No, I don't mean world travellers who stuff everything into a single giant backpack and hop around the world by airliner. I mean people with boots on the ground, hiking into remote areas for two or more days.
Recently I revisited the western end of the Superstition Mountains in central Arizona. The "Sups" as local hikers call them, have special memories for me, because it was the place I started backpacking as a teenager. Before I was old enough to drive, my parents would take me and a couple of my high school friends out to one of the trail heads and drop us off, returning four days or a week later to pick us up. My mom wasn't a soccer mom, she was a trailhead mom, and believe me, that required a lot more driving.
Of course, I soon had a car and a drivers license. I was supposed to use the car to commute to and from university classes, but, funny thing, it soon became a wilderness approach vehicle. Every school holiday was an excuse to go backpacking, usually in the Sups because the Superstition Mountains were the closest wilderness area.
My friends and I pretty much had the backcountry to ourselves, except for a few remnant miners and prospectors searching for the fabled Lost Dutchman gold mine. Then came the backacking boom of the seventies. Pretty soon popular camping areas were crowded with tents and tarps, and formerly obscure trails became well-beaten paths. Although we missed the uncrowded days, it was good to see all those people getting out.
I never did care for day hiking. As Colin Fletcher said, day hiking is like sticking your toes in the sea and backpacking is like diving in. I like the camping part of backpacking as much as the hiking. Watching a sunset while scarfing down dinner, seeing the sky grow light while the comforting blue flame of my little stove heats up hot chocolate for breakfast, and then watching the sun explode onto the surrounding canyon walls just as I swing my pack onto my back- those things are lost to the day hiker.
Fast forward to the 21st century. I've become a reluctant day hiker. I've written so many hiking guides that I'm constantly revising them- and revisions often mean I need new photos of the trails, as well as GPS mapping. I can cover a lot more ground day hiking so a lot of my photo/mapping trips are day hikes.
So there I was, hiking in the western Sups again, only this time day hiking. It was truly weird to be hiking fast past campsites where me and my friends had woken up to the sound of a canyon wren. Or where a friend and I had hurriedly abandoned our plans to camp when a large, striped skunk made an appearance before camp was set up. We knew there would be no sleep at that overused site, so we took off and hike up onto a ridge by headlamp so we could camp where no one had camped before. Or not much, anyway.
There were no backpackers. None. Two miles in from a trailhead, I had the place to myself, apparently having hiking beyond the range of the other day hikers. The trails faded from overuse, eroded treads to narrow, little-used paths. Yet, returning to the trailhead in late afternoon, my car would be lost among a hundred others. Where are all these hikers? Less than two miles from the trailhead.
You people have no clue what you're missing.
