this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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Hiking is a gateway to a lot of different useful skills and knowledge bases. It's good exercise for your core and legs which makes you embrace stress/pain productively. Revolution is mostly cardio and it's good cardio too. You learn your native ecosystems, all of the different components of them, and how society is built on top of them. Ethnobotany is as much a survival skill and poverty food enhancer as it is a really rich field of indigenous studies. I'm much better at intuitively reading the weather, land navigation, climbing, and general bushcraft skills after doing it. Being able to make a solid socioecological critique instead of just a socioeconomic one connects with people who align with us in important values but don't know how to connect the dots between economy and environment. The more time you spend hiking the more you learn the metabolic value of each individual species/land feature that becomes background noise in our alienation from nature.
Get into hiking, but consider getting into backpacking or overnight backcountry camping in general. I'm a long time canoe camper and did an ambitious hike last year.
The more you do this the more you learn:
You made the right call with that thru hike. The first time I went up Longs Peak, a pathological fixation for me since I started that I was determined to do at all costs, I got within sight of the summit and was so dehydrated that it wasn't safe. Learning when it's right to turn back was a bigger lesson than I took away from any other hike because it taught me how to prepare for every subsequent one. Like with the stress and pain, I like that hiking provides you a controlled environment to learn failure and self-criticism in productive ways.
Yep, you definitely also made the right call.
Hitting your physical max isn't fun. Eleven years ago was my first and only trip where I didn't have enough food, and that has engrained into my brain a particular understanding of scarcity that I never would have otherwise (having not grown up in poverty, of course).
I can't in good faith recommend that kind of extreme to anyone, but once you've at least approached your limits, you have a much better sense of when to stop and rest, how much food you need, or how long that last litre of water is going to last you.
Hiking but with a botany twist is a good perspective! We already hike, but I hadn't considered that part.
I've heard! Lots of foraging to be done.
To say nothing of what it can do for their cooking. If I find a single porcini or morel, rice is a restaurant-quality dish. Being able to differentiate whortleberries from nightshade means a camping breakfast you remember a decade later. I'll spend an entire day hunting an ingredient over 25km and it's more fun and rewarding than anything else I could do that day. Then you get into how traditional cultures manage(d) to survive off that land and you gain a really intimate appreciation for the seasons and topography of the space around you.
hiking is walking
Walking is cheaper than most other hobbies
Waddya mean cheaper? It's literally free? Who da heck pays to just go walkin around here!
It's worth investing in good hiking boots to spare your feet/ankles and a good daypack to protect your spine/shoulders. You can do it for free or get those things second-hand for cheap, but I ended up putting around $300 into my gear once I got serious about that and camping.
Lots of good dry cushy socks too!