Part 3

Mont Blanc is the grandest hike I’ve ever taken. But it’s the memories of our all being together on it that I most cherish. There is no companionship quite like the companionship of a long hike. Looking out for one another. Having a good talk first with one fellow hiker, then another. Sharing beauty that can’t be captured in words. Prevailing together over blisters and cold and fatigue. Celebrating together the successful finish of a hard day.

From our early family hikes through many sibling expeditions to my kids and now grandkids, our family have followed in my father’s footsteps. Decades ago, my brother brought his family out to join ours at a friend’s cabin in Marble, Colorado, for several fine days of hiking. As a baby, our Paris-born daughter rode in a backpack through Eastern Europe’s Tatra Mountains and Julian Alps, as passersby called out “die kleinste Alpinistin!” Years later, back in Hot Springs, my dad gave her a quartz crystal and led her on a hike on the mountain where he found it. Long after she and I survived that thirsty Grand Canyon descent, we climbed Mt. Washington together. She was married in the Tetons, and David and I hiked all through the mountains of the Northwest on our way from California to her wedding. Their home is in Utah now: Hiker heaven.

By a stroke of good fortune, all of our kids lived in California during our five years in L.A., opening up wondrous hiking opportunities. Our son lived nearby, in Long Beach. We’d drive up to Angeles Crest most weekends, scaling one San Gabriel peak or another. The three of us climbed 10,000-foot Mount Baldy together and hiked in the Eastern Sierra. With our younger daughter, we’ve delighted in Northern California hikes in Point Reyes, Mount Tamalpais, Muir Woods, the Berkeley hills, Mount Diablo.

Our littlest grandkids commandeered our hiking poles last summer on walks in Crested Butte. In a few months, we’ll be back on the trails with all of them in Maine.

Hiking is especially fine for the particular companionship of marriage. From the Sawtooths, the Bitterroots and the Uintas to the Adirondacks, the Green and the White mountains, from Grandfather Mountain to the slopes of Mount Rainier, David and I have hiked untold miles together. We seek out hikes when we travel abroad, even if they’re not the trip’s focus — up Arenal in Costa Rica, down Samaria Gorge in Crete, through hilly tea plantations in Kerala, India, and in the mountains towering above rice paddies in Sapa, Vietnam.

Last month, in New Zealand’s splendid Southern Alps, we hiked on the slopes of Mt. Cook, at Arthur’s Pass and in Mount Aspiring National Park, all in preparation for the big one: the Routeburn. What a hike.

Shortly after we returned home, we each turned 75. That was my father’s age when he took his last hike up North Mountain, across from his house on Ramble Street in Hot Springs National Park.

For his birthday, I got David a book about Patagonia.

On the Tour du Mont Blanc

Part 2

What is it that draws us to the long, hard hikes? Some of it is testing yourself against the difficulty. Some of it is knowing that, the deeper in you go, the more the wildness envelops you, the more dramatic the beauty, the greater the chance of encountering a fox, a bear, a marmot, an eagle. The farther from everything ordinary.

Powerful as Kilimanjaro was, Africa’s most remarkable hike for me was in the Ruwenzori mountains, along the border between Congo (where I was living) and Uganda. European explorers associated this range with Ptolemy’s Mountains of the Moon, because water runs from its slopes to the Nile. The Ruwenzoris are as mysterious as they sound, with mosses of every hue carpeting the ground and creeping up the trees, and towering plants that Dr. Seuss might have imagined. Our guides brought along a goat to roast for our Christmas dinner, later exchanging it for a piglet in a little village we walked through. (I appreciated the piglet’s slower pace for the rest of that long day.) In the third and highest hut was a guestbook in Flemish (from the days of Belgium’s colonialization), which Lowell Thomas had signed. The 10-mile massif, craggy, snowy, glaciated, towered above.

On our recent hike along New Zealand’s Routeburn Track, a most unlikely fact emerged: Of our group of 31, three of us had hiked in that fabled range, deep in equatorial Africa.

As the long days on the gorgeous Routeburn loosened the knots in my mind, I thought of other multi-day treks I’ve taken: The Jotunheimen of Norway, where a stream was so swollen that I have nightmares still of the terror I felt before throwing myself over it. The wild and rugged Pyrenees, and the two bird species we saw that are found only there. The Cotswolds, with their sheep pastures and their steeples beckoning from each storybook village. Machu Picchu, where our sure-footed guides carried everything from the portable toilets to our tents and woke us each morning with coca-leaf tea. The blazing-hot hike down into the Grand Canyon from the North Rim with my older daughter, when the water source we’d been told about didn’t show up. The Grand Traverse des Alpes across Switzerland, alpenglow out the window of each lovely inn.

But the granddaddy of them all was the Tour du Mont Blanc.

The idea of our trekking around Mont Blanc originated on a Blue Ridge hike with our younger daughter. (Another gift of hiking: You may find your teenager talking to you.) As we descended from the parkway past one lovely waterfall after another, I mentioned an article I’d seen in an in-flight magazine about a hike around the Mont Blanc summit. “I want us to do that,” our daughter said — but there had to be other kids along. Miraculously, given college schedules and two families’ busy lives, we gathered all three of our kids plus an uncle, an aunt and two cousins. It was a splendid trip, from the tough but beautiful first day ending at a little French inn with crème brûlée cooling on the window sill to our last celebratory night in Courmayeur, Italy.

David and I loved the hike so much that we returned a few years later to complete the 10-day loop, from Italy through Switzerland and back into Chamonix.

Part 1

Maybe it’s because our father loved mountains — and hiking — that I do, too. Growing up in a national park probably helped. You can climb Hot Springs Mountain from right behind the Fordyce Bathhouse on Central Avenue. On some Sundays, we’d take the scenic drive home over West Mountain, up Whittington Avenue from Dad’s church. Every now and then, he’d take us further into the Ouachita Mountains to hike. We’d camp in an old canvas tent and play cards by lantern light. He’d fry fish for breakfast. We’d find box turtles and tarantulas.

Dad once told me he hoped that, if he ever got old and crotchety, he’d just run up a mountain until his heart stopped. His heart stopped without that, but he hiked right up until the end.

If Dad and Hot Springs got me started, why has hiking remained so important to me? I was telling a friend about our recent trip hiking New Zealand’s Routeburn Track, and I found her looking puzzled. “Why do you like hiking so much?” she asked.

Part of it, of course, is the beauty. Hikes are almost always in lovely places.

I spent a summer during college as a salad girl in Glacier National Park. Six days in a row slopping together blue cheese dressing and stashing little glasses of tomato juice into ice chips for waiters to pick up, then off in a Red Jammer to Grinnell Glacier or Gunsight, the Garden Wall or Granite Park. Heart-stirringly beautiful, all of it. In grad school, I wrote to newspapers all over the Rockies, hoping to land a job amid mountains. As a cub reporter in Colorado Springs, I joined in the griping about our $110/week paychecks: “Do they think we can EAT Pikes Peak?” But I loved living alongside its majestic immensity.

The Rockies were my “local” range in those years: the San Juans and the Sangre de Cristos, the Gore and Collegiate ranges. The ghost towns and the sheepherders, high in their silent reaches. Later, living in D.C., it was the Blue Ridge we’d turn to. L.A. offered a magnificent array, from the Santa Monica mountains to the San Gabriels to the Eastern Sierra. Now, in New York, it’s the Catskills we hike each spring and fall, and Acadia in the summer — thanks to my sister, who has climbed every peak in the park.

Just the presence of mountains nearby — knowing they’ll be there when you can find the time to go to them — is heartening. The promise of a lift up out of the dailiness of life. The simple act of placing one foot in front of the other, again and again and again. The silence — and the creak of a giant tree, the scrunch of pine needles underfoot. Day hikes in our local ranges have fed our souls, soothed our worries, strengthened us.

The big hikes add other elements: The uncertainty, sometimes fear, about the degree of challenge. The grit-your-teeth dedication as you keep on going at it, even as your goal seems to recede into the distance. The relief and satisfaction when you’ve done it.

For years, “I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro” was my go-to offering when a meeting leader asked that we “tell something surprising about yourself.”

I was 26 when I made that five-day trip on Kilimanjaro. Three of our small group were teenaged boys; they were the ones who didn’t make it to the top. I think they didn’t want it badly enough. You have to believe it’s your only chance. Otherwise, the headaches, the exhaustion, the vomiting, and the scree at the top that robs each stride of half its gain, will prevail.

After I hiked Kilimanjaro, Dad wrote me, “I have news for you: If you climbed Kilimanjaro because it’s there, it still is.” Grandmother wrote, “I don’t understand why anyone would want to walk up a huge mountain.”