What is the goal of hiking? The answer seems simple: The journey is the destination!
Since the Romantic era, people have hiked for pleasure, not because they had to.
But of course, you can have many different goals when hiking.
General goals or motivations (in the truest sense of the word):
I want to exercise in the fresh air. I want to enjoy the company of my fellow hikers.
I want to enjoy exciting landscapes (rocks, mountains, views).
The dog needs to go out. I want to sign the summit register.
I want to enjoy a reward beer. This list could be expanded indefinitely.
But of course, hiking also involves very specific destinations. Here, a distinction must be made
between a circular trail and a point-to-point hike. In principle, a circular trail
(by the way, researchers of hiking have found that it is by far the most popular form of hiking)
is the embodiment of the motto “The journey is the destination.” Because I walk, hike, picnic, and at the end of the day
(or half-day), I arrive back at my starting point.
Strictly speaking, then, I would not have had to set off at all. But of course, even on
a circular trail, I have a specific destination: my starting point. I cannot simply stop
halfway along the route. I definitely have to return to where I set out from.
To my bus stop, my train station, or my car. And then you have to hope
that while I was out on my circular hike, the car did not have a rendezvous
with a tree trunk. That happened to me on the Rhine a few years ago.
On a point-to-point hike, the destination is defined somewhat differently. This is most apparent
on the famous Way of St. James. There, the destination is the destination, not the journey.
You want to reach your pilgrimage destination—Santiago de Compostela.
The pilgrim does not really care about the route there; many pilgrims even hate hiking, as Hape Kerkeling can attest.
When I hike a stage of the (for example) DonAUwald Trail,
I also have a very specific destination in mind—my stage destination, of course.
Or, if I hike the entire route, the endpoint of my trail.
So, alongside the journey, there is always a very specific destination when hiking,
either my starting point or the stage destination on a point-to-point hike.
Hiking is, after all, very goal-oriented.
A very special form of hiking is hiking out and back.
Journalist Dirk Schümer introduced me to this form of hiking.
We set off from a Black Forest hiking parking area near Baden-Baden.
Then we keep climbing uphill—the first destination is the observation tower on Badener Höhe.
When we reach the observation tower, we take a selfie as proof that we were there too.
Then we return along the same route. Dirk says this allows him to rule out
getting lost. At first, I was skeptical about whether such a hike would be fun. But I have to say:
Yes, it is fun. Because it is an old hikers’ saying that a path,
when walked in the opposite direction, reveals completely different sensory impressions and views.
You hike along the same path, but also along a different one. And when we arrived back at the
Black Forest hiking parking area, we had reached three goals:
First, our intermediate destination, the turning point of the hike.
Second, our final destination, the starting point. And third, the enjoyment of hiking in between
—the journey was, of course, also the destination.
And always remember: #esgehtBÄRGAUF
