Consider a sock.

Socks are worn on the foot. They are used to reduce friction, separate bare tootsies from hard leather, keep feet warm, dry, and full of lint. Socks are made of nylon, wool, or cotton. They can be half socks, ankle socks, knee socks, leotards, or body stockings. Socks can be pulled up on the leg so they will creep back into your boots, or folded over the top of the boot so rocks can get inside. They can be of subdued color or fluorescent green. The latter is preferred so if you get lost you can stand on your head and attract attention by waggling your feet.

Socks can be used for a wind stock, pulled over the head and used for a disguise, pulled over the hand and used for a mitten, or filled with rocks and used as a blackjack (could this be known as socking it to someone?) They can be unraveled and knitted into a dickey or crocheted into a doily. One sock can be used for a hat. They can be filled with water, placed in the refrigerator, and used as an ice tray. They can be nailed up on the mantle for Christmas. They can be filled with paperbacks and used for a book bag. They can be equipped with a drawstring and used for a purse. They can be cut into strips and woven into potholders. The toe can be cut off and used for a nose warmer. The heel can be cut off and used for an elbow warmer. The ankle can be cut off and used for a wrist warmer. If your feet are getting cold by this time, cut up an old glove and use it for a foot warmer.

With this wonderful world of new and exciting things to do with this fantastic product, how can you longer resist running out and buying 63 pairs of socks? Wonderful things can be done with 126 socks. If you ever find a 124 footed mastodon, you can outfit both it and yourself at a moment’s notice.

Consider a hiking hat.

A hiking hat is an object that covers the head, more or less. It keeps the sun out of your eyes and the hair out of your face. It keeps 5% of your body heat from escaping and protects your part from sunburn. It is also a good place to carry feathers, headbands, notes to your girlfriends, fleas, safety pins, and trail markers. It can be used to hit people, to scoop water up in, to hold rocks, as a table, to fan a campfire, to fan yourself, as a Frisbee, or to plant ivy in. It can be made of straw, plastic, felt, paisley corduroy, wool, canvas or old newspapers. It can be cowboy, mod, bush Australian, French, Swiss, Dutch or Cossack.

To keep a hat on you can tie on with string, keep it jammed down over your ears, pit in it your collar, glue it on, stick it in your pocket, or hike where there is no wind and/or people to snatch it. A hat can lead to jolly companionship and fun games like “see how long the hat will sit on the fire before it catches”, or “see how long the hat will stay in the river before it sinks”, or “see how long we can keep the hat before the owner decapitates us”. People have been known to become so attached to hats that they will scale cliffs to recover them, walk ten miles with both hands on their head to avoid losing them, and kick people in the Cheetos to keep them from being stolen.

If you happen to buy a new hat, you must first break it in before you take it on a hike, else it be broken in for you. To do this it is advisable that you step on it a few times, drag it for five miles behind your vehicle, soak it in a muddy river, bury it in the dirt, singe it in at least three places, knock it out of any shape it make have fool heartedly once held, and stick a feather in it. Shooting a few holes in it is acceptable, but must not be overdone lest you attract target practice while it still resides on your head.

A hat should ideally not be bought, but found in a ditch, at the side of the road, on top of the Peaks, or on someone else. In extreme cases one may be purchased at Goodwill.

Hats are useful for prestige, for keeping rain off your roof, for protecting your head in caves, for making people mistake you for a hippy, and for throwing into the air in moments of exultation. They can be thrown into a ring, eaten, tipped, or pulled down over your eyes so you can sleep during meetings. A hat can be love, beauty, and truth. A hat can be the ultimate trip. So don’t just sit there, let a hat be your guru. Discover the wonderful world of hats.

Consider hiking food.

It is broken down into several sub-sections: breakfast, mid-morning snack, lunch, mid-afternoon snack, dinner, after-dinner snack, and before bed cocoa and cookies. A pre-breakfast snack is optional.

Breakfast can be composed of gooey oatmeal, lumpy Instant Breakfast, stale doughnuts, burnt biscuit mix, rubbery pancakes, or quickly gobbled noodle dinners. If this does not appeal, one can always skip the hike and eat at IHOP. On second thought, what’s the difference?

Lunches are composed of stale bagels, peanut butter (either frozen or melted, depending on the locale) moldy cheese, strangely smelling bologna, liquid candy bars, lumpy instant pudding (and hearken unto thee, it is not the pudding lumps but the instant milk lumps which cause strong men to cry and strong women to quietly have hysterics) graham crackers, chocolates, raisins, rye krisp, and a dram of instant lemonade. Or the affluent may purchase at exorbitant prices a Trail Pak lunch from a major retailer comprised of graham crackers, chocolate, raisins, rye krisp, and a dram of instant lemonade.

Dinner may be composed of Lipton Noodle Main Dish Dinners (noodles, sauce, and meat), Betty Crocker Noodle Dinners (Noodles and sauce), poor but honest hiker dinners (noodles, butter, sausage, bologna, or mystery meat), or absent-mindedly-packing-for-the-hike-dinner-10-minutes-before-you-leave dinner (noodles). Or one may cave into the materialistic hiking store procurers and purchase freeze-dried repasts such as Turkey Tetrazini, Lasagna, Chicken-a-la-King, or Kung Pao Chicken, most of which taste a lot like noodles, sauce, and stringy mystery meat.

Meals can be cooked in a pot. In fact, it is highly recommended that noodle dinners be so cooked. A pot can consist of the saucepan section of a mess kit, a coffee can, an empty glass jar, a hallowed-out rock, or a bandana, if you cook really fast. An emergency pot can be constructed from a tube tent, cut up and folded into shape, in which you place hot rocks in it to boil the water. Such an emergency might occur when you use your pot for an open canteen, a hat, a daypack, or hung from your belt to conceal holes in your pants.

Snacks are inclusive of M&Ms, lemon candies, mints, nuts, lemonade, limeade, orangeade, apples, cookies, kippered herrings, petite fours, lobster Cantonese, and pheasant under grass (glass will break). Snacks are useful for resting, waiting for lost hikers to get un-lost, puzzling over topo maps, picking up rocks that you can’t carry out so you just take close-up pictures of, and luring yourself along the trail by promising your weary bod a rest and sustenance if it can only drag itself along to the top of the next butte.

Meals are good times to dispose of extra weight in your pack by consumption of food. They are also good for reviewing all the fantastic, beautiful, rare and wonderful things that everyone else saw along the trail, but you somehow missed.

As any hiker will tell you, after 14 miles on the trail, food is more valued than precious gems, exotic furs, cold cash (even before taxes), a Rolls Royce, or a 900-power down sleeping bag. Uncrushed potato chips are worth all these and your first-born child.

Alternatively you can skimp on food and when others find they brought too much and offer to share, produce a grasping hand and an eager happy-to-help-out smile. If they do not offer to share, adopt the classic Puppy Dog Eyes, and begin to drool discretely into your boots. In any case, food is rightly one of the ten essentials. One may live 30 days without food, but one becomes an undesirable and testy trail companion about 29 and a half days prior to this extreme. So do yourself and your hiking buds a favor and invest in trail substance.

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.

What is a hiker?

Somewhere between tourist and explorer there occurs in human development a stage which is physically and psychosocially impossible. It is that unfathomable stage known as the hiker. A creature of undefined by psychologists, misunderstood by park rangers, either admired or doubted by tourists, and unheard of by the rest of society.

A hiker is a rare combination of doctor, lawyer, Indian and chief. She is a competent woods person with her copy of Desert Solitaire as proof. He is the example of manhood in worn-out hiking boots, a sweatshirt two sizes too large and a hat two sizes too small. She is a humorist in a crisis, a doctor in an emergency, a trailblazer, backpacking stove tender, and song leader. He is a comforter in a leaky tube tent on a cold night and a pal who has just loaned someone his last pair of dry socks.

A hiker dislikes 5:00 AM alarm clocks, waiting in line, taking the car to the mechanic (and being asked, “You drove it WHERE?”), and proofreading reports. She is fond of sunbathing in the Grand Canyon, exploring, rock climbing, a 1965 pick-up truck, and weekends. He is a dynamo on weekend hikes, exhausted the next Monday, but recuperated in time for the need weekend. She is good at finding lost trails, downhill hikes, and chasing scorpions out of sleeping bags. He is poor at crawling out of a sleeping bag on raining mornings, remembering salt, and getting to bed early. She is a lover of the out-of-doors, knee-deep in poison ivy.

Who but he can carry a wet sleeping bag, play sixteen games of Uno in succession, carry two packs, whistle “A Fistful of Dollars” through his fingers, speak pig Latin in Spanish, stand on his hands, sing 37 verses of Ging Gang Goolie, and eat four helpings of dinner.

She is expected to hike 25 miles in a weekend when during the week all the walking she does is from the car to the elevator. He is expected to take a 1989 VW over a jeep trail. He is expected to ride for 300 miles sharing the back of a panel truck with 16 other people and 23 packs. She is expected to hike energetically when all she has had to eat are pop tarts, rice and chicken soup, roll-ups made with stale tortillas and beef jerky, and 3 melted chocolate bars. He is expected to sleep warmly in the mountains in a sleeping bag so thin you can see the stars through it.

For all this, she gets blisters, a beat-up pack, sprained ankles, twisted knees, a sunburn on her nose, and a bad cold. All for the glory of seeing a place that the tourists never go. You wonder how he can stand the pace. You wonder why she doesn’t quit all the nonsense and press on to higher things. But on Saturday morning when the hiking group gathers in the parking lot to brandish road directions and trail maps, you know why.

Recently SUV (stupid useless vehicle) clubs have been complaining that there aren't enough off-road sites for them. Apparently the 2 percent of our public lands which are preserved as Wilderness are too much. Notwithstanding the fact that that is about the same amount of land under pavement.

Anyhow, the cry of the month is "access". Access for all who don't want to walk, primarily. And I just want to say that I couldn't agree more.

If hiking trails are too narrow for those poor 4X4'ers, then by all means they should be widened to accommodate those mistreated dusty little souls with their accompanying ice chests full of cold beer. Of course, not everyone can afford a 4X4, so then we'd have to smooth the road enough to accept a high clearance vehicle, like a VW bug. On the other hand, not everyone wants that kind of car, either, so we'd have to grade the roads to accept a passenger car.

Now we have a problem with car owners who don't have a powerful enough engine to chug up and down a steep grade, so bring on the bulldozers and blasters and keep those road grades to less than 10 percent. Then there are those who don't want to get the car dusty, a notable goal. So we have to pave the road.

Now we have those who don't want to spend that long of a time on the road, so we shall put in hotels and cafes for their convenience. And if they don't want to suffer that long of a drive, we'll sell the land to developers and they can put in their second houses and enjoy the Wilderness for as long as they want in comfort.

Of course by this time, the entire United States looks a lot like downtown Los Angeles. Not to worry: frustrated hikers can go north to Western Canada, where the mountains are really too rugged for a lot of road building. But then the poor SUV's are left out again, so we'll just have to widen those trails...

On the other hand, wouldn't it be cheaper and, in the long run, more accommodating for all to say that cars can drive on the pavement, SUVs can drive on the dirt roads, and hikers can hike everywhere else? And if any SUV person really, really wants to see the middle of a Wilderness area or a National park, they could lower their standards enough to walk.

They can even bring along a six pack of beer, if they promise to carry out the cans.

Don't ask of your friends what you yourself can do.
- Quintus Ennius

It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

Clean up your own mess. Your mother doesn’t live here.
-Anonymous

The Brotherhood of the Rope demands that hikers and climbers take care of their own. Or themselves. When a fellow traveler is injured, dehydrated, blistered, burned or otherwise dehabilitated, they get them out without resorting to outside forces such as the Park Service or Search and Rescue.

The Brotherhood has frayed a bit in years past. With the advent of cell phones, GPS, and the nanny state too many hikers, climbers, and even mountaineers on the world’s most challenging peaks have begun stepping over their dying comrade to make the summit, then when they are safely back, placing a casual call to 911.

Add to that the increasing number of “ego climbers” who find themselves in challenging circumstances without the years of experience which one usually approaches such challenges. Many are the “independent” climbers who boast of their solo status while relying on larger parties’ fixed ropes, medical facilities, and radios. Then when something goes wrong, they berate these expeditions for not risking everything to save them.

In wilderness medicine classes we are taught to improvise for splints, bandages, padding, and whatnot from hiking equipment rather than first aid kits. We are further told to use the victim’s equipment. The reasoning being that, if I use up my clothes or pack or sleeping pad on the affected person, I may become affected myself in the fullness of time. And I shall have used up the equipment needed to keep me safe and sound. Rule number one is, “I’m number one”. Don’t make another victim.

I, of course, can picture someone bleeding profusely and protesting mightily when I cut up his/her $200 technical running shirt to bandage said bleeding. When, in fact, I play the part of victim for a learning scenario, I make myself as malevolent as possible (“Do you know how much I paid for these pants?”). Conversely, I can picture coming to the rescue of one of those minimalist hikers who pride themselves on the lightest pack. The lightest pack means no first aid kit, no spare clothing, no, in point of fact, spare anything. “I need an extra shirt to staunch that spurting artery: too bad you don’t have one”.

Oft am I approached by people who know me (and many who do not) asking for equipment which they require but did not fetch along themselves. “I don’t bring a first aid kit,” one such informed me, “because I know you’ll always have one”.

Often in the desert one espies hikers (usually male) dashing madly into the arid climes with a half-liter of water, a can of soda in one hand, or more often, nothing whatsoever in hand or non-existent pack. On one hike into the Grand Canyon one such scampered past me, a half-empty bottle clutched in one sweaty palm, no pack on his ample back. It was a warmish day: temperatures topped 100 in full sun.

In the course of time, I met a fellow traveler who queried, “I have a philosophical question. Did you see that male who rushed past in such a hurry”

“Oh, yes”.

“Do you think he had enough water?”

“I know he didn’t.”

“So my question is, when he collapses on the trail, do I have to give him some of my water?”

“I refer you to the National Outdoor Leadership School’s Outdoor Medicine curriculum: don’t make another victim”.

She nodded, and we were in accord. If said male collapsed due to testosterone poisoning, we were not going to dehydrate ourselves for his sake.

For the record, we last saw him hiking out. Totally out of water, during the hottest part of the day, but heading the opposite direction as we, so if he did collapse it would not be on our heads to provide hydration.

Self-reliance can be taken to extremes. A close friend on an off-trail route, which I have never and will certainly not now attempt, fell 40 feet when part of the route crumbled under her tenuous tread. Her compatriots hastened to treat her shattered legs (tee shirts and sticks for splints), and then discussed how to get her out. She was all for climbing out herself until her innate good sense reasserted itself. If she could not climb down with two good legs, how was she to climb out with none?

Two fast hikers were dispatched to fetch a helicopter, but once on the rim, it was dismissed. My friend was tossed unceremoniously into the back of a pick-up and driven willy-nilly (four-wheel drive road) back to the city and medical aid. “We don’t need Search and Rescue. We take care of our own”.

Said friend now decries this lack of trust in the powers-that-be, and both of us wonder if her 30-years-after-the-fact arthritis in both feet are at all related to the delay in proper medical care. Not to mention bouncing around in the back of a pick-up whilst navigating a Navajo Reservation dirt road.

Self-reliance requires that I carry in my pack a bottle of water and a bag of nuts, a small first-aid kit and enough clothing to be comfortable if I became injured and had to either haul myself out more slowly than I am accustomed or wait wearily for rescue. No wonder those denizens of the outdoors who dash by with half a can of energy drink come to me when they are injured, or hungry, or cold, or thirsty.

Sometimes I help them out. Sometimes, particularly if they let fly a less than charitable remark on their way past about people who burden themselves with a largish pack, I resort to a less than charitable response. “No hablo inglés”.