Nice View? Put the Camera Away!

I took 3,938 photos during my thru-hike. Add to that the 1,161 photos taken by my brother and erstwhile hiking companion, and the many hundreds of photos taken by friends on The Trail and uploaded to Facebook, and there are over 5,000 pictures documenting my Appalachian Trail experience. Wonderful, right? Well, in retrospect, not so much. If you have an upcoming thru-hike in the works, I am here to urge you to put the camera away. I grant that it is an essential piece of gear, and besides, how else will you prove to yourself later in life that your six months in the long green tunnel wasn’t just a delightful dream? However, your camera should be used sparingly and judiciously. Here’s why:

Nature vistas never live up to your memory.

Take a moment to look through your pictures from your last vacation, or hiking trip. Go ahead, scroll through every one. How much time did you spend looking at vast expanses of ocean and beach, or mountains and hills? They all start to look the same after a while, don’t they? It’s often just not possible to capture the majesty of most of the sights along the A.T., or other beautiful wild places, with a tiny camera and a few pixels. On the other hand, how much time did you spend looking at pictures of your friends and family on that trip? Remembering the context for each and every picture, recalling why your brother is laughing so hard in that one photo, or what precipitated the rash of well-intentioned obscene gestures in the next? I am willing to bet that you linger for much longer on these pictures than the dozens that you took of that stunning view from the summit.

There are professional photographers among us who can occasionally capture those sights along the A.T. which bring us up short and reduce us to puddles of humility, quivering at the majesty of nature, but how many thru-hikers are going to add a DSLR and a wide-angle lens to their gear list? For the rest of us, does that picture we took from the fourteenth overlook in Shenandoah or the water rushing over the moss-covered rocks in the sixth stream we passed that day truly reflect the way we felt upon taking in that scene, in that moment, with our own senses? With very few exceptions, every landscape picture I look back on imparts a twinge of disappointment — I’m sure those mountains were more awe-inspiring from where I was standing on White Rocks Cliff…I know that sunset from Russell Field Shelter was much more amazing… — and I begin to worry that I didn’t experience the moment as fully as I could have, because my eye was stuck in the viewfinder the whole time.

You don’t want to look like a fool, do you?

Let’s be honest, we all have some trace of vanity. You’re about to hike over 2,000 miles through 14 states and over hundreds of mountains. That’s no feat to sneeze at, and you’re well within your rights to brag about it. These days, all of our best passive-aggressive showboating takes place on social media, so of course you want the perfect picture of you on the A.T. to adorn your Facebook wall or your Instagram feed. Maybe that one on McAfee Knob, hand on your head, shading out the sun, eyes trained into the distance, searching for Katahdin beyond the horizon. Maybe that one of you in silhouette before an orange sky, the stark lines of your trekking poles accentuating your newly slimmed figure. Maybe you want dozens of those perfect pictures, and who can blame you?

I am not ashamed to admit I like to see those pictures of myself, and I like to show others as well. As I scrolled through the photos of me taken by my companions throughout my hike, all the elements of the perfect picture were there: craggy outcroppings, silky blue skies, verdant pastures hemmed in by towering oaks, lengthy and multichromatic sunsets…and there I am, set against each one of these amazing backdrops with with a dopey stare and my camera held out in front of me, as if I’m Rafiki announcing my photographic prowess to all the creatures assembled at Pride Rock. For shame…

Nobody wants to be the buffoon that ruined that perfect shot of himself by concerning himself more with total picture count than total moment immersion.

No one wants to see a four-hour long slideshow of your thru-hike.

Your friends and family probably have mixed emotions about your upcoming adventure. Maybe they support your push into the unknown (even if they don’t understand it), maybe they greeted your news with a little more trepidation. Regardless, surely they told you that they wanted to see pictures! Your parents, friends, and co-workers will all eagerly await your return that they might be able to forget about their cubicle and their car payments, living vicariously through you as they follow your five million steps through your photos.

However, something we may forget when thru-hiking — when we have the ultimate luxury of time, when we can nap for an hour atop a summit because we feel like it – is that most people are busy. The magnificent and colossal amount of patience that you develop as a member of the hiker community will dwarf that of the people around you as you return to “normal life.” Sources place the average human attention span at somewhere between 8 seconds and 5 minutes. Putting aside the exact number, know that yours will have stretched to a considerably longer amount by the time you reach Katahdin. Therefore, it is imperative to keep this in mind as you share the documentation of your trip with your loved ones. Trust me…no amount of familial obligation can influence someone to stare at your laptop for more than twenty minutes, despite how incredible your trip was.

Mental pictures last longer

We met a trail angel in Harper’s Ferry who was generous enough to feed us, house us, give us a bottle of wine, and regale us with hours worth of splendid conversation. However, when we parted ways, he refused to pose for a picture with us. “When you take a picture of a moment,” he said, “it drains that memory and that feeling from your brain and puts it in the camera instead.”

I respected his wishes and he remained unphotographed, but his stance on the subject got me thinking, especially as I examined more than 5,000 photographs in the weeks after summiting Katahdin. Were all 5,000 of those moments now just blips in my memory, having failed to attach to my hippocampus, and destined to fade away? As I looked at pictures of me taking pictures (of which, as I have mentioned, there were many), I found that those depictions jogged my memory and brought me right back to the particular place where I was photographed, but without the picture in front of me, it was much more difficult to close my eyes and imagine myself back at McAfee Knob (where I was more concerned with how to look cool than with the view) or in the Grayson Highlands (where I spent more time taking photos of ponies than admiring the stunning terrain).

Luckily, one place where my camera remained firmly in my pocket was on the Tablelands, the plateau on the Katahdin massif that approaches Baxter Peak. Of course, I took a silly amount of pictures with the Katahdin sign, and among fellow hikers on the summit. But for my final few hours on the Appalachian Trail, my finger didn’t once touch the shutter button. As I approached Baxter Peak, I wasn’t thinking about what would make the best profile picture, or what goofy pose to make atop the sign, or how many pictures were left on my memory card.

I can close my eyes now and instantly return there in my imagination. I can see the deep azure of the endless sky, I can feel the rush and the chill as the breeze makes contact with the patch of sweat on the back of my shirt, I can smell the alpine flora mixed with my own now familiar body odor, I can taste the White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Clif Bar I had for lunch, and I can hear the blood pounding in my ears as the Katahdin sign first comes into view. The image of that tiny piece of weather-beaten wood standing sentinel, as if it was waiting years for me to approach it and touch it with the utmost reverence, will be burned into my mind until the end of my days.

Before my thru-hike, I enjoined a friend of mine and former thru-hiker to furnish me with some sage trail advice. Aside from the always important “hike your own hike” and various other useful nuggets of wisdom, one thing he told me stuck out in my mind: “take half as many pictures of mountains, and twice as many pictures of people.” My 5,000 A.T. photographs are proof positive that I patently ignored that advice, but looking back, I wish I hadn’t.