Last January, once the glow of winter holidays had passed and the reality of a long, bleak, socially-distanced winter set in, I started going for hikes across Boston at dusk. This was an effort to offset the long hours spent at home, working, shoveling, doing laundry, Doomscrolling, and ripping through the bag of cheddar popcorn that was supposed to last for 3-4 days. I would design each “hike” by picking a Boston-based landmark that I was curious to see—say, the city vista from the top of Parker Hill, the towering land mass where Donna Summer grew up. Then I would plug my landmark destination into Google Maps, weighing my options for getting there on foot and then returning home, over the course of a few hours. Should I take the most direct route, through residential neighborhoods? A passage through unfamiliar green spaces and parklets? Or a “bushwhack” across schoolyards and loading zones that might have fences? Fences that might be too high to climb, necessitating an even longer detour.
The concept of “urban hiking” is often confused with “walking.” And this week, as we recover from feasting and begin that initially wondrous transition into Winter Hermit Mode, I think it’s time to talk about the differences between going for a walk and going for a hike in an urban and suburban environment. Some of you have already discovered these subtle yet salient distinctions yourself, after spending more than a year close to home amid pandemic precautions and periods of travel restriction.
During the most high stakes chapter of the U.S. pandemic experience—March, April, and May of 2020, when stay-at-home orders kept millions of us confined to our zip codes—long foot journeys around town became a tonic for all the anxieties we were dealing with. I wrote about this for The Boston Globe, at a moment when city residents were being asked to resist their instinct to flee to rural regions with small hospitals. But just like the other simple yet ecstatic pleasures that Covid-19 brought into vogue—say, meeting friends to drink wine in a park instead of blowing twenty bucks at a crowded bar, or sitting in sleeping bags in a friend’s backyard and watching Speed in December—urban hiking shouldn’t be considered a pandemic novelty. It deserves to be recognized as a cousin of backcountry hiking. A cousin that you can “visit” anytime when traveling to the mountains or woods is too time-consuming, expensive, or risky.
So what makes for an urban hike? Let’s start with the basic question that precedes a ramble through the countryside. Where are we going? An urban hike should begin with the intent of exploring something. It could be a singular destination, like the building in Worcester where legendary anarchist Emma Goldman once ran an ice cream shop. (“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution,” Goldman once said, presumably following this with a similar ultimatum on waffle cones.) Another raison d'être for your urban hike might be a series of destinations that speak to a regional specialty. Instead of picking off waterfalls in Crawford Notch State Park, you could eat your way across the City of Providence and sample weird Rhode Island heritage foods like pizza strips and stuffed quahogs, which I did just a few weeks ago. Or you could go for an urban hike on which the environments through which you pass are the real star of the show. Maybe it’s the banks of the Connecticut River as it winds through Springfield—cut off from pedestrian traffic for decade by I-91 but recently reopened to foot travelers with the help of the Connecticut River Walk and Bikeway. Whatever you fancy, an urban hike should involve some kind of destination(s) for which you’re willing to sweat.
Now speaking of sweat, let’s talk about mileage and rigor. Unlike an urban or suburban walk that serves as a little burst of activity amid running errands or being stuck at the house working, an urban hike is a commitment to covering more ground and getting grungier. An adventure, in other words. Try and think about the rough distance at which a walk starts to get less comfortable for you: when you can feel the beads of perspiration running down your backside, saturating your shirt. For me, it’s anywhere north of 2 miles. When I’m craving an urban hike, I’ll start by deciding where I’m going to hike to, and when I plug that destination into Google Maps, I’ll choose a route that will involve at least 3 miles of hiking, so that when I trudge back up the steps to my place, I’m ready for a shower, the sofa, and coconut shrimp from Jamaica Mi Hungry.
(Pro tip: While Google Maps desktop and mobile are invaluable tools for urban hiking, I recommend bringing a paper map along on your hike, in case your phone battery dies. You can either print one from your computer after designing a route with Google Maps, or you can draw one. I like drawing maps. It makes me feel like a pelt trapper.)
Unlike backcountry hiking, where your options for lengthening or shortening your hike can be limited, depending on the trails at your disposal, an urban hike can be modified on the fly. That bitter night in January when I climbed up Parker Hill, I turned what was supposed to be a 3.4 mile out-and-back hike into a 5.1 mile journey to even stranger locales. It was one of those hikes when everything just felt right. I reached the hilltop by way of a hidden staircase that rose between residential homes. Flakes of snow were falling against the overcast night sky, eerily illuminated by the lights of New England Baptist Hospital at the top of Parker Hill. The twinkling financial citadels of Downtown Boston were still visible in the distance. Thanks to my parka, snow pants, and boots, I was relatively warm and not ready to return home. So I pulled out my phone, scanned the area for other hills to climb, and settled on nearby Fort Hill. I had never gotten up close to the ominous Gothic Revival tower that overlooks Roxbury and a snow-shrouded January night seemed like a fine time to go there and stare at it.
So my urban hike became a “circuit” hike between two of Boston’s highest points, not unlike ascending a pair of neighboring peaks like Mount Adams and Mount Madison.
This brings us to another chestnut of urban hiking. You should dress for an urban hike as if you were going for a hike in the countryside with the same weather conditions. The common denominator between urban and rural hiking is sustained exposure to the elements. Sure, in a city, you can duck into a CVS or Stop and Shop for temporary shelter from broiling sun or screaming snow gusts, but who wants to spoil the beauty of an urban hike by having to listen to Uncle Kracker crooning through a PA system? You want to be ready to stay outside for the duration of your urban hike. That means wearing three layers for the winter, a hat and/or plenty of sunblock for summer, an enduring raincoat for spring, etc. This useful explainer from The Dyrt is a solid guide for dressing properly in a range of hiking environments, and while cities and suburbs aren’t mentioned, this dressing advice can be applied to hot, cold, and wet urban hikes.
Also, since hiking can burn a lot of calories, an urban hike should include plenty of hydrating and snacking. This brings us to another unique perk of urban hiking. Your sustenance doesn’t have to fit comfortably in your backpack. You can “harvest” your snacks from the urban environment itself. Feeling famished halfway through? Duck into that nearby soul food restaurant and refuel with fried catfish and candied yams! Feeling parched under a merciless sun? Recover with a nitro cold brew, or a locally brewed low alcohol beer like a Czech pilsner or a German Kölsch! You will want to bring a bottle or two of water, but drinking fountains in parks and playgrounds can offer ample opportunity for refills. No iodine tablets required! And the relatively paved surfaces of many urban and suburban walkways make it easier to refuel while hiking. Trust me, you’ve never experienced the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed campus of Mount Holyoke College until you’ve wandered it while reaching into a bag of tortilla chips, crunching away as you admire scrubby wetlands along the Upper Lake Loop.
One of the reasons why we tend to associate hiking with the backcountry is because the unfamiliar, vividly alive backcountry can make us feel humbled, as though we’re stepping into something beautiful and unfathomably bigger than ourselves. For most of us, cities and suburbs might not feel as exotic as the outdoors, but they’re no less alive. They contain their own ecosystems, understories, overstories, and biorhythms. And just like the outdoors, cities and suburbs can be an optimal canvas on which you can project your own moods and thoughts, which might create a sense of synthesis. Sometimes you can walk around a city or suburb and just feel it, listening to the sound of traffic, the whistling of the wind between row houses, organ sounds wafting from a church, or even the machine-gun echo of conversations between nearby humans. But sometimes, the ecology of the city or suburb can feel distant. On days like this, I like to bring my own mood enhancers. Usually not the edible or smokable kind (though these can be nice) but the aural kind. Music. And so, my final bit of advice for urban hiking is a bit of a wild card but no less sincere. An urban hiking soundtrack can heighten your engagement with the landscape around you. Listening to album or mix of songs that mirrors the way a city or suburb makes you feel, as you hike across it, is a special joy.
The soundtrack for my mid-pandemic circuit hike between Parker Hill and Fort Hill was Low’s 2018 album, Double Negative, a squall of industrial noise from Hades that somehow manages to builds into a melodic and emotionally pulverizing soliloquy for the Trump era. (Perfect for a pandemic winter, if you’re ready to feel all the feelings.) I listened to the album song-to-song while brushing snow from my shoulders, squinting through the flakes at the white Midsommar-esque tower atop Fort Hill, and admiring twisted fire escapes on nearby buildings. At one point, I stumbled across a warehouse where the City of Boston keeps piles of plowed snow. Half a block later, I found a tiny park not listed on the map—it looked more like a backyard, with a little fish pond. The trees were still draped with pale blue holiday lights. It was the heart of a labyrinth of dreary multi-units buildings and storage facilities. A glow amid ice and darkness.
It made me feel something in my throat. Something. And I was thankful for it for it.
Sometime this winter, I’m heading down to Delaware to do field research for a project with National Geographic Books and I’ve become kind of obsessed with horseshoe crabs ever since taking on the project. By now, these guys have made their way into the Atlantic to spend the winter on continental shelves, but come spring, they’ll storm the beaches of Delaware like it’s D-Day and mate copiously. This isn’t exclusively a Delaware phenomenon. You can watch the horseshoe crab spawning up and down the East Coast (here’s a video from Maine.) But the intrigue doesn’t stop here. The horseshoe crab is also a member of the arachnid family. A relative of the spider. And recently, horseshoe crabs have been spotlit for a more urgent reason. Their milky blue blood is a vital component for vaccine development. It offers an aqueous extract of blood cells called Limulus Amebocyte Lysate (LAL) and this extract is used to test vaccines for Gram-negative bacteria that could contaminate a vaccine and render it deadly. Anything that will make contact with the human bloodstream needs to be vetted with LAL, including the syringes and needles used to administer vaccines.
So next time you’re near the Atlantic—or when you’re getting your Covid-19 booster, or reading about the Omicron variant this week—you might as well salute the horseshoe crab. Better yet, check out this piece about the hard-shelled heavies from WBUR and consider calling your state representatives to suggest some new rules against using horseshoe crabs for anything other than biomedical purposes. South Carolina did this.
My feet are wet from carrying a bucket of water carelessly and reading your latest trip, Miles. was wonderful. All your trips are terrific and I thank you so much. Gratefully, Hope