Celebrating the wild places

UPDATE July 2025  –

Another Reddit-inspired post. A person wanted to ask about the proper gear for hiking the Tahoe Rim Trail, and he had two weeks to complete the route, so he wanted to know if the TRT is a good route.

I said something different –

It all depends on what you’re looking for in a trip.

The Tahoe Rim Trail has easy logistics and is pleasant enough. If I could drive there in under six hours, park, and start hiking, it’d be a no-brainer in many ways.

But if I had to fly and had two full weeks to backpack, I might choose something else.

I guess the real question is: beyond logistics, what draws you to the TRT?

Some friends of mine hiked it with their kids, visited their parents in Reno, and backpacked in places they cherished from childhood. The whole family loved the experience.

For me, the TRT was the last trail I did just to say I’d done a thru-hike. It helped me realize I see long hikes more as a way to experience a place but not as a goal in itself.

I found the TRT just okay. My friends thought it was amazing. We’re both right.

I now think of my long walks as a way to connect with places and see the wild landscapes and the areas that shape them. A well-known quote by Ray Jardine recently came to mind and the piece I wrote on it.

I updated my article to reflect the longer hikes I’ve taken since writing it, as well as the purpose of these longer walks in recent years. I wrote this article initially almost ten years to the day.

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We celebrate not the trail, but the wild places it passes through. – Ray Jardine,  PACIFIC CREST TRAIL HIKER’S HANDBOOK, 1996

In “The Maze”

My initial backpacking forays were a bit comical.  I became temporarily lost, carried way too much gear, and often the wrong type at that, had to get a tow after one early winter backpacking trip (Pro Tip: A rear wheel drive, 1989 Mustang LX is a terrible car for getting out of a parking lot that has about six inches of freshly fallen New Hampshire snow) and made other stumbles along the way.

But I loved it.

For a person who grew up in the suburbs of Rhode Island, the White Mountains of New Hampshire seemed wild and remote and untamed.

I loved spending time in the wild places.

It was beautiful, simple, and rewarding.

Spending time in the wild spaces felt like coming home.

When I started the long-distance hiking portion of my life, the draw was to spend time in the wild spaces. The trails were a medium through which to experience them.

“The Barracks” on my Walk Across Southern Utah

When I look back at the long-distance hiking portion of my “career,” the moments I invariably think of tend to be ones where I was immersed in the wildness: Lonely campsites, wide-open spaces, and ridges that stretched for miles.

The long trail experience increasingly seems to be about celebrating the trail itself and the lifestyle surrounding it. The long trail experience is less about the wild places the trails travel through.

The Sierra, the Winds, the Colorado Plateau, New Mexico, the Whites, Maine… all places I’ve seen because of the long trails.

When I look back on my long trail hiking experience, it is the ability to travel through wild places for weeks on end that resonates.

Rio Grande crossing – Northern New Mexico Loop

Not so much the trail experience itself.   I love what the trail experience provided

Like my long walks through Utah in 2017 and again in 2023, tracing river and desert, and before that, rambling across the mesas, mountains, and canyons of northern New Mexico, these journeys are than logged distance. It’s about connection: to the landscape, to the season, and the cultural geography of the places.

In the Collegiates on the Colorado Trail/Continental Divide Trail.

Arguably, the modern trail experience IS about the trail itself and the culture around it.

And that is fine. And it is good.

But it is not for me. Or at least not the main reason for me.

As a friend said, he and I are both dinosaurs.

But I want to continue celebrating the wild places…and use the route for something that ties them together, rather than the goal in itself.

Here’s to the wild places.  May I see them more in the years ahead.