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One thing is certain when the members of the Santa Fe Chili and Marching Society convene for their Wednesday hikes. The hike will start at 7,000 feet altitude and it’s usually uphill from there.

Hike up to an alpine meadow in peak flowering season and take in the magnificent view. Then stop and listen. Can you hear the buzz resonating from blooms all around you? Watch for movement darting between one flower and its neighbor, or whizzing by to a distant patch of plants. Up here, you’re deep in pollinator country, and what you see and hear before you is an intricate network of plants and animals that have coevolved over millennia to ensure each other’s survival and success. Now focus more closely on the insects landing and feeding on the flowers, it’s likely the first ones you’ll notice are among the biggest and loudest—the busy, buzzy bumble bees.

A light breeze lifted leaves of mountain-ash and heart-leaved birch still in the dark shadow of Katahdin while morning bird songs mingled with sounds of water running from a thousand clefts and ravines overhead.

As a kid I wanted be a forest ranger. You know, climb a mountain, go to the top of a fire tower, view the landscape as far as the horizon, and here we were, living on the edge of the Taconic Range.

Room 231, Northern Exposure Motor Inn, Gorham, NH.
I'm surrounded by annoyingly fit-looking young adults with strange names: Beehive, Puma, November, Little Toaster, and Calves. Peter Pan is farther up trail. Calves is my son Jonas.

Up on North Traveler Mountain in Maine wild blueberries grow everywhere, along the trail and across the wide open ridgeline. Once you are out in the open above the trees, blueberry bushes brush right up against your legs as you move along the trail, and the ripe fruit hangs in bunches so uniformly blue and numerous you must stop in your tracks.

Those engaged in search and rescue in New Hampshire's White Mountains represent the thinnest fraction of all who come to enjoy the freedom of our hills. But, despite their small numbers, one can argue that they are among our mountains' primary users and in that use they shape what we seek and what we find there. They are its guides, its most skilled travelers, and most celebrated characters. How they come to our hills and what they do there unites practice and path, and almost everyone else follows along, or walks under the wing of their presence.

Changes in our climate are exacerbating hikers' impact on trail erosion, and are contributing to the frequency and ferocity of storms, forest fires, blowdowns, and other destructive natural forces. Simply put, increasing traffic on the trail is outpacing our ability to maintain it, given the environmental conditions we face today.

I consider myself fortunate to live in Maine, and to have the opportunity to raise my son near Acadia National Park, where he first developed a love for hiking on the dramatic boulders and slabs of granite. The park is justly renowned for its outstanding hiking and scenery.

We hike in the black of morning. It's a little spooky. I cannot say what lies beyond the arc of my headlamp. As the well-worn trail turns into the uncertainty of rocky debris, I find myself treading carefully, even repositioning rocks that I think could harm the person behind me, my husband. Ridiculous, I know. Stars squint and sparkle through the darkness above. Headlamps from other climbing groups caterpillar along below us. Today we are climbing the Grand Teton in the heart of Wyoming's Grand Teton National Park (GTNP).

A wonderful way to share our knowledge and love of the land with the next generation is to take them hiking. Many of us, as grandparents, great aunts and uncles, friends and mentors, know young ones who are eager to explore the outside world—to climb rocks and wade in streams, follow paths to treasures in the forest, and glimpse wildlife through the trees. Planning before we head out and patience on the trail help to ensure that young hikers come home excited with their discoveries and ready for more.

When my oldest son, Casey, was seven years old, a biologist friend took us on his airboat deep into the Florida Everglades. Casey sat on a high perch five or six feet above the water. I sat to his right, below him. My friend gave us ear protectors to shield us against the bawl of the engine. For almost an hour, while the airboat skipped like a seashell across miles of open sawgrass, we rode in joyful silence, watching birds and the shadows of birds peel off the Everglades. Whenever a limpkin or an ibis flushed in front of the boat, I'd glance up at Casey, who, momentarily transformed by the experience, craned his neck, stretched out his arms and began to flap to the beat of each bird's wings.

"Onnn… rooope…!" My voice echoes off the walls from the chamber far below me. In the world of safe caving etiquette, this is the essential warning that I have just attached my rappel rack to the rope and am about to begin my descent down the pit. It means don't be in the fall zone below, nor drop anything from above. Even the smallest rock let loose by accident can gain velocity and do some serious damage to the caver or the rope on which his life depends.

Old as dirt. When one steps off the ferry from the mainland of Scotland arriving in the Orkney Islands, that description becomes palpable. I've long been intrigued by what lies beneath the Scottish landscape, whether it's the mythic fairy haven in Dunkeld or the achingly sad battlefield of Culloden. But what has been uncovered and continues to be explored in the Orkneys is rewriting our human history.

Walking down the Baxter Creek Trail in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Becky Smucker stops to quiet down the group.

"Listen," she says, "That's a black-throated green warbler." Twelve gabbing, stomping hikers break on a dime. The woods are silent except for the warbler's zee-zee-zoo. If I'd been hiking by myself, I would never have heard this bird—let alone identify it.

When the poisoned river ran red with heavy metals, people from Canrey Chico and nearby mountain communities didn’t believe at first that climate change was to blame. These small villages in Peru are nestled in the Cordillera Blanca, a majestic mountain range that contains several of the highest peaks in South America. As the glaciers melted, metal-rich rocks were exposed to the air for the first time in thousands of years.

Mount Washington, despite its small stature (6,288 feet) when compared to many mountains around the world, experiences a regular onslaught of brutal cold, wind and icing that arguably exceeds in severity the climate of all other places on Earth.

On August 23, 2018, documentary filmmaker Bob Elfstrom and the six-person production team boarded a 383-foot Russian research ship, the Akademik Ioffe, at Kugaaruk, an Inuit village on the Gulf of Boothia high in the Canadian Arctic.

On July 4, 1996, Dr. Timothy Heaton, a paleontologist from the University of South Dakota, was completing a two-week excavation in a small, dark cave on Protection Head, a remote location on the northern tip of Prince of Wales Island in Southeast Alaska. The site, named On Your Knees Cave due to its low ceiling and tight crawl space, had yielded fragments of bear bones four years earlier during a karst vulnerability survey, a survey of sinkholes, springs and caves for a planned timber sale.

As the weather warms and snow melts, we are drawn to the back country to explore well-known trails and new terrain. Streams, creeks and rivers at this time often run higher, stepping stones are submerged, the water is cold and the current deceptively strong. Fresh water moving at only 4 mph, exerts a force of about 65 pounds per square foot, enough to topple a hiker. Double the speed and the force becomes four times as great, enough to move a car.

Raki came into our lives as a complimentary dinner aperitif at a village outdoor café on the Greek island of Crete. The ubiquitous fiery grape-made spirit is part of the island’s social fabric, found in shops, tavernas and more. It’s considered rude not to drink it when offered by your host. I learned that the hard way. Another time, when a shopkeeper offered me some, I pantomimed I was driving and didn’t want to drink. “Me no police,” he said handing me a shot.

It was raining monkeys. Colobus monkeys, that is, flinging themselves through the air, 50 to 70 feet, from tree to tree, leaves drifting downward on top of us. Between the cascading river and the colobus thrashing through the treetops, the rainforest of Uganda’s Rwenzori Mountains was nearly deafening.

I’d been leading paddles and hikes for a couple of local outdoor clubs for years. Most of them—fortunately—had been fun and uneventful though I admit I did have a couple of rescues on the water. With a successful kayak rescue, the crisis is over in minutes, with the capsized boat righted and the paddler back safely in the cockpit—a rush of adrenaline and problem solved. But not all outdoor emergencies unfold and resolve quickly.

In Class, November 2014 These thirty eyes carry weight. What was a mixed burble of chatter and various announcements of arrival—dropped backpacks, bodies being wedged into desks, heavy sighs—ends abruptly. Nearly at the end of my final, chalked sentence on the board, I glance over my shoulder. They are all looking at me. “What now?” I think, and then, because there is really no other option, I turn fully to them and begin.

I will never forget my first encounter with an island fox. I was on Santa Cruz Island, the largest isle off the California coast and part of the Channel Islands National Park.

Ten-Mile Camp is marked by a weathered wooden post topped with the sun-bleached skull of an unfortunate white-tailed deer. The orange blazes of the Florida Trail continue on into the brush, but here in the Big Cypress National Preserve, with miles of swampy terrain just ahead and the sun dipping low, this dry spot is a welcome sight and will do just fine.

I have long-admired the yellow-bellied marmot, that adorable, long-toothed, garrulous creature of the Rocky Mountains. Like many serial anthropomorphizers, I can’t resist the plump, coarse-haired shape; those cute, fur-covered ears; that twitchy little snout; the short, stocky legs; the nonstop chitter-chat.

Patches of purple monkshood and pink fireweed colored the forest, which had burned a number of years ago.

We nervously negotiated the famous “Rock Slide” rapid using a photo on my phone I’d snapped of a guidebook page depicting the run.

I’m several miles from my nearest year-round neighbor, and I went weeks at a stretch without seeing another human. Yet I never felt alone.