Description
A Hiker’s Philosophy is more than a coffee table book. It tells the story of hiking the Pacific Northwest Trail and the philosophy I discovered on the hike.
A Hiker’s Philosophy is a photobook that can serve as a nice coffee table book to flip through, or you can spend more time on the stories to go in depth into the philosophy that long-distance hiking provides.
It has been years since I hiked the Pacific Northwest Trail (PNT), and I’m still trying to figure out how to talk about it. People say things like, “Wow that must have been fun.” Or “I wish I had time to do that.” They look confused when I can’t give them a simple explanation of what it was like. After all it was just a three month long hike. I wish I could parse it down into a small conversation but a lot can happen in three months. I designed this book to try and answer that question in a small coffee table book. A Hiker’s Philosophy is a book that can be flipped through quickly or slowly contemplated.
It took two years to process the events of those three months in 2015. I have begun to extract the meaning from it all, and made it accessible for anyone interested in learning some of the lessons I did without actually hiking 1,200 miles. There’s a lot of metaphors to be found in the wilderness, because that was our original home. I’ve found that what works out there, works in modern society. Things are just more complicated in regular life compared to trail life but the rules are the same. That’s when I realized the hiker’s philosophy could be applied to things off the trail. To navigate regular life successfully, you need something much more abstract than a map. You need a properly calibrated perspective, and that’s what I found on the PNT.
Don’t like reading? I made a movie about the PNT too! A Sense of Direction: a 1,200 mile walk on the Pacific Northwest Trail.
For more information on the PNT visit, https://www.pnt.org/
