mile loop. He retrieved his motorhome from somewhere alongside the road and camped in the park campground that night. I know this because I saw him pass the entry station three hours later in the motorhome with the car in tow. Both vehicles were snuggly parked side by side in the campground when I did the rove at 8:00 the next morning.

Eighty. He could well have been ninety. Deaf. Difficulty walking even 50 feet; yet he is still busy touring America and seeing the sights.

Twenty years ago I was hiking Box Canyon, Ouray CO, with the man I was wedded to at the time. The trail overlooked a wooded picnic area and we watched a family arrive in a van. They assisted Grandpa as he disembarked into a wheelchair and then they placed him comfortably at the picnic table.

“I hope,” said my husband, “that when I am old and in a wheel chair, someone will still take me camping.”

I have thought of that comment many times in the intervening years as I hiked, camped and travelled to beautiful places. Sometimes alone, other times with friends or family.

Yes! Somehow, some way, may we all keep on putting one foot in front of the other. May we enjoy the great outdoors until our last breath. Because out there is beauty and refreshment and life!

 

 

 

Making Tracks in the Snow

To take a hike every morning -on the clock – and be compensated by a roof over my head. What more could an outdoor loving woman want? Perhaps food? Food is a good idea. At some point – and soon- that will need to be addressed.

But savor with me for a moment an early morning rove through a pristine campground. First a half-mile walk through a piñon-juniper woodland, then a quarter mile trek around a lightly paved loop passing 13 campsites.

No one has been here in the past 24 hours. How do I know? Six inches of new fallen snow blankets everything. Mine are the only tracks. Wait a minute, what is that miniature train track, that zipper imprint in the snow crossing my path? Kangaroo rat? Deer mouse? I see the tail drag. Deer mouse, I conclude. I fill in the campground report.DSCN5348mousetracks

The next day more new snow has fallen.   Once again I am the only creature stirring on two legs. On the paved loop a cottontail found my trail and joined it for 20 yards. Day three I tramp through knee deep snow A jackrabbit has crossed my path of yesterday in bounding strides. On day four I am off work so I don’t have to rove the loop, but how can I resist? I borrow a pair of snowshoes twice my size and decide to break a path in 18 inches of snow. Day five I follow my snowshoe path in my hiking boots. Five days and still no tire tracks in the campground or human prints save mine. On impulse I fall on the undisturbed snow and make a snow angel right in the middle of the less travelled road, laughing to think how this will look from the elevated perspective of a Mini Wini driver. Day six, a mule deer has joined my path through the piñon-juniper woodland, leaving cloven tracks inside mine and a pile of deer scat to the left of the trail and then another to the right.

The sun has been shining these past few days, the snow steadily shrinking and melting. Each day there are new signs in the campground. A tent space cleared of snow and the footprints of a hardy camper. Tire tracks indicating arrival and early departure of a camper truck. And still, my boots make the only stride on the woodland path. And this morning? Blue and gray scrub jays scold and a juniper tit-mouse taps out a question and response to its mate. The sunshine is glorious. Clear and fresh inside my boot print, continuing for 15 feet I see them: Bobcat.