SLOW WALKING

10 Mar

28 days. That’s how long it took us to hike the John Muir Trail. What surprised me the most was not that our trip was scheduled to take a month, but that other people were NOT planning on taking that long.

You only have two weeks? How can you even MOVE that fast?

This question was silently answered by the blur of feet shooting past me on the trail, footsteps dissolving into the distant mountain sounds. I just… hike… slowly.

In the beginning the slowness was from our muscles, getting used to the trail, the elevation, the cycle of the hike. Hike, hike, hike, camp, sleep, repeat. Then we had an injury in our hiking group that allowed us to experience “slow” in a new safety-focused way. Our eventual pace was just the natural speed of our Hiking. 1 mile per hour was not a-typical.

It’s hard not to want to keep pace with everyone else. Most days we would meet a hiker or a group headed in the same direction. Crossing streams goes from scary to entertaining when accompanied by a jovial group. Scrambling up the steep rocks to Mather Pass went from exhilarating to empowering in one of our only all-women hiker days.

We would occasionally run into people more than once, usually when they took a rest day or were stopped to resupply. Seeing someone for a SECOND time was like seeing an old friend! I know you! I’ve seen you more than once! Awesome!

Slowness. It actually wasn’t bad. First, there were the flowers. The moisture from the snowmelt and our lucky timing brought us a daily visual flower display. And we got excited by each and every flower we encountered. We took some pictures too (ok, several…hundred). We found silence. We learned our limits.

Yet we shared something with everyone who passed us. For every hiker on the trail, each day holds the promise of new things. New mountains, new snow, new rocks, new trail companions, new campsites, new marmots…. It’s one of the main reasons many people hike- to see new things. We hike to experience that sense of awe that captured us so easily as kids.

And we did experience that. Slowly.

FOOT NOTE: Another guest blog: this time from Mary Patterson…
a hiker we met up with several times along the JMT.