May is both Mental Health Awareness Month and also National Walking Month. I’d like to think that is a fine bit of synergy there, as walking and other forms of exercise definitely affect mental health.
Tell us in the comments about a memorable walk in your life — good or bad!
Walked around Lake Louise (Banff, outside of Calgary) and a few more trails between AB and BC. This was mid-spring so some of the snow was still there. Cleanest breaths I ever took.
You were there before the summer crowds, too! I would do similar hikes when I lived a couple hours from the West Yellowstone entrance.
Love that whole area. I plan to take Mrs. Butcher there in 2025 as part of a trip on the Rocky Mountaineer.
My mother in law took my family on a tour of Lake Louise, Banff and Jasper and the hikes there are absolutely beautiful.
The last summer before Covid we hiked to the top of a mountain in Montana, about 11,000 feet up. I thought it was going to kill me, but at the top it was completely stunning.
I gotta know which mountain that was, @bluedogcollar. Love walking up peaks out here!
It was Lone Mountain in Big Sky. We took a lift part way but hiked the last couple of miles. It was one of the harder things I’ve done but really beautiful.
Ooh yeah, that’s a fabulous area. Love Bozeman, too.
I did a literal walking home from school in the snow. I thought I had missed the bus, so went back in the house and told me mother who was just about to leave for work, so she was kind of pissed. She barely stopped in front of the school for me to get out and she was off like a shot. I walk into the school…and everything is dark. Then I realize it was a teacher in-service day, but my mother was long gone. It was the dead of Wisconsin winter and my only option was to walk home in the snow. It was about…5-7 miles, but I didn’t walk the entire way because a cop saw me about a mile from home and picked me up asking me what the hell I was doing walking around in 20 below weather.
@butcherbakertoiletrymaker, I’m going to share this with my mom. I had … similar instances in my childhood.
Nothing like a little mommy guilt to spice up the day.
In my younger days I used to skip school from time to time. Honestly, I was a good student but sometimes just needed a day off. I first did it in junior high — hid in the woods and waited for the school bus to drive away. However, the problem was my parents didn’t leave for work for a couple of hours (bus came at like 5:30 am). So I’d walk. I’d go 10 miles or more during the two hours I had to kill.
I’d come back home after the parents were gone and spend the day watching TV and generally goofing off. I never got caught, mostly because I can flawlessly duplicate my mom’s handwriting so I wrote my own sick notes (young people, computers weren’t in schools back then so there was no way for them to notice your whereabouts except checking roll and keeping paper records — you brought a sick note from a parent the following day and that was that).
That’s the first time I realized that walking actually functions as transportation. I could get to convenience stores and buy comics and snacks, and bring them back home. You just had to make sure nobody noticed you, and I was good at that. Plus, rural area. See a car coming, duck into some bushes. I’d also ditch church services and walk to places (when I could be sure nobody would notice my absence).
I really loved just strolling along in the dark, minding my own business, looking at stars until the sun came up.
I took a nice walk in a maritime forest a couple of days ago. It was a beautiful mix of palms and Live Oaks, lots of Spanish moss. And someone had set up a tiny fairy village. It was lightly raining and just lovely.
That sounds like a daydream/fantasy that I would have on a Monday while uploading to the database…..
The next time you see something like that take out the phone and get a few pix to post.
It’s always a treat to see unusual bits of life in different places.
I did take some but I can’t post them here. But I did put some up on BackTalk so I can copy from there.
Unfortunately it turned some of them sideways.
That’s a nice looking path.
There is a spot near Los Osos, CA called Sandspit Beach. It’s on the far side of Montana de Oro State park and nobody goes there because the surfing isn’t really good, but I used to like to walk up and down that beach with the dog in the morning and then stop for a coffee on the way home. It was just a short way from where we lived in San Luis Obispo. I did it in July and I did it in January and the weather was always perfect. Often, the thermal layer hadn’t burned off yet, so the ocean was really…pacific.
California has its problems, but lack of beauty isn’t one of them. I wouldn’t trade Virginia, but I had some lovely walks on the West Coast.
We do similar on the Oregon coast. Hell no, I’m not getting in that cold, violent water, but sure, I’ll walk along the beach. Especially when there’s a bakery one way and a brewery the other way (looking at you, Pacific City, OR).
If you get a chance to go to Belize and have a day to go to Caracol, definitely do it for the walk and the archaeology. It’s one of the big Classic Maya sites (along with Tikal, Palenque, Calakmul, and Copan) and there’s one road in. So you get there with your tour group and then have about a half mile walk through the jungle to get to the actual entrance of the site.
But the neat thing is you’re walking on one of the sacbe roads that the Maya constructed a thousand years ago, and then when you finally get to the end of the walk it’s like okay I’m walking up a slight hill and OMG HOLY FUCK THERE’S A GIANT PLAZA AND PYRAMIDS. It really gives you an experience of being overwhelmed by it all, exactly how they planned it two thousand years ago to impress people.
That sounds amazing. I definitely want to visit a Mayan site, and you just put this at the top of the list!
Just be sure to set aside a whole day for it. From San Ignacio (closest decent sized city), you’ve got like a 2 hour drive to get there. And the last half used to be with an escort of the Belize Defense Force (just some soldiers riding in the back of an open pick up truck) since the isolated nature of the place creates a risk for robbery.
Often tour companies stop at a place with waterfalls on the return trip so you can play in the water and cool off after a hot tour.
Also the soldiers stationed at the park get bored, so like when I visited, they had found a boa constrictor in the jungle and were dropping it slowly behind tourists from higher on the pyramids to photobomb them. Which was hilarious as fuck.
Xunantunich, just outside of San Ignacio (still in Belize), is a much smaller Maya site but also really cool still to visit. Like it’s only a “smaller” site if you’ve been to one of the huge ones.
Tulum is near Playa del Carmen in Mexico and very accessible. Architecturally it’s way different than the Belizean Maya sites I mentioned, but also it’s a Post Classic site when sociopolitically things were quite different. Tulum feels small compared to other sites I’ve been to, but I think that’s just a reflection of what’s been excavated and set up for tourism and not a reflection of actual site size.
I toured Dzibilchaltun in Mexico waaaay back as a cruise excursion from the port of Progresso and sure it was nice, but holy fuckballs is that part of the Yucatan hot as fuck. Hot and humid and no breeze. I don’t remember the site, I remember being impressed I didn’t get heat stroke.