Talk:Hiking

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[edit] old

I like this Hiking article, and want to think further abt how to fit a Mountain-hiking hazards article together with it. (It'd have been more efficient if i'd been clever enough to read the Hiking article before writing what i thot of as the text for a Mountain-hiking hazards one, but, well here i am. [blush])

In terms of WP, i see the core issue as the fact that some hikers work up to wanting to tackle mtns without having sought out training, and without having done the shopping for hiking-specific gear that would expose them to the idea that hiking entails (just as in sports where you have to get special gear from day one) special skills and knowledge. IMO, some of them won't look for a Hiking article, but may look at, e.g., Monadnock, which is now linked to this article.

I'm adding here what i had intended as Mountain-hiking hazards, as a tentative Mountain-hiking Hazards section, without being sure whether it belongs on the page. Its purpose is to raise issues that often first come into play only when the hiker takes on mountains with either

  • sufficient elevation gain to challenge their endurance, or
  • summit climates that at least occasionally markedly differ from base conditions.

And i'll probably be continuing to edit even before getting further stimulus from those who Watchlist these pages.

Comments will be a welcome help to finding what to do with this in the long run.

Most of this material should be moved to a How to Hike article where it can be identified as opinion. Wikipedia should be descriptive, not prescriptive. --Hikers are usually encouraged to keep 20 feet apart in most situations so that they can better see scenery and hazards but often hike much closer. Rmhermen 15:43, Nov 24, 2003 (UTC)
Wikipedia is not a soapbox. Explicitly instructive content belongs at Wikibooks. On another note, I'll try to de-2nd-person the new stuff. -Smack 02:35, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)
I think that there has been a suggestion to more the how-to stuff to Wikibooks (which I support) but I don't beleive it has happened yet. Rmhermen 17:43, Nov 25, 2003 (UTC)

Here's the text that I have refactored into article format. Do what you will with it. (Discussion continues below.)

[edit] Mountain-hiking hazards

Remember:

  • Weakness and/or confusion, brought on by low blood sugar and/or partial dehydration, are important factors in many wilderness illnesses and accidents.
  • Dress in layers, and bring too much clothing. (A bad sprain, or any more serious lower-limb injury, can mean lying on the ground for several hours during the assembling of three teams, of six litter bearers each, to alternate in 15-minute shifts carrying you out over rough ground.)
  • It's hard to forget that a 20-foot cliff can kill you. It's easy to forget that falling on any hard surface - even without your feet moving away from where you were standing - can scramble your brains too thoroughly for you to even be able to decide whether to quibble about the difference.
  • There's no adequate substitute for an early start.
  • If your cell-phone works, don't kid yourself about rescue choppers, but it's good for
    • getting an up-to-date weather forecast,
    • reassuring someone who might otherwise report you missing, or
    • getting first-aid instructions.
  • New Hampshire and some other jurisdictions now hand out bills for multiple thousands of dollars for the cost of rescue services provided to hikers who were negligently prepared.

[edit] Secrets of Highly Surviving Climbers

  • The serious mountaineers can tell you the priorities:
    • Reaching the summit is no higher than third priority.
    • Having a good time is second priority.
    • First priority is coming back on your own feet. (Mallory may have preceded Norgay and Hillary to the summit of Everest, but if so, his summit just doesn't count.)
  • Don't die on the mountain.

And if you can carry it in, you can carry it back out.

Please refrain from inserting instructive content. This includes not only overtly 2nd-person statements such as "always bring lots of water," but also "it is important to bring lots of water." It's more encyclopedic and more informative to say "dehydration is an important hazard, potentially causing ..." --Smack 05:21, 12 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Removing the references to food bcz "it's not a matter of life and death" demonstrates an editor who is beyond their depth. The discussion at Hiking#The importance of the mind is the core here; if taken to heart, it explains the wise comments about both food and water. Carrying water is no matter of life and death either (except in arid deserts) in the sense that was used to justify the deletion. (Even in frozen deserts, the issue is carrying fuel to melt snow or ice for water.) Inadequate insulation leads to death directly from hypothermia in about 3 hours. Lack of water leads to death directly from dehydration in about 3 days. Lack of food leads to death directly from starvation in about 3 weeks. But that's the wrong view of life-and-death issues.

The real life-and-death issues are about the fact that you aren't going to sit around and wait for 3 weeks or 3 days, nor, normally, for 3 hours. The reason to carry water is not to avoid death directly by dehydration. It's because hikers who aren't carrying water won't drink from a polluted stream. Once you're thirsty, your physical and mental performance is going to hell, and you'll soon be a danger to yourself from clumsiness and bad judgement; you should drink from the polluted stream, or stagnant swamp, and face the prolonged treatment for cholera or giardiasis or whatever, rather than get deeper in trouble with a life-threatening concussion, leg fracture, or compound fracture. Hikers have to carry water bcz if they don't, they won't drink, and they're likely to get dead a lot sooner than 3 days.

Inadequate calories are the same. The snacks and the lunch or extra meal are for the weakness and lightheadedness that will also destroy your performance, and kill you indirectly with a life-threatening injury, a long time before starvation kills you directly.

All i've done is restore the relevant removed text (tho i think it needs serious work); i've already been reamed on this page for "preaching" in the article, and it's not efficient for me to try to work around that (IMO highly questionable) expectation. But the bald deletion of those two 'graphs is just terrible, and others than i should figure out how to keep in the article the basic point that those 'graphs make.
--Jerzy(t) 05:36, 2004 May 15 (UTC)

It seems that people are comfortable with the instructive content of the article, and you may notice that I've been writing some myself. As regards the issue of food, I'm a little surprised that you took the time to write this extensive rebuttal, but not to incorporate this material into the text that you restored into the article. --Smack 18:57, 15 May 2004 (UTC)

I didn't say i am indifferent to the article, i said that my interest extends to the provision of source information and not to the much more temporally and emotionally demanding task of forcing that information into encyclopedic form and achieving consensus on that form. My assignment editor wants me elsewhere, and i don't intend to be nagged into insubordination. [raised eyebrows]

Don't forget that Talk:-pages are under the GFDL just as much as all other WP pages; the source is at hand, and whoever thinks they can see a good way to use it in the article has authority to proceed.
--Jerzy(t) 06:52, 2004 May 17 (UTC)

[edit] Tramping

I have linked this page back to the tramping page. The term tramping or "to tramp" is a commonly used description of a popular activity so it does warrant its own page. Alan Liefting 21:46, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Move hiking material to wikibooks a good idea?

I think it might not be --- wikibooks is for the writing of complete books (modules), while this was always a stand-alone article about hiking. Another issue is that all of the links over in the wikibook are red. -- hike395 07:22, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

That's true. Were I an experienced Wikibooks contributor, I would have taken the time to integrate it into the appropriate module, fix the links, etc. However, I decided that it was better to foist it on the Wikibooks people unfinished than to do nothing about the situation. --Smack (talk) 05:01, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I cannot find any Wikipedia policy (e.g., in Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not) that explicitly forbids how-to material of this sort. The only article I could find that discourages such material is in Wikipedia:New pages patrol, which states:
How-tos or instructional materials. In some cases, these can be transwikied to Wikibooks (http://wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page); however, it's often possible to turn these into meaningful articles. Try to improve an article by adding some more material before moving it out of Wikipedia.
I believe that this material was a meaningful article and should not have been moved out of Wikipedia. I'll revert. -- hike395 11:28, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I've made attempts in the past to keep the instructional content on this page in a 3rd-person declarative rather than a 2nd-person didactic voice, and found that in many cases it's simply impossible. --Smack (talk) 18:31, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Cleanup

I won't contest your decision to replace the material that I tried to remove. However, I insist that this article has serious problems. The instructional section is a hodgepodge of tips and suggestions that do not stand together as a whole. There's been an attempt to categorize them into sections, but this system has little basis. Much as I would like to take it upon myself to reorganize the article, I would find it very difficult to do without removing large tracts of instructional material, so I've decided to ask others to undertake the task. --Smack (talk) 21:44, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I concur that this article needs cleanup and TLC. I wish I had more time to devote to it. -- hike395 22:19, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I've gotten rid of all usage of 2nd person imperative, although the article is still disorganized. -- hike395 14:28, 21 May 2005 (UTC)
I see you've eliminated all occurrences of the word 'you'. That's good work, but it doesn't cover the nastiest cases of 2nd-person style - the implicit imperative mood. For instance, one may say "Bring lots of water" instead of "It is best to bring lots of water". Here we see the great pitfall of 2nd-person writing. It's easy to tell someone to do something a certain way without specifying a reason, but it's much harder to get away with saying "it is best to do it this way" without explaining why. Thus, the process of de-2nd-personing requires us to fill in the reasons, even when they aren't included in the article text as it stands. --Smack (talk) 17:01, 27 May 2005 (UTC)
You're right. This will take more editing. I'll gradually do it, unless someone gets to it first. --- hike395 05:11, 28 May 2005 (UTC)
OK. I had to take notes on the article, trash it, and rewrite it from the notes. I think I have fully explained the issues of hiking (in an NPOV way?) and thus the "rules" follow logically from the issues. If I've missed anything, please feel free to improve.
Does this complete the article cleanup? Smack (or others): you decide. -- hike395 02:16, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

It looks pretty good. There are still many things to be done, but as far as I can tell, you've taken care of the big problems. Did you cut anything out? I think this article is under control, so I'll remove the cleanup message. --Smack (talk) 19:24, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

Thanks! I did drop a few ideas:
  • Scout Outdoor Essentials (only explicit mention in "see also")
  • Avoid cell phone (generalized to staying quiet)
  • Misplaced priorities
  • Hiking with children
  • Waterproof clothing (morphed into "appropriate clothing". Gore-Tex is not waterproof)
  • Blisters
  • Center of gravity
  • Specific hiking pace that people use
Perhaps we can reintegrate some of these. -- hike395 10:45, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)


I've removed the reference to bearbells. These kill more people than they safe, by giving a false sense of security. A bearbell makes a small tinkling sound. By the time a bear is close enough to hear it, you're already way to close. Your voice, and loudly is the best way to warn a bear of your approach.

[edit] Split safety issues into new article?

All of that material is common to many outdoor activities, such as hiking, backpacking, canoeing, and skiing (particularly cross-country). --Smack (talk) 00:53, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

I disagree. Some of the material may be relevant to those topics, but the section also contains bits which are hiking specific, such as Naismiths rule and foot blisters. The other material seems to belong in perhaps two different articles - outdoor safety and strenuous activities. Can you make a more specific proposal? -Will Beback 02:22, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
Naismith's rule shouldn't be in a discussion of safety in the first place. I don't really know, but I would be surprised if skiers weren't susceptible to foot blisters. At any rate, I'm not claiming that everything in this section is relevant to all outdoor activities. I think it's quite enough if most of the issues are relevant to most activities, and I don't see a need to distinguish between outdoor and strenuous activities. I don't think we should get into the whole occupational safety and health can of worms, but if you find an article on occupational safety that could accept some of this content, I'd be willing to go along. --Smack (talk) 03:10, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
So what would be the destination article? -Will Beback 04:21, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
BTW, the relevance (perhaps too indirect) of Naismiths rule sis that many accidents occur when people overestimate their ability, and have to strain to complete their hike. -04:22, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
The new article would certainly link to Naismith's Rule, but it need not contain it. You're right; the title of the new article poses some problems. Off the top of my head, we could call it "Safety hazards in outdoor activities." --Smack (talk) 18:47, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
That's a fair title, though "safety" may be redundant. I say let's go for it. If it turns into a mess we can always parcel out the information back to the respective articles. -Will Beback 19:41, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
I would propose Hazards of outdoor activities. If you are going to split it off, then I would recommend making links from the articles all of those other activities. -- hike395 06:57, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
Done. I've also gone ahead and changed most of the references to "hiking" and "hikers" to more general terms. --Smack (talk) 19:41, 15 January 2006 (UTC)
I linked the activities that Smack mentioned, above, to the new article. Upon reflection, I think this split is a good idea. -- hike395 03:59, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
Yes, Smack was right: there are many factors in common, and it'd be a waste to repeat them. . Thanks, Smack, for the idea. I may do some re-organization. -Will Beback 04:48, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
My pleasure. --Smack (talk) 16:26, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Mergefrom Hillwalking

I'm not sure what do do with Hillwalking. It's a synonym, although it seems to have some shades of meaning that 'hiking' does not have, e.g. reaching summits. --Smack (talk) 00:48, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

This is a transatlantic cultural issue: the article hiking describes US trailwalking: the British equivalent would be long distance walking on ways such as the West Highland Way, and backpacking is more likely to be used as a term than "hiking" which is seen as rather quaint. Hillwalking is more related to mountaineering, and in Scottish tradition has no need to keep to footpaths or trails, though common "routes" may be followed. A merger would be problematic. ..dave souza, talk 05:18, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
I agree with Dave, British hillwalking (perhaps due to the nature of the British hills) is quite a distinct entity that can include scrambling as much as walking on paths. Ideally the Hillwalking article should be developed further, as a kind of "Hiking and mountaineering in Great Britain" article. There's a lot that could be said about the history and culture of it. -- Blisco 08:26, 8 June 2006 (UTC)
Dave: Hiking does not necessarily have to cover long distances. I can try to illustrate the term's breadth with a personal observation. I separate hikers into two groups based on their respective definitions of the term 'day hike': a hike that takes a full day, or a hike that only takes one day. Both definitions are valid, albeit in different circles.
Blisco: I like that idea. --Smack (talk) 03:43, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Given general agreement here I've removed the tags and made a start on improvements to Hillwalking. The point about day hikes is accepted, and oddly enough that term is commonly used here in the Scouts, though "hiking" as a verb is less common. Anyway, hope others can help with improvements. .dave souza, talk 17:12, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Section about hazards

I respectfully disagree with the deletion of the hazards paragraph. Before we refactored the article, most of this article was about hazards. I think we need 1-2 paragraphs that talk about hazards at a overview level.

If the other editors find the paragraph fatuous (or content-free), I would encourage them to edit it heavily, but please don't delete it: it's an important topic.

Thanks! hike395 18:28, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

I'm happy to let the decision rest with other editors, but I feel that as it stands the paragraph says nothing which isn't obvious.
Cheers, Martin S Taylor 11:21, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
I agree that we should have this section, but I'm not sure what it should say. Right now, it's mostly a list of things that can go wrong, which I agree is pretty bad. However, it's still better than the intro paragraph at Hazards of outdoor activities. --Smack (talk) 03:35, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I just added the list of things that can go wrong --- it was in response to Martin's criticism that the paragraph was content-free. The new paragraph is just an abstract of Hazards of outdoor activities. If it should say something else, please feel free to throw it out and substitute something better. hike395 05:01, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] which pictures should be shown in the article?

User:Svetovid and I do not agree on which pictures should be shown in this article.

I object to the current first image Image:Randonneurs Glacier Tour.jpg, because the hikers are very small --- on my computer, you can hardly see them. The previous version of the page had Image:Hikingontrail.jpg, which has substantially larger hikers. Since the article is about hiking, I think having hikers prominently displayed in the article is consistent with Wikipedia's guidelines on choosing images. If the layout is awkward, I would be happy to remove Image:Eaglecreek.jpg (because of its aspect ratio), and replace it withImage:Randonneurs Glacier Tour.jpg.

Further, I believe that the image of the cathole Image:Cathole.png is illustrative of and relevant to the paragraph about human waste disposal while hiking. The cathole illustration has been in place since May 2005. It is certainly more relevant to that section than either Image:BlueDiamondHikingLogo.JPG or Image:Trail blaze-symbols.svg. Svetovid, if you want to get rid of Image:BlueDiamondHikingLogo.JPG, that would be OK with me.

hike395 15:21, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merge in solo hiking

I think the proposed merge of solo hiking into this article is a good idea. --Gronky (talk) 12:58, 13 May 2008 (UTC)