About hiking.

When I go hiking, I like best of all: trees, rocks, and hills. Of these three, my favorite alone is the rock; a bare hill is only so much of a hummock, while a bare tree can possess only so many charms, in my experience. It is the rock to which I flock.

Imagine a rock. It juts up from the earth, an elbow of stone two men tall, as wide as that on its base, with one side flat, tilting out of the ground’s own tilt. Worked across its crevices and over its expanse are many patches of green-red moss. The surface is rough, even to the eye, lacking the uniformity and smooth-cut of the brick, lacking the regularity and stolidity of the cinderblock. Gray, dark gray, green, and creeping brown of dust; these are its colors. It knows water, though only as an acquaintance.

But that’s not all a rock is.

A good rock, the type of rock which livens up any hike, is the one you can hop up on. I’m not a mountain-climber, though, so disperse visions of declivities and handholds. No, the rock I’m after is a jump and some scramble, maybe the barest hints of real climbing. It’s the sort of rock you can haul a younger sibling up, if they’ve the taste for it (and I’ve typically got those available in abundance, though not always with an interest matching their number).

And rocks come in all patterns, all shapes. Sometimes rocks crop up in the forest arrayed in clusters, nubs and boulders with ravines cut through them- a few inches wide, maybe, a foot or two. Just a small rash of stone teeth cluttered with old leaves—but they’re rocks, so they are a good part of hiking.

In one place (that I get to see too little), this sort of array becomes more than just dry-land lilypad jumping. The ravines drop farther down; the rocks grow larger; the gaps are wider (sometimes). At their deepest, you can stand more than a man’s height down in the cool, looking up or peering round the hair-pin corner towards the other end of the gully, looking curiously into the soon-attenuating cracks that go off elsewhere, scrambling (a little wary) over the car-sized boulder that tries to clog the little valley quite up. A little foolhardiness or bravery (your choice) and you can leap the top, four feet or six of air to the central pier around which the gully folds.

The rest of the ravines are shallower. A few, branching off for a short way, are almost enough to top a man; they fade out pretty quickly (but the fun of wiggling or hustling along them, of popping up and jumping their width, that lasts). On one side, the ravines fade into the forest; on the other, the rock continues on until sudden dropping five feet into the same stunt-teeth that can be found elsewhere, shingled stubs that stretch a ways in irregular ranks.

And then there’s the one time I found these ravine-runs, these upthrust blocks and their interstitial corridors, not merely in the forest midst but at the bottom of a dry river bed- dry not by habit but due to an extraordinary drought. Heat-hating as I am, that 90+ degree weather was well worth it. Big blocks of stone, irregular polygons almost flat on top the way all water-topped stone becomes, and between them four and five foot tall hallways, wide enough to get through (though I was not so broad in the shoulder as I am now).

So I love rocks. Rocks such as those I’ve described are not so much important to hiking, the way trees and hills are. Rocks are, rather, refinements of hiking, when climbed, or gems found amidst it, when made for cavorting about rather than surmounting. They have the joy of going up, up, up or the pleasure of a small and secret place. And I like ‘em.

God bless.