Last week on the ridge above a deep canyon, before descending into the canyon with my wife and friends, I miscalculated our location and the distance around the base of a mountain peak that is part of the ridge.

The canyon is steep and rocky and forested.  Some of the rocks are large boulders.  The thorns of the ceanothus that grows there hurt to touch.  In some places the thick duff is topped with slippery pine needles.  Fallen trees add to the ruggedness of the land.  Although my GPS guided us to the destination, our journey was much longer and harder than we expected when we left the ridge.  The thorns scratched us and we all fell more than once when the pine needles slid beneath our feet.  Climbing through and over boulders tired our legs and arms.  It all stressed our patience and confidence.

Deep in the canyon are ruins of a historical log cabin, so deep that hiking there from any point in or above the canyon is strenuous, difficult, slow and tiring.  On the day last week when I was lost, by being lost I unexpectedly found a new route to the cabin – something I had previously sought but been unable to find.

Two days later I returned with my wife and friends to explore the new route.  It was more difficult than the others we had used, but more dramatic, more remote, more isolated, and unused except by deer and other wild creatures.  I often hike in lands designated “wilderness” by Congress, but walking this steep forested canyon slope was really the first time I had been in a place that was plausibly unvisited by humanity before me.  It was a place like Thoreau described in Chesuncook:  “There you are never reminded that the wilderness which you are threading is, after all, some villager’s familiar wood-lot.”  There were no signs that other hikers had been here seeking solitude before us.  This was wilderness.

Places like this – so beautiful, so remote, so inhospitable, so wild – seem to affirm Darwin’s suspicion: the land was not made for us.  Wild land confounds agrarian theology.  Chance and necessity seem to have found expression in error and travail.  In wilderness life came unexpectedly and it still does.