Henry David Thoreau has made the idea of deliberately “sauntering” along nature’s paths famous, and I agree that there has been much overemphasis on linear trail achievements, or getting out there with the buddies, or hauling enchanting vino along. These emphases contribute to ways we miss a key but subtle part of camping outdoors (and hiking to glorious sites): roaming, wandering, strolling.

I began heading out into our bucolic backcountry (or Rattlesnake Canyon or Ellwood Bluffs) in 1971 driven wild by college undergrad friends keen to show this scrawny urban Angeleno how to enjoy outdoor nature in golden Santa Barbara County. Hiking in the Angeles National Forest above Los Angeles had been occasional fun in high school, and back in that day sometimes we’d carry .22 rifles and shoot at things (I know, I know!), but I’d never backpacked.

Therefore, when Todd Hunter and guru Franko Hudson showed me the way — arriving in the Santa Barbara backcountry at Manzana Narrows felt like an apotheosis in a brown and green biblical Eden.

Amid the terrifying and truly harsh chaparral, I discovered riparian gardens with sycamores and flowing water in the canyons, and I remembered how Eden was meant to serve as an “earthly paradise” where Eve and Adam would feel safe, and the lion would lay down with the gentle lamb.

Another local outdoor writer I respect recently commented about his love for “just hanging out in the deep wilderness with friends,” and these comradely sojourns have also been my experiences during the past 50-plus years rambling around. However, after a couple of decades, these repeated bursts into the backcountry (and frontcountry) have finally slipped into an entire lifestyle for me. At 75, I cannot now escape the hypnotic pull luring me into our local hills and watercourses despite mounting aches and petty physical concerns. And with the growing “body bads,” leading school groups or buddies and fine wines has a diminishing appeal.

In truth, the vision expressed by Pedro Calderón de la Barca that “La Vida Es Sueno” (“Life Is a Dream”) now catches my fancy and informs the hiking. In his 1636 play, the Spaniard shows that in so many ways urban “life is indeed a dream,” and that the shadow self whose footsteps I follow into the interior will lead to deeper truths and inspired re-awakenings to the true Eden surrounding us.

Yes, we’re losing communion with nature as Her domain shrinks and our human numbers skyrocket. It’s become terribly difficult to descry the forest behind the ubiquitous screens and the arrogant AIs controlling our vision. Eight billion of us huddle teeming on the Mother’s fertile surfaces, plus another 1.5 billion huge cattle confined to quench our meat-loving appetites and trample the sacred plains and meadows.

As a hiker, fellow outdoor writer Matt Kettman, who gave me my first byline as an outdoor writer, asserts that “gourmet meals and drinking fine wines” have become very important, and indeed he’s a fine judge of the grape. Yet these sorts of accoutrements end up making for a “pretty brutal haul,” as he admits, and for this septuagenarian such provisions now get in the way of sauntering in search of Eden.

While some readers have asked me to supply more maps and trailhead details, after leading student groups and hiking teams for more than five decades, I’ve learned the major obstruction preventing folks from jamming outside is mostly mental and spiritual, not practical. Two-dimensional “maps” can be useful, but they are essentially misleading and don’t guide us along the deeper symbolic routes we need to find and follow on our meandering life odysseys.

Pragmatically speaking, too, a lot of folks simply will not surrender their cellphone lifeline even for two days, much less for a three-hour hike up and down Rattlesnake Canyon. While I continue to be teased by friends about it, I have never had a cellphone and do request my hiking buddies to turn theirs off while we’re on the trail, and to leave the veritas of vino back home, too.

Rather than detail and retail roads and maps and tedious GPS coordinates, I prefer to offer interesting landscape photographs, a few stories, and some hints about the joy and ecstasy found in the sacred realms over the pass. (4.1.1. for the two best Bryan Conant maps.)

When I, or friends, happen upon an ancient bit of painted rock art, we certainly do not give away the location or offer much of an interpretation. Rather, we immediately back away, assume a position of standing respect, wait, and we study from afar while striving to quiet the linear mind as the juvenescent “right brain” opens to receive.

Charles Foster writes that heading out into the hinterlands is simply “the age-old quest for contact with reality” and to become fully human we must “relate, endure, and wander.”

There is little doubt that sacred areas, holy caves, mountain tops pregnant with meaning, and mysterious boulders redolent with other consciousnesses exist all around us and remain there for seekers to locate. Anthropologist Travis Hudson paraphrases the crucial ethnographer J.P. Harrington about the sacrosanct land and holy boulders (the First People) surrounding us:

“ … virtually everything in the environment was perceived as having a ‘supernatural’ 
component; e.g., natural features such as prominent rocks were thought to be the
petrified bones of First People who lived at the beginning of the world.” — Hudson and Blackburn, “The Material Culture of the Chumash Interaction Sphere,” vol. IV, p. 91

For these reasons, too, most of my 250-plus columns focus on those awe-inspiring lonesome lands over San Marcos Pass, beyond Santa Barbara Painted Cave, up along the Chumash Highway (154), and out near some of the federal wilderness zones doubly-protected within Los Padres National Forest. The San Rafael Wilderness with Manzana and Sisquoc creeks remains pristine and clear, unsullied by much human presence or colonial settlements. A friend who camped out solo at Coldwater Camp on the Lower Manzana on June 28 found ample water, no humans and plenty to ponder.

A plethora of fine books details how postmodern screen life deactivates the individual, dissipates her/his/their vibrant free will, and tends to annihilate initiative in favor of numbing internet offerings (4.1.1. Books). Antidotes to this Mis-Anthropocene Era surround us, but degenerate urban willpower reduces primal energy and the power to bust out of our urban cocoon.

Our tech overlords dominate our time and keep us catching up to the latest app, the best influencer, Netflix films, political madness and the hottest music Spotify can “curate.” All these and social media have become indispensable obsessions in this attention economy.

There is no shame in fleeing to the hills, leading your children along, and setting yourselves free in the boundless backcountry to roam past venerable boulders.

I can’t fully agree with Indy editor Kettmann when he wryly notes, “Being surrounded by pristine nature without cell coverage is a privilege that’s harder to find with each passing year.” No, not so hard to find, but it requires willpower and sloughing off certain amenities and social responsibilities. Making the effort to walk straight into deep nature amid living rocks is still a privilege we can exercise; bringing ourselves and like-minded adults into those sacred arenas is more than a privilege. Introducing our children to these deeper realities may be felt as a sacred duty, and a choiceless choice.

Foster asserts in “Being Human” that “the rock art images are travel books.” As such, when the earliest shamans fared spiritually forward on their spirit journeys, the impossible creatures they encountered (therianthropes or transmorphic beings) stimulated the birth of individual human consciousness. He writes that “travel broadens the mind; spirit travel could have transformed it.”

4.1.1.

Charles Foster, “Being Human” (2021), p. 161; Bryan Conant, “San Rafael Wilderness Trail Guide and Map” and “Matilija and Dick Smith Backpacking Guide and Map”; T. Hudson and T. Blackburn, “The Material Culture of the Chumash Interaction Sphere,” vol. IV (Ballena Press and Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, 1980); Tung-Hui Hu, “Digital Lethargy”; Jaron Lanier, “You Are Not A Gadget”; Jenny O’Dell, “Saving Time: Discovering A Life Beyond the Clock” (2023); Neil Postman, “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” Click here for more on sacred boulder fields.