Hiking

• 1. Introduction

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  Hiking is a long, vigorous walk, usually on trails or footpaths in the countryside. On the 26th of April 1336, the Italian poet Petrarch is said to have climbed to the top of Mont Ventoux, a peak 1912 metres tall, with his brother and two servants. He did it for recreation rather than necessity, then described the day in a letter to his confessor. Yet some have suggested the climb never happened at all. That single disputed afternoon sits at the heart of a much larger question. When did people first start walking for the pure pleasure of it, and not because they were poor, or pious, or simply going somewhere? The answer turns out to be tangled. It runs through Roman emperors and Romantic poets, through trespassing miners in northern England and a forester sketching a trail down the spine of a continent. It also runs through a single English word that means one thing in Manchester and something else entirely in Auckland.

• 2. A Word For Walking

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  In Canada and the United States, hiking is the preferred term, while walking is reserved for shorter, particularly urban strolls. Cross the Atlantic and the vocabulary shifts. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, walking covers everything, from a turn around a park to backpacking in the Alps. The British also speak of rambling, hillwalking, and fell walking, the last used mostly in northern England, where fell is the common word for both hills and mountains in places like the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales. Australians have their own word entirely: bushwalking, which covers both on and off-trail hiking. New Zealanders call a long, vigorous walk tramping, a term they favour for overnight and longer trips. The terms multiply as the difficulty rises. Trekking describes multi-day hiking in mountainous regions. Walking a long-distance trail from end to end is called trekking or thru-hiking. Multiday hikes that involve camping, mountain huts, or other accommodation are known as backpacking. And then there is bushwhacking, the brute work of forcing through dense forest and undergrowth, where in extreme cases a machete is needed to clear a path.

• 3. Before Pleasure

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  The Roman Emperor Hadrian ascended Mount Etna in 125 CE during a return trip from Greece. In 1275, Peter III of Aragon claimed to have reached the summit of Pic du Canigou, a 9134-foot mountain near the southern tip of France. These were ascents for their own sake, long before anyone called such a thing a hobby. The first ascent of any technical difficulty to be officially verified came on the 26th of June 1492. Antoine de Ville, a chamberlain and military engineer for Charles VIII, King of France, was ordered to climb Mont Aiguille. Because ropes, ladders and iron hooks were used, the event is widely recognized as the birth of mountaineering. Conrad Gessner, a 16th-century Swiss physician, botanist and naturalist, is widely recognized as the first person to hike and climb for sheer pleasure. The claim that Petrarch was the first to climb a mountain for pleasure since antiquity was disproven by Lynn Thorndike in 1943. Mount Ventoux had already been climbed by Jean Buridan, on his way to the papal court in Avignon before the year 1334, to make some meteorological observations. Thorndike also noted that Anno II, Archbishop of Cologne, who lived from about 1010 to 1075, climbed his beloved mountain oftener than usual in his final years.

• 4. The Romantic Turn

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  Albrecht von Haller's poem Die Alpen, published in 1732, is an early sign of an awakening appreciation of the mountains. The Swiss scientist and poet used it chiefly to contrast the simple, idyllic life of the Alpine inhabitants with the corrupt existence of those dwelling in the plains. The idea of taking a walk in the countryside only really developed during the 18th century in Europe, arising from changing attitudes to landscape and nature bound up with the Romantic movement. Johann Gottfried Seume set out on foot from Leipzig to Sicily in 1801, returning via Paris after nine months. Thomas West, a Scottish priest, popularized walking for pleasure in his 1778 guide to the Lake District. He aimed to encourage the taste of visiting the lakes by furnishing the traveller with a guide, and he marked out stations, or viewpoints, from which tourists could enjoy the views for their aesthetic qualities. The book was a major success. William Wordsworth was another early exponent. His poem Tintern Abbey came from a 1798 walking tour of Wales with his sister Dorothy, and in 1790 he had set off on an extended tour of France, Switzerland, and Germany, later described in his autobiographical poem The Prelude. In June 1818, John Keats began a walking tour of Scotland, Ireland, and the Lake District with his friend Charles Armitage Brown. Robert Louis Stevenson crossed the Cévennes in France with a donkey, recorded in his Travels with a Donkey of 1879, and published his essay Walking Tours in 1876.

• 5. The Right To Roam

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  Industrialisation in England drove people into cities where living standards were often cramped and unsanitary. They escaped by rambling in the countryside, but the land around Manchester and Sheffield was privately owned, and trespass was illegal. Rambling clubs sprang up in the north to campaign for a legal right to roam. One of the first was Sunday Tramps, founded by Leslie White in 1879. The first national grouping, the Federation of Rambling Clubs, formed in London in 1905 and was heavily patronized by the peerage. Access to Mountains bills were presented to Parliament from 1884 to 1932 without success. In 1932, the Rambler's Right Movement organized a mass trespass on Kinder Scout in Derbyshire. Despite police efforts to stop it, the trespass succeeded thanks to massive publicity. The Mountain Access Bill passed in 1939 was opposed by many walkers' organizations, including The Ramblers, who felt it did not protect their rights, and it was eventually repealed. After World War II came the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949, and in 1951 the first national park in the UK, the Peak District National Park. The Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 considerably extended the right to roam in England and Wales.

• 6. Trails Across America

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  Abel Crawford and his son Ethan cleared a trail to the summit of Mount Washington, New Hampshire, in 1819. This 8.5-mile path is the oldest continually used hiking trail in the United States. British and European Romanticism reached North America through the transcendentalist movement, and both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau shaped the outdoors movement there. Thoreau's essay A Walk to Wachusett, from 1842, describes a four-day walk he took with a companion from Concord, Massachusetts to the summit of Mount Wachusett and back. Established in 1876, the Appalachian Mountain Club is the oldest hiking club in America, founded to protect the trails and mountains of the northeast. Four earlier clubs had already formed and then disbanded within a few years, including the Exploring Circle, set up by four men from Lynn, Massachusetts in 1850, which the National Park Service recognizes as the first hiking club in New England. The Scottish-born naturalist John Muir, who lived from 1838 to 1914, petitioned Congress for the National Park bill passed in 1890, establishing Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks. He founded the Sierra Club and is today called the Father of the National Parks. The National Park Service was created in 1916. In 1921, the forester Benton MacKaye conceived the Appalachian Trail, completed in August 1937 and running from Maine to Georgia. The Pacific Crest Trail, first explored in the 1930s by YMCA hiking groups, was eventually registered as a complete trail from Mexico to Canada.

• 7. Pilgrim Paths

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  Many modern hiking trails follow ancient routes walked for practical or religious reasons. The British National Trail the North Downs Way closely follows the Pilgrims' Way to Canterbury. The Camino de Santiago, or Way of St. James, leads to the shrine of the apostle Saint James the Great in the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, in Galicia in northwestern Spain. Many walk it as a spiritual path or retreat. The French Way is the most popular route, running from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port on the French side of the Pyrenees to Roncesvalles on the Spanish side, then another 780 km to Santiago de Compostela through Pamplona, Logroño, Burgos and León. A typical walk on the Camino francés takes at least four weeks, allowing for one or two rest days. Paths from Tours, Vézelay, and Le Puy-en-Velay meet at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, and the GR 65 of the Grande Randonnée network is an important variant. The Abraham Path, established in 2007, is believed to follow Abraham's journey across the Ancient Near East. It runs as a pilgrimage route between Urfa, Turkey, possibly his birthplace, and his final destination in the desert of the Negev.

• 8. Mountains And Hazards

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  Mount Kilimanjaro, a dormant volcano in Tanzania, rises 5895 metres above sea level and about 4900 metres above its plateau base, making it the highest mountain in Africa and the highest single free-standing mountain in the world. According to the Kilimanjaro National Park Authority, 467,190 travelers visited it between 2013 and 2022, with over 45,000 climbers recorded in 2023. Elsewhere, the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu in Peru is popular enough to require a permit, while Chile's longest path is the informal 3,000 km Greater Patagonia Trail created by a non-governmental initiative. The Great Himalaya Trail aims to link roughly 1,700 kilometres of path across the Himalayas from the east end to the west end of Nepal. Such terrain carries real danger. Hiking can be hazardous because of terrain, weather, the chance of getting lost, or pre-existing medical conditions. Physical ailments range from dehydration, frostbite, and hypothermia to ankle sprains and broken bones. Altitude sickness typically appears above 2500 m, though some are affected lower down. The Mountaineers club recommends a list of Ten Essentials, including a compass, sunglasses, sunscreen, a head lamp, a first aid kit, a fire starter, and a knife. Many hikers follow the Leave No Trace philosophy, summed up in the saying: Leave nothing but footprints. Take nothing but photos. Kill nothing but time. Keep nothing but memories. In bear country, though, the advice reverses, and hikers make intentional noise to avoid startling a bear on the trail ahead.