Fwd: [at-l] Hiking Ethics

[spiriteagle99@hotmail.com (Jim and/or Ginny Owen)]

rick boudrie wrote:
>
>I wonder if anyone would tell Colin Fletcher to sit down, shut up and "hike 
>your own hike" when he wrote the following:
>
>"The very nature of the trail-guide beast custs clear across the grain:  
>the 'sensible" subordination of doubt and chance; the mile-by-
>mile scheduling and checking; the rule of the written word.  It is all 
> >inapplicable, stupid.
>  It walls off, befor you have even begun, the values you have come so far 
>to retrieve."
>
>I wonder if anyone would tell Laura Waterman to pipe down and hike her own 
>hike when she and her late husband wrote, among a whole lot of other good 
>stuff, that they would like to see the day when "winter climbers, or 
>parties penetrating the more remote areas in the summer, accept the genuine 
>risk that they are on their own to handle all emergencies; to be their own 
>sole resource for rescue (self-rescue); to have no way of letting anyone 
>else know whats happening by means of airwaves.  Risk? Certainly"  (Both 
>Quotes taken from "Wilderness Ethics")
>
>Which brings me to the question.  If it is OK for folks of their stature to 
>promote these kinds of ethics, why can't R & R and others do the same 
>without being told "Sit down, shut up and hike your own hike".



Rick -
R&R isn't doing the same - neither he nor WF believe in or promote HYOH.  
And both the examples you quoted above are specific examples of HYOH.  They 
have no relationship whatever to anything that either WF or R&R promote.

Point 2 - "Sit down, shut up and " is an invalid expression.  Don't know 
where you got it (I haven't bothered to read some of this thread), but the 
correct expression would be  "hike your own hike - and leave mine alone".  
Neither R&R nor WF do that.  Their thing is to control other people's hikes.


>It also brings me to the realization that talking about and promoting 
>hiking and backcountry ethics is no way to win friends.

Yeah - now you know why we didn't cry when WF left at-l.  And why R&R isn't 
particulary popular.

Walk softly,
Jim



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