Trail Notes from the Foothills
I went for a hike a couple of weekends ago on a trail in the foothills east of where I live. Nothing dramatic or well-known, just a dirt path that winds through scrubby grassland and eventually up to a ridge where you can see the valley floor spread out below. I've done this route maybe a dozen times over the past few years, usually on weekend mornings when the weather is cooperative and I don't have anything pressing. It's become one of those quiet routines that I look forward to without really thinking about it.
The morning was overcast when I started, which I prefer. Direct sun on exposed trail gets tiring, and the overcast light has a pleasant flatness that makes everything look more detailed. The grasses along the first section were dry and pale gold, the way they get after the growing season ends. Some were knee-high, bending in a breeze that came and went without commitment. There were low shrubs with dark green leaves and woody stems, the kind that always look the same regardless of season. I don't know the names of most of the plants out there, something I keep meaning to remedy by bringing a field guide, and I keep forgetting.
The first mile or so is relatively flat. The trail follows the contour of a gentle slope, crossing a couple of shallow drainage channels that were completely dry. In wetter months these have a trickle of water, sometimes enough to require stepping on rocks, but right now they're just shallow grooves in the dirt with smooth pebbles at the bottom. The soil is loose and sandy, and your footsteps make a quiet crunching sound that becomes rhythmic after a while. I find this part of the hike meditative in a way that the steeper sections aren't. There's nothing to think about except putting one foot in front of the other and looking around.
I passed another hiker coming down the trail about twenty minutes in. We exchanged the standard trail greeting — a nod and a brief "morning" — and kept going. This is one of the things I appreciate about hiking, at least on the less popular trails. There's an understood protocol. You acknowledge each other without expecting conversation. Nobody asks what you do for a living. You're just two people walking in opposite directions on a path through some grass and rocks, and that's sufficient.
After the flat section, the trail begins to climb. It's not steep by any serious hiker's standards, but it's a sustained uphill grade that gets your breathing going if you've been sitting at a desk most of the week. The terrain changes as you gain elevation. The grass gives way to more rock, with patches of low scrub and the occasional twisted tree that looks like it's been fighting the wind its whole life. The soil becomes compact and gravelly. It feels like entering a slightly different landscape without having traveled very far.
There's a section about halfway up where the trail passes through a shallow cut between two rock outcrops. The rocks are a dull gray-brown, layered in horizontal bands that suggest a geological history I'm not qualified to narrate. Some layers have a reddish tint. Others are almost white. I stopped here to drink some water and look at the rock faces up close. There were tiny plants growing in the cracks — little tufts of something green that had found just enough soil in the fissures to take hold. They deal with extreme heat and cold, very little water, and essentially no soil, and they just carry on growing. I don't want to turn that into a heavy-handed life metaphor. It was just interesting to look at.
The ridge at the top is the reward, such as it is. It's not a summit in any dramatic sense — more of a long, narrow crest that you walk along for a quarter mile before the trail loops back down. But the view is good. On one side, the valley — a patchwork of fields, a few clusters of buildings, roads threading between them. On the other side, more foothills rolling toward mountains partly hidden in the overcast. The wind was stronger up there, steady and cool, the kind that makes you zip up your jacket and squint. I stood there for a while just looking. There's something about a wide view that settles the mind. Maybe it's the sense of scale, the reminder that the things you've been worrying about are happening on a very small patch of a very large landscape.
On the way down I noticed things I'd walked past on the way up. A rusted fence post sticking out of the ground at an angle, no fence attached to it. A pile of rocks that might have been deliberately stacked at some point, or might just be random. A bird — some kind of raptor, though I couldn't identify it more specifically — circling slowly over the slope below me. I watched it for a couple of minutes. It never flapped its wings, just rode the air currents in lazy loops, occasionally tilting to adjust course. I envied its apparent effortlessness, though from the bird's perspective it was probably doing something quite difficult.
I got back to the trailhead a little over two hours after I'd started. My legs were pleasantly tired. I sat on the tailgate of my car and ate a granola bar and drank the rest of my water and watched two other hikers heading out. The overcast had started to break up, with shafts of sunlight moving across the valley like spotlights on a very slow stage.
I've been thinking about why I hike. It's not for the exercise, though the exercise is welcome. It's not for the views, though the views are nice. I think it's for the enforced simplicity of it. When you're walking on a trail, your world narrows to a manageable set of inputs: the ground under your feet, the air on your face, the things you can see and hear. No notifications, no emails, no tasks competing for your attention. For someone who spends most of their working hours in front of a screen managing files and staring at text, a dirt trail and open sky is a kind of reset.
My neighbor, who's lived in the area much longer than I have, has offered a few times to show me less-known trails further back in the hills. I should take him up on that. He knows the names of all the plants and birds and rock formations — the kind of knowledge that comes from decades of paying attention to one place. I'm still learning this landscape. The trail in the foothills is familiar enough now that I notice small changes from visit to visit — a fallen branch, a new erosion channel, the shifting colors of the grass through seasons. But there's plenty I'm still not seeing.
Anyway. I'll probably go again in a week or two, weather permitting. It's good to have a simple thing that you do regularly, that asks nothing of you except to show up and walk.
— Kevin Vadala