By Andy Zahn
When I was twelve
years old, I found a book while digging through the spider infested boxes in
our garage. It was called 100 hikes in the South Cascades and Olympics by Harvey Manning and Ira Spring. Ten years later, my
collection has expanded to over 70 books covering trails in every corner of the
mountains of the West Coast. One of my projects during the long dreary months
of this winter was to move all my books from a sagging, overburdened shelf to a
new set of shelves. In the process, I realized that just as these books shaped
the shelf, they have shaped many aspects of my life.
I was drawn into 100
Hikes, at first, by Ira Spring’s incredible photography. The photos brought
to mind scenes from The Lord of the Rings: a photo of High Rock Lookout perched
atop precipitous cliffs, Flapjack Lakes, placid beneath the menacing crags of Sawtooth
Ridge. Peaks and lakes, alpine tundra and ancient forests – all reminded me of
the fantastic lands where heroes trod. I would read Harvey Manning’s descriptions
and stare at the marvelous places recorded there, imagining my own epic
journeys into the wilderness.
I read voraciously, poring over every hiking
book I could get my hands on, memorizing each hike until I could recite word
for word the descriptions of every trail in the South Cascade Mountains. My
family was less than appreciative of my constant hiking babble. They would
complain yet more when the only way to get me to be quiet was to be dragged out
into the wilderness with nothing but a guide book to lead us. Not all of our
trips were great successes. On one trip, we hiked into Bluff Lake and spent the
night bailing water out of our tents! After a number of similarly “memorable”
trips, the rest of my family have become fair weather hikers, but my attitudes
seem to have more in common with another of my favorite outdoor writers,
Patrick McManus, who wrote: "Half the fun of camping in
those days was looking forward to getting back home. When you did get back home
you prolonged the enjoyment of the trip by telling all your friends how
miserable you had been. The more you talked about the miseries of life in the
woods the more you wanted to get back out there and start suffering again.
Camping was a fine and pleasant misery"[i]
Hiking
books have not only guided my feet, but have also shaped some of my ideas and
opinions. Harvey Manning’s writing imparted in me a desire to explore and
protect the wild backcountry of the world. Manning wrote about hiking trails in
order to get people to go there, so that they, too, would want to protect the
trails and the lands they passed through. According to Manning, "Your feet have information, direct
boot-on-trail knowledge of the earth"[ii],
and "Your Feet bones are
connected to the leg bones, leg bones to the hip bones, hip bones to the backbones,
backbones to the head bones, head bones to the letter-writing finger bones.”[iii]
These ideas have driven my desire to emulate him and write about the wilderness
in order to help save it. He and Patrick McManus have further influenced me to
make abundant use of exaggeration in order to make a point. One of my favorite
descriptions by Manning was written when he was especially annoyed by horse
traffic on hiking trails: "The
cavalry rides through this region in numbers approaching the squadrons of Phil
Sheridan, Jeb Stuart, and the Cossacks, and where trails are wet, horses churn
the soil to mud and a hiker may simply sink out of sight in black muck and
nevermore be seen"[iv]
As I put the last of my hiking books onto
their new shelves, one tumbles to the floor. It happens to fall open to a page
featuring a panorama of the Alpine Lakes Peaks: Summit Chief, Mt. Daniel,
Mt.Hinman, their craggy heights rising over a small lake glittering in a verdant
forest valley. It strikes me that summer
isn’t very far away, and maybe it’s time to start planning this year’s hikes.
Soon the shelves are empty once again and books are strewn around me in a
haphazard circle; my portal to the mountain kingdoms, currently still locked in
the icy grip of winter. In my mind the flowers are already pushing their way up
through the snow drifts, their scent already welling up from beneath the deep
powder blanketing the meadows. I fancy I can hear the snow melting from here…….
 |
| GI Joe scales a mountain of literature! |
[iv] Manning
H. (1985). 100 Hikes in the South Cascades and Olympics. Seattle WA: The
Mountaineers. PG. 79.
