Someone who doesn't live in Vancouver writes to ask, "What's up with this hiking thing, anyway?"

It's in my blood, I guess. Growing up in West Vancouver in the early 1970s, across the street from our house was a huge overgrown municipal park with a large creek running through it. On the other side of the road was forest, all the way up to the Upper Levels Highway, which was itself fairly new, having only been completed in the late 1960s. Much of this land is now expensive subdivisions, with multimillion dollar ocean and island views, and not many original trees. I remember going for walks with my mom in 1974 or 1975 up what would later become Westport Road, to gaze into this huge undifferentiated green tangle. Not a dangerous, Snow White-style forest, but something other, brooding, serene, and largely indifferent to people.

My dad hiked a fair bit as a younger man, and took me out as soon as I was old enough to carry a pack. We went to Cheakamus Lake, near Whistler, in 1975. The virtually flat trail to the lake runs through an open old growth forest, and I remember the trip with surprising clarity: the trees' size; garlands and cushions of bright green moss; the glacial blue of the lake. When dru and I were older, the three of us climbed the Squamish Chief one crisp fall Sunday, and the Black Tusk, and Alpha Mountain's shoulder -- this last trip neccessitating renting a canoe, and paddling across the swift Squamish River, and staggering up a 20%+ grade trail with heavy overnight packs for six hours to Lake Lovelywater, a campsite, and a brief respite before the real climbing, which began the following day.

I took friends out, too, in my old battered Honda Civic, and, later, my Tercel, friends who, for the most part, went "hiking" (or scrambling, or full-on mountaineering, ropeless, bushwhacking down wet cliffs covered in blueberry bushes and slippery moss) once, and then found all kinds of excuses to never go again.

Peaks were climbed, nonetheless, including some fairly obscure and remote ones. Most importantly, I never felt lost outside, or helpless, even in the weirdest and most trying circumstances. The lack of a trail was never an impediment to getting where I wanted to go. Pushing through bushes, scrambling up gullies, etc. always seemed a neccessary and enjoyable part of getting up into the alpine.

I've suffered from persistant depression for almost twenty years. Being outside, surrounded by landscape, lifts that depression, draws me out of myself. It's hard to be depressed when you're soaking wet, or sweaty, exhausted and bug-bitten, or quickly retreating from a surprised and unhappy bear.

So, there's some historical context for all the breezy trip reports and stuffed-cat-on-the-summit snapshots. I guess the black and white forest photographs that pop up here and there have something to do with that history, too; they seem framed lower down than my other pictures, as if taken by my five year-old self at the top of Westport Road in 1975, looking out on a landscape that is all one piece, a presence that is not aesthetically pleasing in any conventional Group-of-Seven-meets-Emily-Carr kind of way, but meaningful nonetheless.
- posted by cjb @ 10:44 AM