How I Stopped Chasing Views and Started Seeing

The Way I Hike Now — a reflection on slowing down, noticing, and walking with wonder.

There was a time when hiking meant pursuit.I hiked to reach the top of a mountain, to peer over the edge of a cliff, to stand before a waterfall and feel its mist on my face. Each step was a measure of distance, a climb toward something visible and grand. The view was always the goal.

Then something shifted.It happened quietly, without intention — perhaps the natural slowing that comes with time, or maybe an opening of attention that had long been waiting to happen. I began to notice the small exchanges that make up the trail: the nods between hikers, the smiles, the soft greetings between strangers and their dogs. For the first time, I felt the subtle kinship of moving through the same breath of the world.

After that, I started to see the trees.The oaks, their mycorrhizal roots weaving hidden networks of exchange beneath the soil.The cottonwoods and willows, their branches dipping toward water.The mahogany, ashes, pines, firs, and redwoods — each holding the memory of light and rain in their rings.

I remember one hike in particular, through Big Basin State Park in Northern California.The air was cool and sweet with moss.Redwoods rose like guardians of time, their bark soft and breathing. Water trickled through stone, and mushrooms appeared like small miracles — quiet reminders that decay is just another form of renewal.

That was when I began to notice the plants — their medicine, their nourishment, their stories. I started learning their names and their ways of giving. How the first peoples walked these same trails with reverence, giving thanks for every leaf, every root, every seed. The forest was no longer just a place to pass through — it became a relationship, a living conversation.

Now, when I hike, it’s no longer about getting somewhere.It’s about being here.Listening to the birds.Feeling the wind thread through pine needles.Watching clouds drift and seasons turn.Breathing in petrichor as it rises from the soil after rain.Tasting ripe berries along the slope.Touching the velvet leaves of hedgenettle, the cool geometry of lichen, the resinous bark of pine.

Yesterday, I stopped beside the trail to notice a patch of Scutellinia scutellata — tiny scarlet cups, the common eyelash fungus. To see their delicate lashes would require a microscope, but that wasn’t the point. It was about noticing — kneeling before a world most people never see.

It helps that I now share the trail with someone who reminds me to look up as often as I look down. To notice not just what grows from the soil, but what moves across the sky — the wingbeat, the shadow, the fleeting shape of a Townsend’s solitaire perched on a rock as the waterfall murmurs behind it.

What began as a pursuit of distance has become an intimacy with place. Each step is slower now, more like a conversation than a climb. I no longer measure the worth of a hike by the view from the top, but by how deeply I can listen — to the forest, to the air, to the heartbeat beneath my feet.

Every organism has its place in the great respiration of this planet.And so do we.To notice.To belong.That is the most beautiful arrival of all.