You know why you haven’t taken up backpacking?
Because you think you have to hike with 40 pounds on your back with every footstep you take.
Well, you don’t. If every backpack trip we took involved lugging a full pack for days on end, we wouldn’t backpack, either.
Today, fittingly, may be the last hot day of the year. As I write, it’s Monday, Sept. 21 — the last day of summer (that’s the fitting part) — and the temperature is 85. It’s forecast to hit 92 by day’s end. Tomorrow, however, the temperature will barely break 80 and it may not top 70 for the rest of the week. Overnight lows may dip into the upper 40s:
Back when hiking was pretty much my full-time job I hiked daily, racking up 30 to 40 miles a week. My philosophy, to borrow from Dani Rojas, was “Hiking is life.” When I scheduled hiking programs I did so under the assumption that hiking was everyone’s life. Who wouldn’t want to hike as many days of the week as possible?
Even when I was a kid I dreaded June 21.
The first day of summer? What kid dreads the start of summer?
Not summer per se. Rather, what that “start” represented.
The demise.
The demise, curiously, of sunlight. For June 21 (or thereabouts) marks the longest period of daylight of the year: 14 hours and 39 minutes. But from then on we start getting shortchanged, imperceptibly at first, on sunshine. A few seconds a day at first. At the end of June, the sun set at 8:37 p.m.; tonight (Sept. 3), it will be down at 7:42 p.m. By the end of September the sun will set at 7:02 p.m. and come Halloween it will be down at 6:22 p.m. Let’s not even talk about November and the end of Daylight Saving Time.
I’d been hiking the ridge for five minutes, aware of the fading light filtering through the hardwoods. I was in the waning minutes of daylight and wasn’t about to pass without a memorable goodbye. So why was I still moving? I should take a minute to stop and take this in, I thought. So I did.
100-plus degrees? 80 percent humidity? And a “feels like” rating of Phoenix?
Certainly doesn’t inspire thoughts of a day on the trail. A long day, at least.
That’s why this time of year we pull out our Summer Shorts: hikes long enough to sate your thirst for trail, but short enough to prevent heatstroke.
