I'm thinking about long distance backpacking even more than usual at present as I'm deeply involved in planning for my forthcoming Scottish Watershed walk and have the book on my Pacific Crest Trail walk that I'll be writing next autumn in the back of my mind. A few years ago, reflecting on a recent TGO Challenge crossing, I wrote a piece for The Great Outdoors about the reasons why long distance backpacking is so satisfying. Here it is again:
What is it about walking for day after day carrying all you
need on your back that is so fulfilling? Day walking is easier, staying in
roofed accommodation is more comfortable. But neither has the same intensity or
produces the same feeling of contentment as long distance walking and camping.
The reasons, I think, are complex and many. They are to do with the nature of
journeys, the significance of self-sufficiency and the importance of closeness
to nature.
Backpacking is about travelling, about moving on from place
to place, with the only limitation being how far you can walk each day. This
can be done as a random venture, setting out each day with no destination in
mind, just following the whims of the hour, and with no overall aim for the
walk. Such relaxed unpressured backpacking sounds appealing but in reality I’ve
found it strangely unsatisfying on the couple of occasions I’ve tried this
approach. Whether on an overnight or a multi-month hike I like an ultimate
point to aim for via a series of intermediate destinations even though I know
that what is most important is what happens between those points not in
reaching them. Having an objective gives a purpose to a walk, a structure
around which to plan and an incentive to keep moving. A walk like this becomes
a journey, an odyssey, an exploration. The goal gives the walk shape and
meaning. It becomes a challenge too, something that requires physical and
mental effort. And on long walks I find that the two go together and that
increased physical fitness and increased mental sharpness add to my
appreciation of and involvement with nature and the landscape.
A backpacking journey is a progression, a slow accumulation
of distance, a gradual movement towards the final destination and away from the
beginning. Every journey grows, matures and then declines. At the start there
is anticipation, excitement, even trepidation as I look ahead to the adventure
to come and wonder what it will bring in the way of joy and difficulty. Once
the journey is well underway and the little niggles of the first days, the
concerns over equipment, camp sites, water sources and route finding, have
faded away its nature changes. The experience becomes deeper and more intense and
I can concentrate on the land and the walking and camping. On multi-week hikes
it becomes my way of life. This is what I do, this is what I am. Then as the
end approaches the journey starts to wind down and the mind leaps beyond the
world of the walk to the one outside that I am about to rejoin. Life after the
walk suddenly emerges and becomes a reality whilst the walk itself starts to
fade as I complete the last miles.
A journey on foot is the best and arguably only way to journey
through a landscape and really see it, really take in the details, the subtle
changes, the way the land works. Walking speed is just right for this. The
faster the travel the less the engagement with the land, culminating in the
supersonic speed of jet aircraft, which is fine for whisking you from continent
to continent but useless for experiencing anything at all about those
continents. Mechanized transport is about getting to places as fast as possible
not about the journey itself. Backpacking, slow and inefficient at getting
anywhere, is about the process not the product, about enjoying nature and land,
about relishing the physical effort of walking and the skills of navigation,
camping and coping with the terrain and the weather. The backpacker has freedom
and depends on skills and knowledge, the mechanized traveller is bound by
timetables and dependent on the abilities and competence of others. There is no
sense of personal involvement or adventure let alone any connection with
nature. Even when the landscape can be viewed, from a train or car window say,
it’s no more than a scenic backdrop rushing past, pretty perhaps but no more
than that. You can’t touch it, smell it, feel it change under your feet,
experience the wetness of the rivers, the roughness of the rocks, the warmth of
the sun, the rush of the wind down the glen or hear the wild sounds of nature –
a stag’s bellow, a diver’s weird shriek, a barn owl’s chilling scream, the softer
tunes of song birds. A landscape is far more than a picture but to realise this
you have to become part of it, slowly, and on foot.
Backpacking is the finest way to lose yourself in a
landscape. By spending days or weeks moving through the land and sleeping there
at night you become attuned to its characteristics (that soft down slope wind
that arises after dusk, the bright green attractive looking ground that
signifies a deep bog), its smells, its plants, its wildlife, its feel. And as
you move through the landscape you can watch it change, watch mountains and
rivers grow and diminish, watch forests deepen in the valleys and thin and
dwindle as you climb, watch the shape of the land gently alter as rocky peaks
give way to rounded hills and the latter in turn to low moorland or forest. A
picture can be built up of the way the land is formed and how it changes. TGO
Challengers know this, beginning on the wild, indented western coastline where
rocky pointed mountains rise steeply from the sea with narrow glens and fast
short rivers winding through them, then walking out of this tightly packed landscape
into a more expansive one of massive, steep-sided, flat-topped hills, broader,
gentler glens and bigger, longer rivers. Finally this central and eastern Highland landscape is left for a slow descent from the
last low moorland hills into flat forests and farmland and the towns and cities
of the east coast. The various landscapes merge and intertwine with each other,
details fading in and out from one to the other. There are no straight lines
delineating the end of one landscape and the start of the next. The wild is not
neat and tidy. Yet at the same time there is a clear progression from the wild
west to the tamed east.
In my opinion the best backpacking routes are natural ones
that fit in with these changes in the landscape. By this I mean ones whose
start and finish points are determined by nature not by humanity. The TGO
Challenge is a good example. Coast to coast is a natural route to take, with
clear, indeed absolute, end points. Walking the length of a mountain range, as
I did in the Canadian Rockies, is satisfying in the same way. I finished that
walk looking down on rolling hills as the big mountains I’d been following for
1600 miles faded away. Ending the walk
at the end of the mountains felt appropriate, a suitable way of completing a
long journey. That’s how a backpacking journey should end, with a satisfying sense
of completion.
