How did hiking become so popular across the globe?

News and Adventure from Glacier National Park

The following is an adapted excerpt from my new book, Ramble On: How Hiking Became One of the Most Popular Outdoor Activities in the World:

Since the dawn of mankind, humans have walked the earth to hunt, forage for wild edible plants, explore, trade goods with neighboring communities, and migrate to other regions. At some point in our long evolution we realized that we didn’t need a utilitarian reason to walk. Somewhere along the line we discovered the joy of traipsing through the countryside, observing the beauty of a wildflower, watching wildlife in their natural habitat, marveling at the roar of a waterfall, or contemplating the scenic grandeur from the top of a mountain. Is this a fairly recent phenomenon, or is this an innate characteristic of human beings?

While history has preserved a few examples of men scaling mountains for an assortment of reasons prior to the early modern era, these feats were extremely rare. Before the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, mountains were commonly seen as dangerous and mysterious by most Western cultures. People from the Middle Ages widely regarded them with fear, loathing and superstition. Moreover, they thought the alpine world was inhabited by evil spirits, witches, wild beasts and bandits. Some men even swore affidavits before magistrates that they had seen dragons in the mountains.

However, as the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods progressed and spread across Europe, fear of mountains slowly began to subside, and more men began venturing into the highlands. Several modern historians contend that attitudes towards mountains started to shift as a result of the religious and philosophical tenets of natural theology, which proposed that God is revealed through nature, rather than through divine revelation or supernatural beliefs. They assert that individuals from this era began to realize that fear and loathing of mountains wasn’t justified. The perception that they were inherently dark and evil inevitably changed after it was understood that it was God that had created them. Consequently, people started viewing mountains as images of God, as natural cathedrals, or even as sources of spiritual inspiration. Leslie Stephen, on the other hand, claimed that attitudes simply evolved in conjunction with the revolution in ideas and thinking that occurred during the Age of Enlightenment. As one of the most famous British climbers from the “Golden Age of Alpinism,” Stephen argued in 1868 that “The history of mountaineering is, to a great extent, the history of the process by which men have gradually conquered the phantoms of their own imagination.”

By the mid-1700s we begin to see the first documented rambling and walking excursions. While the historical record seemingly indicates that mountaineering preceded hiking by several decades, or even centuries, it doesn’t necessarily mean that people didn’t hike or walk for recreational purposes prior to the late modern era. Rather, it seems more likely that those who set out on foot never would’ve considered a walk in the countryside to be noteworthy or important in any way. Therefore, very few individuals would’ve taken the time to record their rambles for posterity. As a result, hiking doesn’t have a date of birth, nor even an approximated timeframe for its origins. It seems most likely that walking for pleasure was a natural form of recreation that evolved over time to a point where individuals began to take it more seriously, for any host of reasons, whereupon we begin to see the first descriptions of walking excursions in diaries, letters, poems and travelogues.

The roots of hiking and walking for pleasure were firmly established by the late 1700s, especially in Great Britain and certain parts of Europe. However, during the earlier part of the century, walking was generally looked down upon. “Respectable” citizens during this era usually rode in carriages or on horseback to travel any significant distances. For the most part only the poor walked. In Victorian England, during the mid-1800s, wandering vagrants were derogatively known as tramps, a word that would eventually refer to hikers, and now used by New Zealanders to describe backpacking.

While overcoming the fear of mountains, and the gradual breakdown in the social stigmas associated with walking certainly enabled mountaineering and hiking to germinate, I would argue that the single most important event to spur the development of hiking and walking for pleasure was the Industrial Revolution. The social changes brought about by industrial development were profound. While many of those changes improved the lives of people around the world, there were also many detriments resulting from industrialization.

Ramble On explores how industrialization both enabled and inspired people to seek the forests and mountains for recreation, which allowed hiking to eventually become one of the most popular outdoor activities in the world.

Jeff
HikinginGlacier.com
TetonHikingTrails.com
RockyMountainHikingTrails.com

Ramble On (2nd edition book on the rich history of hiking)
Exploring Glacier National Park
Exploring Grand Teton National Park