The Power of Hiking
By Katherine Cully
Last year, I experienced a time in my life where my sense of safety as a woman was challenged. In the process of re-discovering it, I found myself struggling with my body image and mental health. Through my healing process, I found myself with a need to find an escape: something positive and fulfilling to dedicate my efforts.
Over and over I kept going back to the first moment, a few years back, where I remembered feeling a peace so profound it seemed magical. I was standing a couple thousand feet above Lake George on Buck Mountain. I was aching to experience that kind of feeling again. So naturally, I went on a search to find the hardest and most rewarding hike within a ten hour reach, and began to train.
I had always been an athlete in high school and was generally well-versed in how to exercise for the specific results I wanted to achieve. But at this point in my life I found my brain calling for me to get more connected with my body again, and my training became molded into a much more intuitive and emotionally therapeutic form. It didn’t take anything besides listening to my body. I was at the gym every day, pushing my legs until they were numb, giving them a challenge to prove I could rise up to. And when it felt like it was aching, I put massive effort into taking the time to nurture my body. I became what one calls a “yogi”, rid processed foods in my diet, and took the occasional self-care spa day. I found myself healing without even beginning to realize it. Over these months I was gaining a strength my body had never experienced before, and through these physical changes I began to see positive adaptations and a new sense of beauty in strength rather than feminine delicacy.
Old Rag Mountain was a thirteen hour drive total to Virginia, an empowering solo trip itself. At ten miles and a three-thousand foot plus ascent to the peak, it was the perfect opportunity for the ultimate test of my months of hard work.
The scenery was quick to soothe my mind, empty my thoughts, and create a space for my goals. See, the beauty with hiking is that it begins like a regular workout. It starts easy, gets harder, and you push yourself until you ‘think’ you can’t go anymore. A climb like this requires you to keep going when you quite literally are about to collapse,especially when you are trying to complete the round trip before dusk. That empty space in your mind becomes filled with the sensations of your burning muddy legs, the sweat dripping from your brows and slowly soaking your shirt, and a primal inner motivation to get to that peak. This motivation requires you to tell yourself you can do it, because there is something incredible on the other side of making it through that hardship. Physically or emotionally, hardship is reconciled when you hike. Hiking requires you to work through your struggles by yourself, to prove to yourself that you can do it on your own. It is a truly beautiful experience.
I do not ever include this in my stories about Old Rag, but I cried when I made it to that summit. I hope it makes more sense now as to why, but that day was a very emotional experience for me. The magical sense that you feel at the top comes from both the natural beauty you can see and a lesson you learn in that moment. Because when you stand at what seems like the edge of the earth, covered in the earth you struggled with and against to climb, you experience a parallel where you are both a microcosm and a macrocosm. This bird’s eye view of the earth absorbs you in its beautiful vastness, and makes you feel so small. It reminds you that there is something much greater in this world, no matter what you believe it is, to surrender into. This teaches you not to put all the responsibility and the weight on your shoulders, because the forces at play are so much bigger than us, and we can only control a minute fraction of them. But at the same time, you are a macrocosm. You defeated a physical and mental battle that can’t always be won, you surpassed the odds. The sense of power in your body and your mind makes you feel larger than the world, an ultimate claim to our unbelievable human capabilities.
And this is why I will never stop loving hiking; the peace and the healing it brings me in such unexpected ways are so valuable to me. It is my escape, my therapy, and my teacher. It is a vital part of experiencing the world and learning your connection to both it and yourself as a human being- as real and raw as the earth we climb.
