Forget Hiking. Saunter.
Borrowing a turn from Henry David Thoreau, John Muir championed moving over the landscape in a way that underscored its sacred quality. He had a point.
A week ago today I set out on chosen a strenuously steep route in the direction of Mt. Olympia, a secondary peak on the east side of the Mt. Diablo massif, some six miles out and back with 1,800 feet of altitude gain and loss. By the time I was halfway along, I knew my plan wouldn’t work: too far and too high.
So I shifted gears, paying attention less to bagging the peak than to my surroundings and their many denizens, plant and animal. No longer was I a hiker on a mission. I had become a saunterer.
There’s a story told by Albert W. Palmer in The Mountain Trail and Its Message that John Muir was all about sauntering. A United Church of Christ minister and later president of the Chicago Theological Seminary, Palmer was always on the lookout for parables to use in his sermons.
As Palmer told it, he was resting in trailside shade when John Muir came along and stopped to chat. Palmer asked whether it was true that Muir disapproved of the word hike. He answered:
“I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains – not hike!
“Do you know the origin of that word ‘saunter?’ It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, ‘À la sainte terre,’ ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.”
Be it known that, in his time, Muir did plenty of hiking. He summited Mt. Shasta at least twice, caught both times in blizzards on the way down, and gleefully bagged one peak after another along the High Sierra’s granite spine. But by the time Palmer knew him, after the turn of the 20th century, he had slowed down, both by age and by choice. In Palmer’s telling:
John Muir lived up to his doctrine. He was usually the last man to reach camp. He never hurried. He stopped to get acquainted with individual trees along the way. He would hail people passing by and make them get down on hands and knees if necessary to see the beauty of some little bed of almost microscopic flowers. Usually he appeared at camp with some new flowers in his hat and a little piece of fir bough in his buttonhole.
Muir’s explanation of saunter so closely follows Henry David Thoreau’s in “Walking, and the Wild” that he — or Palmer — surely borrowed it. As for the etymology, it’s wrong. The word is now thought to come not from medieval French but from the Middle English verb santren meaning “to muse” or “to be in reverie.”
But no matter: the distinction between hiking and sauntering counts. It’s one thing to go from here to there, ticking off the miles and setting goals of time and destination. It’s quite another to attend to who and what is manifesting along the way.
In my younger backpacking days, I tried to cover as much mountainous ground as possible as fast as possible, once knocking off 50 miles around the Desolation Valley Wilderness in four days. Now I take it slower, partly because my body demands it, partly because what you see, feel, and hear matters more than how far and how fast you speed. On my recent Mt. Olympia hike I recognized that it was time to turn the hike into a saunter. So I started paying attention.
First, there was bird song. As I sat in a spot of shade and listened to the early morning, voices emerged and offered their names: California quail, acorn woodpecker, ash-throated flycatcher, oak titmouse, bushtit, wrentit, both Bewick’s and house wrens, spotted towhee, western bluebird, and orange-crowned warbler. A turkey vulture spiraled high above, and an Anna’s hummingbird buzzed around the blooms of a nearby thicket of sticky monkeyflower like a miniature meth head.
Monkeyflowers weren’t the only plants in bloom; it is spring, after all. There were brodaieas, common wooly sunflowers, red ribbons, blue elderberries, bluewitch nightshades, purple innocence, mariposa lilies, winecup clarkia, crane’s bill, and the exquisite Mt. Diablo globe lily.
Not all was glory and beauty, though. Because I was taking my time I spotted a small stand of young gray pines infested with miniature mistletoe. Unlike the traditional mistletoe folks kiss under over the winter holidays, this species is a full-on parasite able to kill the conifers it infests.
As I worked my way back down to the trailhead, the vegetation changed, demonstrating how one life zone gives way to another on a mountain. High up the slope it was principally drought-resistant sage and blue oaks, a thermophilic (heat-loving) species that can take the fearsome summers on this face. Lower down, where it is shadier and moister, interior live oaks towered over a carpet of poison oak reaching sunward. There was even at least one bay tree, a fragrant species that loves damp. Then the forest gave way to a rolling grassland going slow gold in anticipation of summer. I could almost see the color change.
Because on a saunter the point isn’t the destination. It’s who and what says hello along the way.
Apps for Sauntering
Taking time to determine the names of plants and animals encountered along the way is one way to turn a hike into a saunter. These phone-based apps help:
To identify birds I can lay eyes on, I rely on iBird Ultimate and Sibley Birds. The only drawback is you have to know enough about birds to, say, tell a gull from a wren or a thrush from an accipiter.
If not, Merlin Bird ID from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is a godsend. It will walk you through step-by-step visual identification. And for those birds you can only hear, Merlin offers sound identification of calls and songs. Easy to use and amazing in its power to reveal. And the app is free to download and install, with no annoying ads.
For plants, I find myself relying more and more on Seek, free from the folks who also make iNaturalist. It uses your camera to image the plant and offer up identification of family, genus, and often even species. It works, too, for insects and other animal species; the challenge is getting close enough.
Cast out of Eden Comes to Berkeley
Under the auspices of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, I’ll be offering a talk with Q&A session about the book on Friday, June 7, 10 a.m.–noon PDT. This session will be online only, both live-streamed and recorded for later viewing, so wherever you are and whenever you have the time, you can take part. To watch my informational video and to register, head over to the OLLI website. Please join me!