Explorer's Guide 50 Hikes in Eastern Pennsylvania: From the Mason-Dixon Line to the Poconos and North Mountain

Hiking is a particular delight to me. Every season there are new things to discover, even on the same old trail. Wildflowers of spring give way to the soft green velvet beauty of summer, which in turn gives way to the color riot of autumn, followed by the snows of winter, with their many animal tracks.

All of us return to the roots of our species when we walk. Our ancestors were bipedal long before they were human. They walked out of the jungle into the veldt and then all over the earth. As an anthropologist would say, bipedalism (walking on two feet) preceded encephalization (swelling of the brain). Our cousins who persisted in walking on their knuckles are still in the Gombe Preserve.

Nessmuck wrote: “We do not go to the woods to rough it, we go to smooth it. We get it rough enough in town.” Nessmuck is the pen name of George Washington Sears (1821–90), Pennsylvania’s pioneer conservationist and outdoor writer.

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you, and the storms their energy, while cares drop off like autumn leaves,” is the way John Muir put it.

According to Thomas Jefferson, “Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far. The Europeans value themselves on having subdued the horse to the uses of man: but I doubt whether we have not lost more than we have gained, by the use of this animal.”

And as Aldo Leopold said, “Never did we plan the morrow, for we had learned that in the wilderness some new and irresistible distraction is sure to turn up each day before breakfast.”