America is losing credibility as a democracy, with Freedom House now ranking the United States less free than former dictatorships such as Argentina, Taiwan and the Czech Republic.
We lag in well-being, with life expectancy shorter in Washington than in Beijing. We trail in education: A young person in once-impoverished South Korea is today far more likely to finish high school and get a college education than an American.
Yet there is at least one area where the United States still excels: our wild places. We have some of the world’s most glorious wilderness — and if you want to salve the pain of other national failures, one of the best ways to do that is to accumulate blisters and mosquito bites on our magnificent hiking trails.
Taking in these trails is also an opportunity to contrast today’s political myopia with the foresight of visionaries like President Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, his conservationist friend, who under Roosevelt became the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service (and later served as the governor of Pennsylvania). Many government policies are forgotten just a few years later, but the instinct of Roosevelt and Pinchot to set aside wild public lands is one that enriches us more than a century afterward: It helped preserve wild places for us to enjoy, and for our unborn great-grandchildren to cherish in the 22nd century.
I thought about this the other day when I was backpacking with my family in the Wallowa Mountains of Eastern Oregon, my wife and I egged on by our kids to try something called the Wallowa High Route. It’s a vague path — or sometimes no path at all — meandering above the timberline past Alpine lakes and connecting a series of peaks. You’re as likely to see mountain goats as other hikers.
When evening came, we found a flat, grassy spot and laid out our sleeping bags under the stars. We looked for shooting stars, hoped it wouldn’t rain, and then we were asleep.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The post At Times Like These, My Advice: Take a Hike! appeared first on New York Times.
