Hiking Rewired My Brain. It Can Do the Same to Yours.

If the cab fare to the southern end of the Pacific Crest Trail cost $1,000, so be it: I was not going to spend an hour crowded into a van grousing about the world with a hiker named Honest Abe.

Abe and I had met on the Appalachian Trail in 2019, and it did not take much conversation for us to intuit that we were opposites—not friends, perhaps even nemeses. I am a middle-class Southern nerd who went to college, then got paid to stroke his beard while tapping thoughts about music into a machine. Abe, meanwhile, had grown up in rural Missouri and joined the Marines before becoming an electric lineworker whose work powered my machine.

Our politics followed predictably: I was the liberal activist who believed Donald Trump was coming for my vulnerable friends back home. Abe, meanwhile, was the Trump advocate who I assumed had at least one Gadsden flag bumper sticker on his pickup. Marching alongside a Virginia creek bed one humid afternoon, we had a brief but pointed exchange about our opposing views. We both walked away scowling.

Whenever we’d spot one another during the next 1,800 miles, we’d silently glare and maybe nod, sworn enemies simply acknowledging one another’s existence.

But here we were, in the spring of 2021, slated for the same shuttle to Campo, the California border town where the PCT begins. A mutual friend we’d both met on the Appalachian Trail had volunteered to ferry us and a few others to the start in a van that was also her home; assuming everyone was a reasonable adult, she hadn’t bothered to warn anyone about who else was coming. I was already apprehensive about this 2,600-mile walk, so I didn’t want to begin it by arguing about Covid lockdowns and Capitol rioters with someone I despised. Were it not for the wisdom of Tina, my wife and hiking partner, I would have called that cab to Campo.

And then, something unexpected happened: Abe and I grew to like another. For the PCT’s first 400 miles, or until he sped ahead to meet a deadline, we walked and talked and debated and laughed—so much that my other pals wondered if I’d had some MAGA epiphany. No, neither my nor Abe’s politics had changed much, but our old perspectives on ourselves—that we each had to be right, that our worldviews were so valid they did not warrant explanation or defense—magically softened. We talked about privilege and welfare, transgender rights and reproductive access, and our chats rarely rose into arguments.

American rancor had reached new heights since we first met in 2019. Somehow, though, he was less bitter, and I was less vitriolic.

So what had changed inside of me and Abe in those two years? Turns out, we’d both walked enough—often in silent solitude, where our own roiling thoughts could mellow into a simmer, and sometimes with others who didn’t always see the world the same way—to be able to listen. Walking had warped our brains, and we were happier for it.

Both my job and my hobby have perennially demanded a kind of unapologetic certitude. A music critic since I was 18, I have had to wield my opinions as something of a sword, brandishing them upon arrival for two decades of bylines. And then, in my early thirties, this conviction translated into absurdist political activism, where humor was weaponized to lampoon those who I felt were wrong. (Well, they were wrong and still are, but whatever.) In a campaign that soon spread to other continents, Tina and I mocked abortion clinic protestors with handmade signs. We followed a few hundred friends every week to blow airhorns at North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory to protest his assaults on transgender rights; that campaign eventually made it into The New York Times and debatably altered North Carolina’s 2016 gubernatorial. Very little of my life and what might be regarded as success involved listening.

That was, more or less, my mindset when I headed north from Springer Mountain on the Appalachian Trail in 2019—be right, never waver. But today, after walking 10,000 miles through Southwestern deserts and New England forests, over Rocky Mountain heights and across Florida swamps, I know that my mind has changed, and that virtues like patience, humility, and empathy have steadily swollen to crowd out the ego, arrogance, and anxiety that once dominated my mindset. I first noticed this soon after the AT, when my longtime instinct to critique something yielded to the desire to hear someone’s story and help tell it. The encounter with Abe, where two peas from very different pods started to fashion our own trail bubble, felt like absolute proof: Thru-hiking had absolutely altered my brain for the better. I notice it even now, in my daily relationships and interactions off trail, and I hope it never fades.

“Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord,” Rebecca Solnit wrote early in her great Wanderlust: A History of Walking. “Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.”

Solnit wrote that back in 2000, years before social media demanded that everyone have and share an automatic opinion about everything. It has only become more salient as we have become more reactionary, piling takes atop takes until we have built a pile of trash with no foundation. But crisscrossing the isolated Continental Divide in Montana or pushing through the canyon of the Gila River in New Mexico, this isn’t an option, simply because you don’t enough have cell service to be in or contribute to the proverbial know. Even when you do, the root that could trip you and cost you your hike matters more than what some stranger thinks of another stranger on a screen. You have time, then, to be still with your thoughts, to examine them from every angle, because you simply have less access to and stamina for an incessant opinion factory. Your mind is less busy with the world, racing less to keep up with a pace none of us can match, anyway.

This begets a new sort of patience, too, or at least it did for me. When you accept that you need not have a readymade take on everything, you instead become comfortable with interrogating an idea more deliberately, with letting a thought tumble around in your brain until it is as smooth as some river rock. This process also mirrors your daily existence on trail—methodical, consistent, slow. Rushing anything means enjoying it less; rushing too much risks an injury from overloading the system. Walking is an invitation to settle into that system, to indulge in the steadiness of the long haul, both mentally and physically.

And then there is the question of the people you meet out there, strangers you get to know simply because there is no one else around. In the woods, I’ve heard so many ideas and perspectives I’d never before considered, just because I chose to hear what someone had to offer rather than walk in silence. In turn, I’ve listened to their reactions to what I’ve had to say. This is the bilateral breakdown of the clique, or of the circles of ideological reinforcement that we build around ourselves for validation, both online and in physical communities. By the time Abe and I reconnected on the PCT, we were far enough away from our own cliques—and lonely enough, maybe?—to listen for real and, in turn, be heard.

Almost 100 years ago, guidebook editor Harold Allen famously said the Appalachian Trail was “remote for detachment, narrow for chosen company, winding for leisure, [and] lonely for contemplation.” His words transcend the AT and fit any space where you can put any foot in front of the other for a long time. These are places to let your mind indulge in all the things that our ever-busying world frequently denies it: room to roam, freedom to change, an opportunity to open again.

I am, unfortunately, not naïve enough to think that incredibly long walks are some workable political solution, that they are either practical or applicable for the average American. We live in an era of almost unconscionably high stakes, when our societal embrace of brinksmanship could push us over a half-dozen abyssal brinks. One of the most well-armed countries in the world has killed 34,000 of its neighbors since October. We lack the political, economic, and personal will to change our systems enough so that we don’t destroy our own planet. Women’s rights, trans rights, voting rights—somehow, a quarter-century into the 21st, these seem as contentious now as they have ever been.

No, long walks in the woods aren’t going to fix that, even if I could change the mind of someone who didn’t buy all this global warming hullabaloo with every new on-trail debate. Aggressive activism remains essential and urgent. I don’t want to suggest that we literally walk away from it or that getting along with someone in the woods is in any way a substitute for substantive changes in ideology or policy.

But these treks have gifted me a new kind of wherewithal, a burgeoning understanding that none of these fixes will be instant and that none of them will be implemented by continual yelling into the void. I spent so much of my life judging, speaking, and preaching, all impulsive acts rooted in convenience and quickness. It is much harder to slow down—to listen, think, and talk, to try and find a way forward that is more than an assertion of your own arrogant will. I have walked that fever off, at least for now, and I feel better about my ability to move in and relate to the world even if I feel worse about the actual state of the world. That is, it feels a little better to be alive, to be in my own head.

I am still honest with Abe and tell him when I think he’s wrong, which remains pretty often. But after our own walks in the woods, I can actually hear where he’s coming from before I try to change his mind, too.

How a Short Hike Can Change Your Brain

At this point, I have altered my entire life to make way for long-distance hikes, setting aside a chunk of every year to do just that. In this regard, I am incredibly lucky and privileged, and I know that many Americans don’t have the resources or luxury to disappear into the woods for six uninterrupted hours, let alone six months.

The good news? You don’t have to. You can use the fundamental takeaways that have helped to change my brain as I have walked across the United States, whether you’re walking in a state park or simply strolling the sidewalk or rail trail with your dog near your neighborhood. Here’s how I think of it.

Put your phone away
Some folks may tell you that you should just leave your phone at home, that the purpose of hiking is to disconnect and that’s the simplest route. Bollocks. Maps, a camera, an emergency escape—your phone has it all. But put the thing away. Try not to see your stroll as a chance to catch up on scrolling, so that you can be incensed by the news on Twitter or envious of friends on Instagram. Step away from the feed and just let your mind unpack itself. I’ve got a treadmill with a TV attached, and the impact of walking while watching Netflix or reading the news is never the same as it is outdoors, free of screened input. “[Walking] leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts,” Rebecca Solnit writes. Revel in that gift.

Hike often
How often are you riled up by news, distracted by your phone, or simply taken away from your thoughts by the world at large? All the time, yeah? You’re not going to be able to match that number blow for blow with walks, but do your best. My mind didn’t change after my first day on the Appalachian Trail or even my first 100; this is an accretive process, so give yourself as many chances to be in motion and still with your thoughts as possible.

Talk to people on the trail
I know I’ve said a lot about walking in silence, but one of the most salutary parts of hiking for me has been hearing other people’s perspectives and trying to understand the way they see the world. I’m not a naturally empathetic person, but as walking has worn down my own arrogance, listening to strangers in the woods has enhanced that part of my head. Strike up a conversation, and see what you learn.

Remind yourself of a hike is its own miracle
Sorry to end on a New Age note here, but I guess hiking is to blame? Seriously, remember that this is all pretty incredible—you have the ability, space, and time to go for a walk, the culmination of millions of years of evolution and geologic deep time, all far beyond your control. Want to feel less arrogant and convinced of your correctness? Remember how you’re just lucky to be here, and keep on walking.