The point of a walk in the woods (unless you’re Reagan or Gorbachev fine-tuning a deal on arms control) is to get away from the cares of office — from desks, phones, computers and all the paraphernalia of our multimedia world. So I was grumpily dismissive when I was sent a link to an “eHike” in Glacier National Park, Montana. Then I clicked on it…
Now, there’s a danger with this sort of presentation: it could lead to a forest full of MP3-toting hikers, playing recordings of the chickadee and the steller’s jay rather than opening their ears to live performances by the original artists.
But if you were to use it only to brief yourself, and not in the field, it could be useful, particularly if your keenness to walk isn’t matched by your knowledge of flora, fauna, and the differing propensities towards aggression of the black bear and the grizzly.
That great fell walker Wainwright, for whom technology meant a pen and a notebook, would probably have loathed it. Or would he…?