LET YOUR MIND FREE: A trail through the woods, or along a grassy bluff, or through a desert canyon, is helpful in so many ways. Principally? It keeps you on course, from your start point to the next vista or rest stop or fork in the road, and, if you're lucky, maybe you'll pass a few fellow travelers heading in the opposite direction. (A wave or a nod and a kind hello are some of the currency of trail life.) But trails are also excellent ways to free the mind, and dig into a few daydreams, and work out the knots and tangles of everyday life. If you can discern the path ahead of you clearly, and know that whatever twists it takes it'll still clearly unfold beneath your feet, you can begin that whole let-go process that hiking truly helps with.
A DAY TO CELEBRATE: This isn't to not give love to wilder, untrekked routes, but trails do help body and soul leave some worries behind while presenting a well-trod route. National Trails Day honors those routes, and the people who use and love them, with a reminder to get out and enjoy the pathways through our wilder spaces, and to take part in a special event, if that so interests you. National Trails Day is...
SATURDAY, JUNE 4, and a map provides places where revelers'll be out in honor of the occasion, roaming, biking, and participating in beneficial trail projects. The American Hiking Society is behind the annual observance, which is called "the country's largest celebration of hiking trails." Is there a trail you're especially enamored of, perhaps near where you live? Visit it for an hour or two. Is there a trail you haven't taken on yet? Make June 4 the day to do so. Can you hike every trail in the world? Wellll... That's an impressive goal. But lending support and regular, considerate use to those trails you adore goes a long way toward elevating the eternal passion humans have for trekking into nature.
