"I learned... what people write. Cultural references, jokes, weather conditions, or the difficulty of an ascent. Sarcastic comments..."

"... about needing to quit smoking or arriving stoned. A lot of humorous begging for a helicopter ride down. Catalogs of wildlife spotted or lamentably not. A lot of misspellings (which I’ve retained). A lot of thanks to God."

From "Why Do We Leave Notes on Top of Mountains? It’s Personal/For centuries, people have left all sorts of notes in summit registers. I looked through 100 years of love letters and spontaneous exaltation, including my own family's, to find out why." (Outside).

You can see trends in handwriting styles (neat cursive, like the kind taught by nuns, giving way over time to chicken scratch), as well as music and literature (lots of Grateful Dead and Dharma Bums). Some writers refer to previous entries. Most seemed not to have thought about what they’d write until they arrived. Instead, the words left in registers are simply tactile evidence that someone was there at a certain point in time: alone, with friends, or with the people they love.

One register entry found by the author: "If you are a single woman and made it this far to read these scribblings: I love you!! Marry me!"

And — this isn't in the article, but — here's a quote from "The Dharma Bums": "Oh my God, sociability is just a big smile and a big smile is nothing but teeth, I wish I could just stay up here and rest and be kind."

"The Long Path is a 358-mile hiking trail that begins at the 175th Street subway station in Manhattan and runs to Thacher State Park, just south of the Adirondack Mountains."

" Conceived around 1930 by Vincent Schaefer, a chemist and meteorologist, and named after a line from a Walt Whitman poem, the Long Path initially had no fixed route and was essentially a sequence of waypoints that led toward the Adirondack High Peaks.... It often felt like I was the only human on the trail. Occasionally I encountered others in the mornings or evenings, though all of them lived nearby and were being towed by their dogs. I began to realize that nobody I encountered was aware of the Long Path’s existence, including several people whose homes sat mere feet from the trail. Despite being well marked (its route is indicated with a rectangular aqua blaze), it appears to be hidden in plain sight. Apparently the ubiquitous patches of paint adorning tree trunks, stones and telephone poles are only perceptible to those who navigate by them...."

Writes Casey Kelbaugh, in "Walking From Manhattan to the Catskills on the ‘Long Path’/Intrigued by a trail marker he spotted upstate, a photographer set out to follow a meandering — and little-known — hiking route north from New York City" (NYT)(free access link).

The Walt Whitman poem is "Song of the Open Road," which begins:

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Did you know the Appalachian Trail continues up into Canada?

I didn't. But then I get all my information about the Appalachian Trial from Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods," which I've listened to as an audiobook 100s of times. (I fall asleep listening to audiobooks, and this is one of my favorites.) But here's Nina, hiking the Canadian section of the AT.

We had wondered why the label for this stretch of the IAT is "difficult." How could it be, when the elevations aren't so steep. Now we know.

LOL. Read the whole thing.

"The farewells depicting David Souter don’t do him justice."

That's the teaser on the front page of the NYT website, and I really thought I was clicking over to an article about the mark Justice Souter has made on legal doctrine — some specifics about the cases and the modes and methodologies of constitutional intepretation. But no, it was only about how the man loves to hike in New Hampshire. And then there was the gratuitous swipe at Rush Limbaugh:

“David Souter’s a girl,” said Rush Limbaugh in 2006. “Everyone knows that. What’s the big deal? I’m talking about attitudinally here, folks.”

O.K., a show of hands: Who’s the bigger man: the prescription-drug abuser with the cigar stuffed in his mouth, or the buff older gentleman puffing his way up one of the more strenuous climbs in New England?

(Did Rush really say that? Yeah.)