What is easy hiking?
There are two things that you need for an easy hike.
1. A trail where you don't need a compass and where the wildest animal you are most likely to meet is a rabbit. (A fox and a boar, in theory, but in practice, you will never see them.) Where you can be confident that nothing that lies ahead of you could not be mastered by a sprightly pensioner. Where you have a signal on your cell phone most of the time, and where you often see - albeit from a distance - the signs of civilization: roads, railway tracks, villages.
2. An easy hiking attitude. Because you can approach even an easy trail in two different ways. Tents, camp fires or even nights spent in a hut alone or with complete strangers are not "easy". Sleeping in hotels and rounding off your restaurant dinner with a glass or two of wine or beer is.
In the short time that I have had this blog up, I have learned that Americans have problems getting their heads around this idea of easy hiking. If you ask them what "easy hiking" means to them, they start in their minds with what they would consider a difficult hike: something in the Rocky Mountains that involves wild river crossings and the possibility of an unfriendly encounter with a grizzly bear, and then they come down a notch, replacing the Rockies with a National Park somewhere east of the Mississippi and the grizzly with a brown bear.
I - and, I suspect, most of my fellow Europeans - would approach "easy hiking" exactly the other way round. I would not ask what is too hard for easy hiking but what is too easy. I would ask what could no longer be considered as hiking at all. And then take it up a notch from there.
In other words, my main point of reference is a walk in the park. Now, THAT is surely too easy even for an easy hike. Four-year old kids can do it; even pensioners in wheelchairs can do it. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but hiking this is not.
So, let's take up a notch and ask, what is the difference between a walk in the park and hiking? For me, hiking rules out the idea of turning around on a whim, for example, of going home at the first drop of rain: you have a destination, and you are going to get there, short of hell or high water.
Hiking is equally impossible in a place where you could not get lost no matter how hard you tried. A little flirt with danger is part of the package. And your attitude as well as your attire must reflect a certain level of awareness that you are leaving your natural habitat as an urban creature. You must wear something else than your every day clothes, the right type of shoe - and a backpack.
Beyond that, I am prepared to be generous. Day walks? They are definitely not the perfect hiking experience, but sometimes you are on a vacation somewhere and that's all you got time for, so the alternative you have is not between a day walk and a four-day expedition but between a day walk and nothing at all.
Hikes where some travel company has your luggage brought from hotel to hotel? Or where a bus ferries your group of ten or twenty people to the trail and back, mornings and afternoons? Again, see if you can do better. But if you really can't, it's still preferable to slowly filling all your orifices with sand in some Mediterranean or Caribbean beach resort hell hole.
But easy hiking can be much more fun than that, and together we will discover how to have it - and where.
Michael Schuemann worked as a journalist in London and Paris since the mid 1980s. He was with the BBC World Service and as a sportscaster for a string of TV stations. More recently, he has written a book about his adopted home town ("Paris Movie Walks") for a US publisher. Recently, he has started blogging about hiking in Germany as Easy Hiker. If easy hiking tempts you for your next holiday, make sure to check out his blog at http://easy-hiker.eu
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