It is not until some uninitiated tourist asks me, “why do I hike” that I realize how little I really know about hiking. I have equipment that satisfies me, almost, and I can get food that I like, usually, and I can amble along a trail without watching my feet, most of the time, and somewhere I have a journal full of details on most of the trails I’ve been on, except every time I go there I find things to add on the list.

But not only does memory sag and lag, and the mind conveniently blank out nastier portions of the adventure, and the trails change with every rainstorm, and the camps change with every passerby, and the seeps change with the snowmelt, but the hike itself depends on the weather, muscle cooperation, water, rocks, animals, wind, blisters, a knee that decides to conk out, mice that eat your apple, lemonade that leaks and sifts throughout the pack, and a thousand other variables.

Then I stare in perplexity at a place that I remembered as Xanadu, and now find to be part of Dante’s Inferno. Or a place that never really ranked outstanding in my mind suddenly grabs my attention with both hands. And then I hear the ghosts of the old explorers who came before me and laid down the path I walk on, laughing down the wind as they sit on some butte and watch us stumble through their old stomping grounds. The grandeur of wilderness reduces us back to our proper place in the perspective of things as that of busy little bugs scuttling about pushing things around.

The faded footprints of the first travelers remind us that we have a long way to walk before we really learn anything. The rolling majesty of clouds, of rocks, of canyon buttes, that were old before time started to mean anything to us, humbles our lives into bursts of music down an undisturbed street, and the ageless wisdom of delicate balance and endless cycles reduces any learning we may profess to have to its less than exhaulted portion of tiny crumbs of facts out of a world of knowledge.

If that is the case, then why frustrate ourselves by trying to find out anything about hiking, or anything about anything? The wisest man in the world knows very little of all there is to know, and if he is wise enough, he may realize this. Ill never climb K-2, or achieve the first decent of a river. I’ll never hike every route in the Grand Canyon. But I ‘m happy with my crumbs. I’m satisfied to just hike in a place for the first time in my life, if not for the first time in the ageless eons of time. I'm glad to know just one part of one trail for certain, if not every inch of every trail in the world. I’m glad to get one insight of myself, if I can’t know everything about people that anyone could know. And if I can so satisfy myself by hiking, then maybe that’s what I ought to tell that tourist.