Tim Dronfield (Outside reading) - Trail Journals and Community

 December 10 2020

Trail Journals and Community

    Trail journals are a great way for hikers to share their experiences and catalogue the specifics of their trip. But I was surprised to find that while many of the journals were simply "I hiked this many miles from this place to that. Set up camp and ate such and such." A number of trail journals talked about the people they met and interacted with.

    The people named in the trail journals are hardly ever referred to by their legal names but are referred to by their trail names. This is not unexpected as trail names are normally how people know each other while on the trail. The overwhelming sense of community and helpfulness of people was surprising. In many cases the journals talked about how people were very generous and always seemed to be willing to help each other.

    You would think that on the trail, where you only have what you can carry, people would be more selfish and want to give things out sparingly. But this is not the case. People on the trail understand the hardships that everyone else is going through and are open to helping because they understand the pain and what its like to not have something. It is a perspective that most people in the "real" world do not have we are kind of blinded by our abundance of luxury that we don't understand the hardships of not having it.

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