The Complete Walker IV - Softcover

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Colin Fletcher was born in Wales and educated in England. He moved to California in 1956 after serving in the Royal Marines, farming in Kenya, surveying in Zimbabwe, and prospecting in northern and western Canada. He is the first man to have walked the length of Grand Canyon National Park within the canyon’s rim. He is the author of numerous books on walking and the outdoors, including The Thousand-Mile Summer, The Man Who Walked Through Time, River, The Secret Worlds of Colin Fletcher, and three previous editions of The Complete Walker. He now lives in California.


Chip Rawlins has worked as a guide, outdoor instructor, range rider, firefighter, field hydrologist, and scientific editor. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Rawlins has written previous nonfiction books—Sky’s Witness: A Year in the Wind River Range and Broken Country: Mountains and Memory—and poetry, with a recent award-winning book, In Gravity National Park. He served as president of the Wyoming Outdoor Council and on the board of directors of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. He lives in Laramie, Wyoming.

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For the first time since 1984, we have a new edition of the classic book that "Field & Stream called "the Hiker's Bible." For this version, the celebrated writer and hiker Colin Fletcher has taken on a coauthor, Chip Rawlins, himself an avid outdoorsman and a poet from Wyoming. Together, they have made this fourth edition of "The Complete Walker the most informative, entertaining, and thorough version yet.
The eighteen years since the publication of "The Complete Walker III have seen revolutionary changes in hiking and camping equipment: developments in waterproofing technology, smaller and more durable stoves, lighter boots, more manageable tents, and a wider array of food options. The equipment recommendations are therefore not merely revised and tweaked, but completely revamped. During these two decades we have also seen a deepening of environmental consciousness. Not only has backpacking become more popular, but a whole ethic of responsible outdoorsmanship has emerged. In this book the authors confidently lead us through these technological, ethical, and spiritual changes.
Fletcher and Rawlins's thorough appraisal and recommendation of equipment begins with a "Ground Plan," a discussion of general hiking preparedness. How much to bring? What are the ideal clothes, food, boots, and tents for your trip? They evaluate each of these variables in detail--including open, honest critiques and endorsements of brand-name equipment. Their equipment searches are exhaustive; they talk in detail about everything from socks to freeze-dried trail curries.
They end as they began, with a philosophical and literary disquisition on the reasons to walk, capped off with a delightfulcollection of quotes about walking and the outdoor life. After a thoughtful and painstaking analysis of hiking gear from hats to boots, from longjohns to tent flaps, they remind us that ultimately hiking is about the experience of being outdoors and seeing the green world anew.
Like its predecessors, "The Complete Walker IV is an essential purchase for anyone captivated by the outdoor life.

"From the Hardcover edition.

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Chapter 1 -- Why Walk?

Sanity is a madness put to good uses.

George Santayana


COLIN: I had better admit right away that walking can in the end become an addiction, and that it is then as deadly in its fashion as heroin or television or the stock exchange. But even in this final stage it remains a delectable madness, very good for sanity, and I recommend it with passion.

A redeeming feature of the condition is that no matter how heavily you've been hooked, you can still get your kicks from very small doses.

Ten minutes' drive from the apartment in which I used to live, there was a long, grassy ridge from which you could look out over parkland and sprawling metropolis, over bay and ocean and distant mountains. I often walked along this ridge in order to think uncluttered thoughts or to feel with accuracy or to sweat away a hangover or to achieve some other worthy end, recognized or submerged. And I usually succeeded—especially with the thinking. Up there, alone with the wind and the sky and the steep grassy slopes, I nearly always found after a while that I was beginning to think more clearly. Yet "think" doesn't seem to be quite the right word. Sometimes, when it was a matter of making a choice, I don't believe I decided what to do so much as discovered what I had decided. It was as if my mind, set free by space and solitude and oiled by the body's easy rhythm, swung open and released thoughts it had already formulated. Sometimes, when I'd been straining too hard to impose order on an urgent press of ideas, it seemed only as if my mind had slowly relaxed; and then, all at once, there was room for the ideas to fall into place in a meaningful pattern.

Occasionally you can achieve this kind of release inside a city. One day some years ago, when I had to leave my car at a garage for an hour's repair work, I spent the time strolling through an industrial area. I crossed a man-made wasteland, then walked up onto a little-used pedestrian bridge over a freeway. Leaning on its concrete parapet, I watched the lines of racing, pounding vehicles. From above they seemed self-propelled, automatic. And suddenly, standing there alone, I found myself looking down on the scene like a visitor from another planet, curiously detached and newly instructed. More recently I've discovered a sandhill near the place I now take my car for repair. This desiccated oasis among encroaching industriana still supports on one flank a couple of windswept pines. Its center cradles dips and hummocks that are smooth and flower-decked. And there, while the 21st century ministers to my horseless carriage, I can lie and read and lunch and doze, cut off, in a quiet urban wilderness. Most cities offer such veiled delights. In walking, as in sex, there's always a good chance you'll find, almost anywhere, given enough time, something that wows you.

But no one who has begun to acquire the walking habit can restrict himself for long to cities, or even to their parks or less intentional enclaves. First he explores open spaces out beyond the asphalt. Then, perhaps, he moves on to car camping and makes long, exploratory, all-day treks. But in due course he's almost sure to find his dreams outreaching these limitations. "For the human spirit needs places where nature has not been rearranged by the hand of man." One of the joys of being alive today is the complexity of our human world. We have at our fingertips more riches than anyone has ever had: books by the zillion; CDs and movies and TV by the ton; the Internet; also the opportunity to move around almost as we please. But in time the sheer richness of this complexity can sandbag you. You long for simplicity, for the yin to that yang. You yearn-though you may not openly know it-to take a respite from your eternal wrestling with the abstract and instead to grapple, tight and long and sweaty, with the tangible. So once you've started walking down the right road, you begin, sooner or later, to dream of truly wild places.

At this point you're in danger of meeting a mental block.

Even in these mercifully emancipated decades, many people still seem to become alarmed at the prospect of sleeping away from officially consecrated, car-accommodating campsites with no more equipment than they can carry on their backs. When pressed, they babble about snakes or bears or even, by God, bandits. But the real barrier, I'm sure, is the unknown.

I came to comprehend the reality of this barrier—or, rather, to recomprehend it—30-odd years ago, during a four-day walk through some coastal hills. (I was walking, as a matter of fact, in order to sort out ideas and directions for the first edition of this book.) One warm and cloudless afternoon I was resting at a bend in the trail—there was a little triangular patch of shade, I remember, under a rocky bluff—when some unexpected tilt of my mind reexposed a scene that I had completely forgotten. For all the vividness of the vital features, it remained a curiously indistinct scene. I wasn't at all clear when it had happened, except that it must have been more than 15 years earlier. I still do not even remember for sure whether it happened in Africa or North America. But the salient contours stand out boldly. I had come to some natural boundary. It may have been the end of a trail or road, or the fringes of a forest or the rim of a cliff, I no longer know which. But I do know that I felt I'd gone as far as a man could go. So I just stood there looking out beyond the edge of the world. Except for a wall of thick, dark undergrowth, I'm no longer sure what I saw, but I know it was wild, wild, impossible country. It still looms huge and black and mysterious in the vaults of my memory.

All at once, without warning, two men emerged from that impossible country. They carried packs on their backs, and they were weather-beaten and distilled to bone and muscle. But what I remember best of all is that they were happy and whole. Whole and secure and content.

I talked to them, briefly and in considerable awe. They had been back deep into the wilderness, they said, away from civilization for a week. "Pretty inaccessible, some of it," admitted one of them. "But there's a lot of beautiful country in there-some of the finest I've ever seen." Then they walked away and I was left, still awestruck, looking out once more into the huge, black, mysterious wilderness.

The awe that I felt that day still hangs in my memory. But my present self dismisses it. I know better. Many times in recent years I've emerged from wild country, happy and whole and secure and content, and found myself face-to-face with astonished people who had obviously felt that they were already at the edge of the world; and I know, now I have come to consider the matter, that what I have seen on their faces is exactly what those two men must have seen on mine, many years ago on the edge of that other wilderness. And I know now that the awe is unwarranted. There's nothing very difficult about going into such places. All you need is the right equipment, a reasonable competence in using it, a tolerable degree of physical fitness, and a clear understanding of your own limitations. Beyond that, all you have to do is overcome the fear of the unknown.

Once you've overcome this fear of the unknown and thereby surmounted your sleeping-out-in-the-wilderness block, you are free. Free to go out, when the world will let you slip away into the wildest places you dare explore. Free to walk from dawn to dusk and then again from dawn to dusk, with no harsh interruptions, among the quiet and soothing cathedrals of a virgin forest. Or free to struggle for a week, if that's what you want at that particular time, toward a peak that has captured your imagination. Or free, if your needs or fancies of the moment run that way,...