Thanks all, for your continued patience with me as I try to find a balance between work, home, hiking, photography and blogging. I'm starting to find my rhythm now, and hopefully won't need too many more byes throughout the course. I have also enlisted the aid of several volunteer guest bloggers. I can't think of a more appropriate first guest than Bill Shecket, who has a long-time affiliation with CHS. In this article, Bill discusses a leader's perspective on hiking with "persons of advanced wisdom". Enjoy, and please post your comments!
--Steve
Thoughts about Aging Trip Participants
By Bill Shecket
So how can an aging outdoorsman, a hiker and backpacker with 600-plus nights out (he keeps a log), juxtapose his sense of self with his inevitable aging? Can we as trip leaders help?
What does the older participant say as he struggles to keep up with the rest of the group while they stride seemingly effortlessly up a stretch of hill? He needs to stop and catch his breath every few minutes. The group waits for him at the saddle above, talking, telling stories, pacing, and regularly sneaking short stares down slope. And soon they hear the panting and see the sweating and when he does arrive, the water gets gulped from the Nalgene bottle! It’s truly painful to watch, but is he suffering? Can we as trip leaders help?
Stanford psychologist Leon Festinger spent his career studying how we make sense of conflicting attitudes and behaviors. We are so uncomfortable, he said, with our states of dissonance that we will change our beliefs (some powerful and long “held dear”) to reframe the person we think we are. Most of us will craft a story; so it’s no surprise our aging participant talks about the bad weather: “It was wet and windy so I had to be adjusting my gear.” Another comment might be, “I feel a little off this morning; maybe I’m getting a cold.” Or he might quip “People are in such a hurry now. They push for the summit and don’t stop to look at the view or even take a picture.” But the saddest statements of all aren’t rationalizations of the moment, the hike, or the group’s behavior. They are self-revisions, incomplete and probably untrue: “I never was any good going uphill.” and “I’ve always been uncomfortable on loose rock and scree.” and “Most of my trips have been on good trails and old logging roads.” What about your Alaska backpacking adventures? How sad!
We as leaders need to understand that our aging trip participant has trouble accepting his changes. He is now 71 years old and so he must go slower! He can be a great hiker/climber but he needs to carefully negotiate rough trails and he must give himself more time. He has to come to grips with who he is now, not who he wishes he still was!
This senior participant could be a delightful companion for us on properly selected trips. He has lots of wisdom and much to “show and tell.” This man’s stories would be a joy to share and he would be an outstanding partner for those in his company, an esteemed member of the group and not a problem person, a liability, or a drain on everyone – if he could catch his breath long enough to talk!
Our aging trip member has climbed innumerable peaks, braved ice-melt swollen streams, seen wolves and grizzlies, and hauled 60-pound packs across the tundra on week-long adventures. Why can’t accepting and changing himself be as significant a challenge?
Can facing these personal summits be the adventure now? How can we as trip leaders help him move away from denial and find self-acceptance, move from feelings of dissonance to feelings of consonance? How can we help him find a comfortable place in the outings community?
I read this article with great interest, and then with increasing dismay. By the end of it, I wondered if it might discourage older hikers from joining CHS, because it feels so condescending to me, rather than compassionate or welcoming.
ReplyDeleteIf your objection is to people who hike more slowly than the pace you'd prefer to maintain, in my experience as a hike leader I have found that senior hikers are not necessarily the slowest people in the group. If your concern is with people who are "a drain on everyone", why focus only on the oldsters?
I am aging now (approaching 65), I have many senior friends who hike, and I see none of the attitudes you describe. Making excuses for my ebbing energy? Blaming the weather? In a state of “dissonance” because I’m no longer young? Are you kidding? I enjoy growing older, and I’m as strong as I need to be to hike the trails that appeal to me. I have been out hiking and encountered people in their 70s, 80s – even a 91-year-old woman on the Ira Spring Trail – and none of them were complaining about the aging process. I can't imagine who you're talking about.
I think that a hike leader has no business attempting to "help" a senior hiker break through his alleged denial to "feelings of consonance". Hike leaders are not therapists. And generalizations about aging can be dangerously patronizing. Aging is a very personal issue. Each person ages in his or her own way, at his or her own rate. Each person adjusts to the challenges of aging with whatever grace he or she can muster, and certainly will not appreciate the perhaps well-meaning but entirely misguided efforts of younger folks to "help" them with the process.
-Lola Kemp
Graduate of CHS 2005; CHS hike leader 2006-2011
I was dismayed to find this article on the CHS Blog and am writing because I feel the tone of this article is condescending (to older hikers) and may even discourage older hikers from signing up for the CHS Course. Isn’t CHS for hikers of all ages? If not, it should be, since the purpose of CHS was/is to get in better shape and/or retain it.
ReplyDeleteEspecially condescending is the description regarding the older hiker who makes excuses for being slower (weather, terrain, etc.) while others wait for him to catch up to them. Especially insulting is your comment: “if he can catch his breath” and a perfect example of the entitlement issues to which many “younger” hikers are not addressing. Has it ever occurred to you that many older hikers do not feel they need to be “helped”?
Many “older” hikers automatically withdraw themselves from younger hikers but not perhaps, for the reasons addressed in this email. As an older hiker who has climbed many mountains, explored valleys, rivers, backpacked the West Coast Trail (twice), I prefer hiking with older hikers, even when I was younger. What you suggest are liability issues are gifts to us elders because we can still climb, scramble and hike the harder trails with just as much enjoyment as in our younger years. The slower pace is often a choice, not a limitation because we are aging – more often than not it is because we enjoy “looking at the flowers” (and the moss, lichen, rock striations which comprise the mountains we all love).
Again, such limitations are gifts in disguise – for older hikers who will continue to hike as far, as long, and as high as they can go. Also, it’s a relief – for some – not to rack up summits attained, speed records, lists of pace, mileage, and number of summits climbed or trails hiked within any time period.
When has stopping to look at flowers ever been a liability to the enjoyment of a hike (at any age)? What is the point of racing up mountains and missing out on the pleasures along the way?
How many summits can one stand on before they all begin to look alike? Or yet another look-alike photo on Facebook (or elsewhere) of grinning, Gore-Tex clad hikers/climbers standing on a summit? Or yet another often-boring list of “accomplishments” or speed records, mileage and elevation gain per hike?
Consider this: while you “entitled” hikers are stopping at every switchback to see how fast or how far you have traveled within a given time frame the rest of us are lolling at a high point, enjoying the view and probably planning the next hike, scramble, backpack, snowshoe trip or climb.
For the record – yesterday on the Kachess Beacon trail I was the only hiker that didn’t need to use trekking poles to navigate the steep terrain and I’m rapidly approaching 70. I didn’t bother to record my time or elevation gain – it wasn’t important.
Thanks for listening!
Karen Sykes