In Wildness…
“Life in the wilderness can be a continual contemplation and communion with God and Spirit of those values echoing within us all, values born of timelessness, mystery, the great silences, and an ancient way of life.”
-Sigurd Olson, Reflections From the North Country
Throughout my adult life—especially my pre-spouse-and-kids adult life—the wilderness has been my holy sanctuary, my retreat, where I go to clear my head, re-invigorate my body, re-energize my spirit, and re-balance my chakras. Self-revitalization is a common theme you see expressed by many writers who spend time in wild places, going back to Henry David Thoreau and John Muir and continuing with more recent authors such as Sigurd Olson, Ed Abbey, Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, and countless others. I’m talking about more than an afternoon out on the hiking trail. There is something special about putting some distance between you and the regular trappings and distractions, as well as the creature comforts, of your daily life for a few to several days. It takes at least this long to shed your typical daily rhythms and attune to the slower pace of the land. The psychological, emotional and physical benefits are able to more firmly manifest in your being after a few days of moving through a wilderness landscape at a pace determined by the landscape, the weather, and your own skill and energy.
I learned how to travel and camp in wild places during my college years. The Outdoor Education curriculum at Northland College (now defunct) included wilderness skills training and group backcountry experiences in the Lake Superior region as well as the southwestern US. I’ve continually found myself yearning to reconnect with the wild since then. During those early single years, I generally went solo. I’d plan multi-day trips, pore over maps, load up the backpack with camping gear, carefully pack lightweight foodstuffs, and drive myself to some remote trailhead where the car sat for a few to several days while I disappeared. I was never into extreme adventure travel. I wasn’t out to conquer anything, set any speed records, or test myself by bringing only a water bottle and multi-tool. I never took up serious whitewater paddling or rock climbing, although I’ve done both in my college days. I planned trips that took me through scenic wildlands and set an easy pace that allowed me to snap photos, birdwatch, ID the local flora, gather wild blueberries or fish, and journal while sitting next to a wild shoreline or by a campfire. I occasionally travelled with companions, particularly on trips into the Canadian boundary lakes wilderness, which I planned in order to introduce friends to the beauty of these areas. Solo travel, though had a special place in my heart, as I was setting my own pace and could linger as long as I liked or move on.
Admittedly, wilderness travel requires not only knowledge, skill, and proper outfitting with the right equipment but a certain degree of physical stamina as well. It is not for everyone, although, I believe that everyone can benefit from spending time ‘losing oneself’ in wild places, even if it is within the wild, yet safe environs of a county or state park. I am no longer in the physical condition I was in my 20s and 30s and would not attempt some of the journeys I took during those years. While my epic excursions may be a thing of my past, I continue to be motivated to get out onto the land and reset my natural biorhythms for a few days. A just completed journey along the Ice Age Trail in Wisconsin’s Kettle Moraine State Forest convinced me that I can and do need to continue venturing into the wilds for as long as I can. While I wouldn’t describe Kettle Moraine State Forest’s North Unit as a wilderness, the trip required backcountry equipment, skills and a certain degree of stamina (or what constitutes stamina for a 65-year-old retiree). In addition to sore muscles I don’t recall from my younger days, the old familiar feelings of connectedness, inner calm, and reawakened spirit found me by day two. I even felt physically stronger by the third day of walking.
My intent here is not to provide a tutorial on planning and preparing for a journey into the wilderness or even to suggest that you must take one. If you do decide to venture out into a wild landscape, there are ample resources in print and online to help you plan. I would only suggest consulting with an experienced wilderness trip guide or planner or book yourself into a guided trip with a professional outfitter or local Sierra Club chapter, where you can learn the ropes. Exploring a wild area with a professional outfitter has the advantage of providing you with most of the gear needed so that you don’t have to outfit yourself with expensive new gear. There are knowledgeable, passionate people working for these outfitters that will ensure your safety and love to share wilderness travel with newbies. Certainly, don’t make the mistake made by a group in California recently, who consulted with Google’s Gemini AI to plan and outfit a trip into the Mount Shasta wilds. They ended up lost and poorly prepared and required rescuing from the mountainside. Plan intelligently but not artificially!
My goal is simply to inspire you! In addition to sharing some excerpts from the writings of some of the aforementioned authors and others, I’ve included below a couple of my own past musings penned (literally) in wild places. There is an incredibly rich and beautiful world out there to experience. Reading about these places and travelling vicariously is the easy part and provides its own sort of inspiration. Driving to an overlook and snapping a selfie won’t do the landscape justice and you any good. Make a promise to push yourself just a little out of your comfort zone, and venture down that trail, up onto that mountain, out into that desert, down past the tide pool where the reef fish swim. Get to a place where the sounds of your daily life fade away and you can hear your own breath and heartbeat enveloped in the silences of the earth. You will feel alive in a way you never have! You will be inspired and feel a sense of accomplishment. Of course, you might die, but that is always a remote possibility when you travel to exotic places. Don’t give that any energy.
Lake Superior Provincial Park, Ontario – 1993
“I realized while sitting here after settling in comfortably at my fourth campsite this week, what it is that I came here to learn – or maybe I just re-realized something I already knew. Home is where you make it and happiness is in your heart. It is certainly easy to be content here, constantly surrounded by beauty and the restless sounds of Lake Superior. However, no one campsite or view of the lake or section of Northwoods trail has stood out as my favorite. I have intentionally kept moving each day because of restlessness and the urge to explore and discover new wonders. Now I realize that I am as content here as anywhere – including my home, which has its own challenges and satisfactions. Here, life is reduced to basics; shelter from wind and rain, dry warm clothes, food, and water. Each day I have put these all together with simple effectiveness. There is a renewed understanding of the importance of patience, perseverance to get where you want to be, and acceptance of things beyond your control. With your heart in the right place, you’ll get to where you want to go, eventually.”
Sea of Cortez, Baja California Sur – 1995
“Yesterday was a day rich in magic and melancholy. Early in the morning, while it was still dark, I crawled out of my tent to answer nature’s call and look at the stars. The defining vision of my trip was revealed to me there along Danzante Island’s rocky shoreline. With the sky awash in stars, the shallow tide pools were likewise awash in stars of a different kind. Tiny bits of ghostly bioluminescence flashed, sparkled and flitted about in what has to be nature’s finest imitation of the heavens. I suddenly felt aware of and in touch with this ocean environment, as though it had accepted me and felt I was worthy of one of its secrets. As I did earlier, I thought once again of the ocean coursing through my veins – my body’s salty imitation of the nurturing sea from whence we all came originally. In a sense, the ocean and not the earth is our mother. While life has evolved on land, this mother has continued to age and nurture those closest to it, including the little phytoplankton which soak in the sun’s light by day and shine some of it forth at night in honor to the givers of light, the stars.”
“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity”
-John Muir, Our National Parks
“It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.”
-Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction – so easy to lapse into – that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.”
-Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of Fascination
“Some of us are drawn to mountains the way the moon draws the tide. Both the great forests and the mountains live in my bones. They have taught me, humbled me, purified me and changed me.”
-Joan Halifax, The Fruitful Darkness
“Wilderness areas are first of all a series of sanctuaries for the primitive arts of wilderness travel, especially canoeing and packing. I suppose some will wish to debate whether it is important to keep these primitive arts alive. I shall not debate it. Either you know it in your bones, or you are very, very old.” -Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
“Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets’ towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.”
-Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
