The consistent pedestrian will score to his credit, every week throughout the year, ten miles of vigorous, sustained tramping. Five hundred miles a year makes an impressive showing, and is efficacious: it goes far to “slam the door in the doctor’s nose.”
The Walking Tour. Apart from, or, better, in addition to the perennial weekly walking about one’s home, there is the occasional walking tour: a two or three-day hike, over Labor Day, perhaps, or Washington’s Birthday; and then there is the longer vacation tour of two or three weeks’ duration.
With important exceptions, we, in our northern latitudes, arrange our walking tours in summer time. And, so far as concerns the exceptions, it will here suffice to remind ourselves of mountain climbing on snowshoes in winter, of ski-running and skating, and of the winter carnivals of sport held in the Adirondacks, in the Alps, and in the Rocky Mountains. In our southern states, however, no disadvantage attaches to winter; to the contrary, over a great part of that region, winter is the pleasanter season for the pedestrian. But summer is the season of vacations, and is, generally speaking, the time of good roads, fair skies, and gentle air. Then one can walk with greatest ease and freedom.
The choice of the particular fortnight for the “big hike” may be governed by all sorts of considerations; if the expedition be ornithological, and there is free choice, it will be taken in May or June, or perhaps in September; if to climb Mt. Ktaadn, it will preferably be in August. Again, one’s employer may, for his own reasons, fix the time. It is well, therefore, to formulate general statements, helpful in making choice of place, when once the season has been fixed.
In early summer, from the time the snow melts till mid July, the north woods are infested with buzzing, stinging, torturing mosquitoes; to induce one to brave these pests, large countervailing inducements must needs appear. Mountaineering in temperate latitudes is less advisable in the early summer than later; there is more rain then, and nights are cold, and, in the high mountains, soft snow is often an impedance. Throughout much of our country, June is a rainy month. In May and June, accordingly, and early July, one should by preference plan his walk in open settled country, in the foothills of mountain ranges, or across such pleasant regions as central New York or Wisconsin.
Late July, August and September are, for the most part, hot and dusty. At that season, accordingly, the great river basins and wide plains should be avoided; one should choose rather the north woods, the mountains, or the New England coast.
For the pedestrian September in the mountains and October everywhere are the crown of the year; the fires of summer are then burning low, storms are infrequent, the nip in the air stirs one to eagerness for the wide sky and the open road.
“The world has nothing to offer more rich and entertaining than the days which October always brings us, when after the first frosts, a steady shower of gold falls in the strong south wind from the chestnuts, maples and hickories: all the trees are wind-harps, filling the air with music; and all men become poets, and walk to the measure of rhymes they make or remember.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Country Life.”
If one is so fortunate as to have his holiday abroad, he will find the Italian hills or the Riviera delightful either in early spring or in late autumn; he will find the Alps at their best in midsummer; and, at intermediate seasons, there remain the Black Forest and the regions of the Seine, the Rhine, and the Elbe. As for Scotland and Ireland, no one has ventured to say when the rains are fewest.