It has been said that nothing ever stays the same and I have seen many changes come and go over the past 48 years. Many of these changes leave me melancholy and a little sad. Others have made my heart sing and leave me breathless in anticipation of better things to come. I have seen favorite places lost to development, fires, and floods and I have discovered many amazing new places as well. I have lost many dear friends to accidents and disease and at the same time I continually meet new friends. I have lived various places. I’ve picked up and dropped hobbies and interests. I have learned many, many things about myself and the world around me and I have forgotten almost as much as I have learned. In many ways I am a very different person than I was 30 years ago but in many ways it seems that I am the same.
This spring I went through some old photo albums and scanned in a bunch of pictures. I realized that many of the pictures I took 30 years ago are almost identical to the ones I take now. Pictures of my dog on a mountain. Pictures of whatever van I happened to be living in at a beautiful campsite. Pictures of empty trails in remote areas. That process left me wondering whether my life has become stuck in a rut that I have never “matured” out of, or whether I was fortunate to discover at an early age exactly what fuels my soul and continued doing it. I don’t have an answer to that question although I suspect it might be a little of each. Regardless, I still find myself drawn to travel, to be mobile, to seek out beauty, to hard work, and I still spend more nights in a van than in my bed and I still spend more time with my dog than with people.
Mt. Magazine, Arkansas. 1985
Grizzly Peak, Colorado 2014
When I look back over the past three decades, however, I am struck at how different the experience of travel is today than what it was 30 years ago. Sure the trails are a bit more crowded. There are more rules, regulations, permits, etc. Everything seems to cost way more than it did. Those are all subtle changes, however. Those are the result of continued steady change over long periods of time. It would be difficult to point to any one point in time and say “This changes everything”. Right around the turn of the millennium, however, something changed that represented a complete paradigm shift in the experience of the itinerant traveling lifestyle. That change had to do with the advancement of technology.
There have been many advancements in technology over that time. Some, like GPS, can be quite useful in the outdoor lifestyle. Others like heart rate monitors or iPods may enhance the experience in some ways but might also detract from the experience as well. None of these are exactly groundbreaking. The biggest affect of technology, the thing that fundamentally changes the very nature of the experience, is the ability to stay connected and to share the experience with others.
When I first hit the road to travel and backpack around the west in 1985 I was alone, except for my dog. Here and there I would meet people and sometimes spend a few days or a week with them but then we would split and I would be alone again. In order to share my experience with someone I would have to tell them a story one-on-one. I did have a camera and could show a few pictures but photography was much more difficult then and to show the pictures to someone they had to be physically present to look through a large photo album. Certainly 1985 was not 1804 when Lewis and Clark set off on their Corps of Discovery Expedition, but in many ways the ability to stay connected and share experience in 1985 was closer to 1804 then it was to 2010.
Lewis and Clark did not have camera’s but they had artists along who could paint pictures of the places that they visited, the people that they met, and the plants and animals that they saw. Granted, taking a photograph is a bit quicker than painting a picture but in many ways a painting can be far better, at least with my meager photography skills. I was lucky to have had a decent SLR camera with me on my earliest travels. When I was a senior in high school I went to a computer convention with my father and I put my name in a raffle and won. I didn’t win a camera but I won a cabbage patch doll which I had absolutely no use for. But my sister really wanted the cabbage patch doll and she had a camera that I wanted so we worked out a mutually agreeable trade and I was able to record the next 10 years of my travels for prosperity and my sister got an ugly doll.
In 1985, however, photography was very different than it is today. Film was expensive. Developing film was expensive. Camera’s were large and heavy and if you wanted to really be able to capture the experience at a variety of scales it required a set of lenses and filters, and the ability to use them. When a picture was taken, it was often weeks before the result was seen, which made it difficult to learn the skills necessary to take good photos. Because the cameras were heavy and bulky it was unlikely that it would be handy and with the proper lens and/or filter when you happened to get a glance at a bear or a moose or a mountain goat, and even if it was properly equipped it would take a minute or two to take the lens cap off, focus the lens, set the f-stop, etc. You get the picture. Or more likely you didn’t get the picture.
Even when we did eventually get the film developed and managed to get a few decent shots there was nobody around to show them to. You had to store the pictures in your van for months until you got home and physically hand them to people one at a time to admire. At least Lewis and Clark had artists who could draw the grizzly that they saw from memory and make sure the picture was perfect. And they could paint the landscape that they saw even if it was looking straight into the direction of the setting sun. They didn’t have to wait weeks to see the results. They did, however, have the same challenges of protecting the end result and only being able to share them with others one-on-one.
Today we can take an almost unlimited number of pictures from a device that can fit in a pocket and be accessed almost instantaneously. We can see the resulting photo immediately and make an adjustment or simply fix it in photoshop after-the fact. And when we get an amazing shot, or even just one that doesn’t suck, we can share it with hundreds or even thousands of people all across the world instantaneously. I doubt if two dozen people have ever looked at the photo albums I carted around with me for 30 years but I posted one of the pictures from those albums on facebook this morning and 40 people have “liked” it, probably 5 or 10 times that many people saw it, and several thousand have at least a potential of seeing it.
While seeing one picture certainly doesn’t give anyone a full understanding of your experience, seeing many pictures over a few weeks or months certainly gives them a better understanding of your life than no pictures. And knowing that people that you care about understand you a little better is comforting. It makes it easier to talk to people without feeling the need to explain ourselves. It makes us all feel more connected and less alone and as social creatures, this is beneficial in many ways.
Of course having even an old film camera was certainly better than not having one. In the summer of 1993 I lost my camera when I swamped a canoe in Yellowstone Lake. For the next 10+ years I traveled around the west for work, made and lost entire groups of friends, spent endless hours watching bears, tracking lynx, and doing other fun field work as a biologist. I saw many amazing things but I never had much money and never bought another film camera so none of that time is documented. Cie la vie. At least I have my memories, for another year or two….
My first van that I converted into a camper. 1985
Lewis and Clark didn’t have phones either, so no voice communication at all. But phones were also very different in 1985. When I was traveling I was mostly backpacking and only occasionally drove through a town between trailheads. Mostly these were small towns in rural areas. They all had pay phones but using them required a pocket full of change at exorbitant cost and it required the person you were trying to call to be within reach of a landline. My family traveled a lot and even when they were home, spent most of their time working outside during the day, so the odds of actually reaching someone was pretty small. And I could never stay in town into the evening because I always had to find a place to camp before dark. As a result sometimes 3 or 4 weeks went by between opportunities to actually speak to someone and even then only for short periods of time. In the interim, even my own mother would not even know what state I was in most of the time.
Mail was equally problematic. It was easier to send a letter than to reach someone on the phone, but getting a letter in return would take weeks. Friends would have to send a letter to my mother who would hold them for me until I was able to reach her on the phone. Then I would give her the name of a town where I expected to be in a week or so to give her time to package it up and mail it to me at General Delivery, Nowhere, Wyoming. Even my best friends only managed to exchange letters with me 3 or 4 times over a 6 month trip. More casual acquaintances rarely heard anything other than “Mikes still alive somewhere in Wyoming”. Lewis and Clark could do just about as well, sending couriers back to St. Louis with an update on their progress.
It’s amazing that in just a decade or so our entire society has become so used to constant communication by cell phone, text, email, facebook, etc. that it’s nearly impossible to fathom going weeks or months without hearing any news from friends and family. Certainly the experience of most people in 1985 was not being disconnected for long periods of time but that wasn’t the experience of most people in 1804 either. It was, however, the experience of those who took off on their own to travel in remote areas.
Perhaps the biggest difference technology has made is in the ability to stay connected to the people we meet. I met a lot of wonderful people while I was traveling. I have great memories of all of them, but that’s all I have are memories. I’ve lost contact with every single one. A few people I spent a few days with or even an entire week. Some of those I exchanged addresses with and wrote letters for a year or two, but when both parties were traveling and moving around a lot and mail was the only way to communicate the probability of letters reaching someone after 3 or 4 address changes becomes quite slim. In fact there are only 6 people I am still in contact with from my entire undergraduate class 1990 to 1994. None of us had email addresses then and all of us moved frequently. Constant address and phone changes made it impossible to stay in touch for long. The classmates who I am in contact with are, with only 2 exceptions, people that I lost contact with for 10 years or so before reconnecting on facebook. Contrast that with todays kids who can only loose touch with classmates when they intentionally “unfriend” them. Its hard for people who grew up in this millennium to comprehend how you could possibly loose contact with people you care about.
I spent 10 days backpacking with David Allison who I met on the Ozark Highland trail in 1986. We stayed in contact via snail mail for a few years but eventually lost track of each other.
I did a lot of hiking in the Ouchita mountains of Arkansas with Pat Patterson. The first full time traveler I met on the road. He ruined me for life….
The end result of all of this is that we now have a constantly expanding group of people that we are in contact with. Many of them are people we have never even met but somehow connected with through technology on the basis of common interests. These people are usually aware of what we are doing and where we are. Much of my travel these days involves intentional visits to meet friends, but even when I am just going off on my own I know I am never far from someone I “know”, or at least know of. I am never far from a place to park my van, grab a shower, and enjoy a conversation over a meal or a beer. And when I am home I frequently get the chance to offer the same to folks I know who happen to be traveling through the area where I live.
Things were very, very, different in 1985 when I first left my home to explore the country. I had lived my entire life within 100 miles of the Atlantic Ocean. I had a few relatives and family friends in the Midwest but nobody that I was really close to. Most of that trip I was well over 1000 miles from anybody I knew, even if I had the ability to reach them. If I spoke with someone it was someone I had met only recently and most times would never speak with again. If I needed help it was from a stranger. When I encountered problems I had to solve them on my own. And I had a few problems…
At that time I was relatively inexperienced and I had very little money. I travelled for 5 months with only $500. Of course gas cost $0.60/gallon and there wasn’t anywhere to spend money in the places I was interested in being, but still there wasn’t money left over for anything other than cheap food and gas. My van was old and the tires were well used but I was too cheap to buy new ones. When I got a flat I either got it fixed or bought a used tire and as a result I got a lot of flats. I did have a spare but it was always the worst tire I had and there was never a guarantee that it would even have air or if it did, that it would get me out of the woods over 40 or 50 miles of rough road. Once, in the upper peninsula of Michigan I drove a couple hours on dirt roads in the dark trying to find a trailhead I had heard of before giving up and parking alongside the road to sleep, hoping for better luck in the morning. In the morning, however, I discovered that I had a flat tire and that my spare was also flat. Because I had been driving on logging roads in the dark, I really had absolutely no idea where I was or what direction I needed to go. I waited there for two days hoping to flag down a passing truck but nobody came by. Finally I realized that I needed to take matters into my own hands. I threw a tent and some food for me and the dog in my backpack and strapped the tire to it and began hiking. I tried to go generally north as I knew the main road was in that direction but the road system was complicated. After about 6 hours I hit the paved road and was able to hitchhike into town but it was Saturday evening and no garages were open so I camped in the woods until Monday before getting the tire fixed and heading back. Fortunately I had seen a sign on my way out so I knew that the road my van was on was #521. What I didn’t have was a map telling me how to get back. The UP was a bad place for this to happen because there are a LOT of roads and not much in the way of mountains to help you locate yourself. I had gotten a late start and I spent most of the afternoon walking generally south trying to find something that looked familiar and trying to find order in the road numbering system that might help me find Road #521. Finally I gave up and set up my tent just before dark. The next day I decided it would be better to go back in to town and try to find a map than to continue wandering aimlessly. Nobody in the little town I was in had a map so I had to hitchhike to the next town before finally finding one, hitchhike back and hike the remaining 9 miles before arriving back at the van almost exactly a week after getting the flat tire in the first place.
Technology also provides easy access to information. Today it’s rare that I don’t know what the weather is expected to be like a week into the future. I can access that information instantly on my phone from anywhere I have a cell signal. In 1985, however, you either had to hear the weather report on the radio or read in a newspaper. Both of which were rare in the rural rocky mountains where I spent my time, so most of the time I never had a clue what was about to happen. I set off once on a week long trip in the Flattop Wilderness in Colorado. The first day was beautiful, but clouds set in early the afternoon of the second day. I made an early camp to avoid the rain but wasn’t worried as I assumed it was just an afternoon thunderstorm. The next day, however it was still raining. It is really hard to think about getting out of a warm dry tent when its raining hard and you know you will start out cold and damp. There is no such thing as a warm pleasant summer rain in the high Rockies. Rain is always cold and staying dry is crucial. So I stayed in the tent and read all day. The next day it was still raining and I began to look at the map for a short cut back. I noticed that I was only a couple miles from a dirt road and there appeared to be a ranch at the end of the road so I decided to head there and see if I could find an empty barn to stay in. It turned out to be an outfitters camp. Nobody was there when I arrived and I snuck into an outbuilding to wait. In mid-afternoon the owners arrived back from town. They offered me a bed and a meal in exchange for doing some chores but told me that it was supposed to keep raining. I was able to dry out all my clothes in front of the fire and get a good night’s sleep. The next day it was still raining and I spent the day helping with chores and drinking coffee in front of the fire, swapping stories with my new friends. When it was still raining the next day I decided to try to bust through back to my van. It would be a long trip but I had eaten most of my food so my pack was light and I was strong after an entire summer of backpacking. I started early and got back to the van just before dark after a solid 16 hours of non-stop walking.
I can also learn anything I want to know about the plants, wildlife, trails, etc just by googling it on my phone. A few years ago while backpacking through Patagonia my traveling companion began having pain in her feet. When we got to a hostel we were able to determine quickly that it was plantar fasciatus through internet research and were able to get advice from 30 or 40 people who had personal experience with that issue and that allowed us to continue our trip with a minimum of pain and without making things worse. In 1985 when my feet began to hurt on a backpacking trip I had no idea why or what to do about it, and no way to find out.
More importantly I can download maps to my phone and use it as a GPS device to locate myself instantly. It’s rare that I don’t know exactly where I am these days, which way I need to go, and what type of terrain I am about to encounter. But in 1985, that was far from certain. Maps were something that you had to seek out and purchase. If you were lucky you could find a ranger station with a topographic trail map for an entire wilderness area but many areas didn’t even have trail maps then. You could buy USGS 7.5’ quads for anyplace if you could find them. But it might take 10 or 12 to cover the area for a one week trip and they were expensive. The trails on them were also often out of date. The other alternative was to buy maps that covered an entire national forest but these were so coarse that they weren’t very useful and didn’t even include topo maps. As a result I often hiked for almost a week just with the written description from a guide book or a written description I wrote down myself from a map posted at the trailhead. Sometimes I didn’t even have that available and just went, figuring I would go for a few days and then retrace my steps.
My last trip that summer was into the Wind River Wilderness of Wyoming. I had been unable to find a decent trail map and I was unable to afford and unwilling to carry the 12 USGS quads I would have needed to cover a week long trip (even if I had been able to find them), but I did have a very coarse Forest Service road map that showed trails with no topo lines. I was able to work out a loop of around 150 miles and gave myself 8 days to finish it. The first three days were non-eventful on a popular, well-marked and signed trail crossing the Winds from the North Fork of the Popo Agie to the Big Sandy Campground. A few miles from big sandy I ran into someone named Mike who was heading the direction I was coming from. He was starting a week long trip and told me he was camping at Granite Lake to fish for the week. We chatted a few minutes and he invited me to find him if I saw his camp when I went by Granite Lake a few days later. The trails heading north from Big Sandy were not nearly as well used or marked as the trails I had come in on. To make matters worse they crossed a large bench with a mix of trees and meadow for 10 miles or so. It was beautiful but the entire area was grazed by cattle and there were cow trails going everywhere making it impossible to follow the actual Forest Service trail. I followed what I thought was the direction of the trail and was able to locate myself occasionally from finding lakes and occasionally a trail marker but I was far from certain where I was most of the day. I was able to determine when I reached the next drainage where my route headed over a pass and find the trail again. I ran out of light before I hit the pass and decided to set up camp. I was shocked to realize that I was missing my tent poles.
The Winds are big wild country.
As I had spent most of the day uncertain where I was I realized that it would be impossible to go back and find them, but it was a nice night and sleeping under the stars seemed like a good option. The next morning I decided to push on rather than retrace my steps. Going back I had a slight chance of finding my poles but it was longer and I was concerned about my food supply. Also there was a much larger chance that I would NOT find my poles and I would have to spend an extra night out. I decided to push hard and try to finish my hike in 2 days rather than the three I had planned for. That meant only one more night without a tent. As it happened I ran into Mike’s camp on the shore of Granite Lake in late afternoon and he invited me to stop and enjoy some fresh fish he was just cooking up. I had planned to go longer but real food and a fire was tempting. Conversation flowed and before I knew it, it was dark, but we ended up staying awake and chatting around the campfire. It was chilly, but the stars were still out when I finally pulled out my sleeping bag around midnight. I quickly faded off to sleep planning to get up before dawn as I had given myself an almost impossibly long day if I wanted to avoid camping another night. The next thing I knew I woke up cold, wet, and shivering.
Mike and his dogs at their camp on the shore of Granite Lake, Wind River mountains, 1987
A storm had moved in and it was raining mixed with snow. More cold slush than either water or ice. My down sleeping back was soaked and I knew I was in trouble. I got up and gathered some wood to make a fire but my fingers were so cold that I couldn’t work my lighter or unscrew the cover of my waterproof match case. I alternated doing jumping jacks and placing my hands under my shirt in an effort to warm them up. It took what felt like an hour but I was finally able to get a fire going just as my headlight batteries went dead. Now I was unable to collect more wood and my only option was to stay close to the fire for warmth and burn the pile of wood that Mike had collected. I felt bad about using his wood but it really was a matter of life and death for me. I did more jumping jacks by the fire and finally got my core temperature back up just about the time it was getting light.
Knowing I had a long day and not wanting to burn any more of Mikes wood, I threw my wet gear in my pack and took off. As I said the map I had was very coarse and had no top lines so I had no idea what to expect in terms of terrain and in retrospect, that was probably a good thing. All I knew was it was around 30 miles. It turned out to be brutal crossing the continental divide 4 times and another large river valley before heading back up to the ridge where I was parked. There were also two fairly large river crossings with no bridge. By early afternoon I was exhausted and feeling feverish. A long week and especially two very long days with no sleep and a bit of hypothermia had take their toll on my body. I reached the road by dark but by that time I had been moving at a snails pace and barely able to walk a straight line for several hours and I felt like I was burning up. Sadly I still had three miles to walk up the road to my van but there was enough moonlight to see the road and afternoon I had several interesting hallucinations to keep me company after all. By the time I reached my van I knew I was very sick. Fortunately I had a full bottle of Nyquil and a van full of books and food so I spent the next four days reading, sleeping and resting until I felt well enough to drive out.
Cirque of the Towers from Jackass Lake 1987
Now, I am not claiming that my early travels compare with the Lewis and Clark expedition. I do think however, that in many ways, the vagabond experience in the days before internet and cell phones was closer to the experience that travelers have had throughout history than the experience that I have traveling today. Today I am in frequent contact with hundreds of people and can get more information than I could possibly use at the touch of a button. In 1985 I was almost completely on my own most of the time, I had very little information about where I was going or what the weather would be like, and I had very limited availability to share my experience with others. In some ways I enjoy the change that technology has brought about but at times I also long to head off on my own and explore places with no pre-conceived expectations of what and who I am about to encounter. I long for the ability to be alone with my thoughts without the constant distraction of communication and the constant influx of information. I long to be surprised with something completely unexpected, good or bad. I long for the days when strangers were just as hungry for conversation as you were instead of spending their time staring at their phones.
I realize I still have the choice to do that but I often bring along a device loaded with kindle books, audio books, podcasts, etc. I find myself thinking that there is so much to learn I need to take advantage of every second. The information age has changed us. In fact there is evidence that our neural networks in side our brains have rewired themselves to expect a constant influx of information, even those of us who have spent most of our lives prior to the advent of pocket technology. Our ability to sit still has been diminished and our stress levels increase when forced to sit alone with no external stimulation. In fact, recent research shows that most people will submit to a strong electric shock rather than spend more than 15 minutes alone. It is true that you can learn a lot about many things while listening to podcasts on a backpacking trip. It is also true that sometimes it is more important to spend time in quiet contemplation and learn about yourself.
It may be possible to find places to travel outside the realm of technology and to experience life the way humans have experienced it for untold millennia but it gets harder and harder every year. The world has changed in a fundamental way. Humans have changed in a fundamental way. I doubt it is possible to reverse course and I don’t know that I would want to but I feel fortunate to have experienced both sides of the technology divide.
Trusting My Cape 