Roaming in Nature

2025, August

Holly and I kept hiking and finally came across a creek. Was this it?  We threw down our packs, sitting on top of them, and pulled out the map again. By our read, the last creek before the climb should have another creek coming down the valley directly across from it. We turned around to look for it and there, only a few feet away, was a marten. The beautiful, cat-size weasel stared at us, connecting us briefly to the nonhuman world, before bounding off into the forest. 

Here’s what I’d like to tell you about this story: We wouldn’t have seen the marten if we’d been using an app, because we would have just glanced at our screens and kept moving. Using paper maps forced us to stop and look around, to compare the landscape with the map itself, and that’s when we saw the marten.

I’d been thinking a lot about technology on our trip. We saw hikers with earbuds dangling around their necks as they listened to music. We saw a guy sitting on the side of the trail playing a video game while waiting for his buddy to catch up. We asked someone how far it was to the next mountain pass, and, annoyed, she told us to check the app.

The same way that smartphones and the internet have changed our lives at home, they  have altered our experience of the outdoors. As a backpacker, I’ve noticed it most in designated wilderness areas, but the same changes are happening on a day hike or in car camping. The change is bringing with it some of the qualities of the digital age that I don’t necessarily love: Information is always on demand; everything is something that can be reviewed, compared, and evaluated; and screens mediate our experiences. It’s not just that the ding of the text message is reaching me farther into the wilderness, it’s the way that my whole view of nature feels like it’s now shaped by the digital age.

I increasingly cherish my time in wilderness because of the absence of screens. I’m forced to be present in the land. The surprise of eye contact with another animal like the marten is a reward for paying attention. But as the wilderness is no longer a place to “unplug,” how do we hold on to that  ideal of wilderness, the seemingly pure connection with nature?

1880s

It turns out that our relationship with nature has been mediated by technology for a very long time. 

“I thought when I started my own research on outdoor gear and clothing that I would discover a time before there was so much stuff in the way of Americans getting back to nature,” says Rachel Gross, historian and the author of the book Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America. 

She and other researchers agree, the history of American outdoor recreation is reliant on technology. Maps, hiking boots, the trails themselves are all forms of technology that help us access wild spaces. 

By the late 1800s, as more people moved to cities and worked wage jobs in lieu of subsistence living, these city folks feared they were losing their connection to nature. White men in particular worried that this meant a loss of their manliness and virility. Nature tourists flocked to places like the Adirondacks and Yosemite, fueling the movement for the establishment of national parks and other public lands. This is also when Native people were violently removed from their homelands to make way for these parks. Nature became somewhere “out there” you had to go visit, rather than land you depended on to survive. 

Outdoor writers and a nascent gear industry catering to these new recreators instructed them in what gear they’d need to buy to get back to nature: not too much and just the right kinds. Rachel wrote that guidebook authors at the turn of the last century would describe the experienced “woodsman” in a prized buckskin jacket versus his counterpart the “tenderfoot” who “always overdoes the equipment question,” showing ignorance in the outdoors by bringing too much gear. 

According to Rachel, the outdoor recreation movement has always been in a state of tension over what gear is deemed crucial for an authentic nature experience, but also what gear might get in the way of it. After the waterproof material Gore-Tex was invented in the 1970s, she says, outdoor experts worried that people would be too reliant on it to keep them dry and stop learning to read weather patterns. In the magazine Field & Stream, one mountaineer had been called on to rescue people who had “thought their raingear could perform miracles.”

Rachel says that digital technology is by no means the first gear to come onto the scene and supposedly disrupt things: “Since the 1880s, people have been shaking their fist at the idea that there is some object, some incursion from modern commercial society that is threatening the idea of the wilderness that they want to get back to.”

1964

As more and more people flocked to national parks and forests, roads were built to accommodate these tourists. Early environmentalists like Aldo Leopold had worried wild places would become overdeveloped. He wanted a two-week pack trip without running into a road, a cry that became the argument for designated wilderness: to set aside large chunks of roadless areas for an even higher level of protection. In 1964, Congress passed the Wilderness Act.

While setting aside roadless areas is incredibly important for ecosystem health, the law also codified the concept of wilderness as a particular type of nature experience—one where you can engage in “primitive and unconfined recreation.”

The writers of the Wilderness Act obviously didn’t have anything to say about smartphones. Would they consider going live on Instagram from the top of Mount Whitney a “primitive” wilderness experience?

1995

Historian William Cronon argued in his seminal essay “The Trouble with Wilderness” that this concept of wilderness creates a problematic separation between humans and the rest of nature. He pointed out what Indigenous communities had been saying for over a century: The lands we now call wilderness have long histories of people living on and taking care of them. The wilderness movement shifted these lands from being homes where people lived and hunted and fished for subsistence into places of tourism and recreation where people consumed nature through collecting views and photos and experiences: “One went to the wilderness not as a producer but as a consumer.”

2000

It’s been over 25 years since I started backpacking, which is both not that long ago and—technologically speaking—ages ago. To plan a trip, I’d learn about a particular route from a guidebook or a friend. The day of the hike, I’d drive up to the ranger station and get a permit on my way to the trailhead. On the trail, if I wanted to know the name of a peak, I’d consult a paper map. Because I was younger and more willing to carry a ridiculously heavy pack, I even sometimes brought a field guide to identify wildflowers. Less aware of history, I imagined this was how things more or less were always done and always would be.

2017

Always a late adopter, I bought my first smartphone.

2018

I first really noticed the change to tech while hiking a section of the Pacific Crest Trail, the route across the western U.S. from the Mexican border to Canada. Seemingly overnight, most backpackers had little walkie-talkies hooked to their packs’ shoulder straps. These satellite devices, for example the SPOT or Garmin inReach, use low-earth satellites instead of cell phone towers to transmit messages, making it possible to text from anywhere. Then, while on a dry stretch of trail, Holly and I asked some hikers coming from the other direction about any running creeks up ahead. The hikers pulled out their phones and opened an app: Guthook, what’s now called FarOut. This was the hiker equivalent of asking a local for directions, who then responds by pulling out Google Maps. The app provides backpackers with crowdsourced, up-to-the-mile information about where to camp, get water, and safely cross a creek. The hikers had a lightweight portable solar panel attached to the outside of their packs that they used to charge their phone and inReach. I suddenly felt very out of touch. 

2019

In a meadow just over the border of Yosemite, I watched a helicopter lower and land. As the rotors slowed, Mono County Search and Rescue Coordinator John Pelichowski approached an injured hiker sitting inside the chopper.

John got a call about this guy late the previous night. The hiker was backpacking near Peeler Lake in the Sierra when he injured his leg. He couldn’t walk and didn’t have a phone or satellite-texting device. Other hikers who happened across him did, and they used it to call for help.

Because so many people now hike with these satellite devices, when people contact John, they can tell him the exact location of the injured person. “That kind of takes the ‘search’ out of Search and Rescue,” he says. “For us, that’s awesome.”

But John says they also may be inspiring more people to head into the wilderness, perhaps subconsciously emboldened to push past their comfort zones knowing they can just call for help. “We quite frequently . . . get the ‘I’m tired’ phone call or ‘I didn’t realize how far this was’ phone call.”

This hiker’s injury, though, was just a case of bad luck. John and a paramedic assessed him while waiting for the ambulance to arrive. “I’ve hiked 1,500 miles in the High Sierra. I’ve climbed 15 peaks,” the hiker told him. “I’ve never had anything like this happen.” His voice faltered as he burst into tears.

“I’m glad those hikers came across you,” John replied. “I’m glad they were able to get some information out.” Finding someone with a satellite device who could contact Search and Rescue possibly saved this hiker a day or two of being stuck in the backcountry with an injury.

Still, this technology isn’t a panacea. “You can have all the cell phone battery in the world and a cell phone connection,” John says, “And it could be in the middle of a nasty spring storm, and you can call me but we might not be able to get there. Mother Nature is still in charge. It’s still wilderness.”

I broke down and bought an inReach for my next backpacking trip.

2024

Apple announced that its next iPhone software update will include satellite texting. As other phone companies follow suit, our phones will function in the wilderness just as they do back at home. No longer will I be able to say I’m “out of range.”

2025, June

The same summer I’m hiking the John Muir Trail, a trail crew staged a mutiny over a Starlink. Rentaro Shinohara, a crew leader for the Eastern Sierra Conservation Corps, an organization that does trail work all over the state, had started out as a crew member, working for months without even cell service most of the time. But this year, for the first time, all crews brought Starlinks into the backcountry, the SpaceX device that provides internet access via satellites. At first, Ren wanted to reserve the device for emergencies and connecting with support staff, then decided to offer the crew an hour a week for personal use. Suddenly crew members were texting loved ones, downloading movies, and checking their email. “It became such a hot topic,” Ren says. “I had some folks who were trying to push for more. I had someone ask if we could have an hour daily, and I was like ‘absolutely not.’” 

“It’s definitely a fight,” Agnes Vianzon, founder and executive director of the Eastern Sierra Conservation Corps, agrees. “There’s definitely been a shift in just the young people, in every detail—can I bring my phone? When can I use it? Can I bring my own Garmin?” 

When Agnes started her career in trail work as a California Conservation Corps member in 2002, the technology debate was around listening to music on Discmans. “It was a big deal if you could have it or not. ‘Can we do music during chores?’ ‘Can we do music during physical training?’” Agnes remembers that time fondly, though. She says she grew closer with her mom because they would write each other letters, in the absence of being able to call.

Still, Agnes supports Ren and other crew leaders’ decision to not fully unplug. Agnes thinks it’s important to meet young people where they are, and for a lot of them, smartphones and staying connected with loved ones in real time can serve as an important form of support. “They’re doing a hard thing” being on a trail crew. “They’re facing challenges they’ve never done before with people they may not be getting along with.” It’s more important to Agnes that the crew members can stick out the entire backcountry season and have a positive experience in the wilderness than nitpicking over what tech is allowed. She thinks it is a crucial part of getting more young people to care about wilderness.

“If we don’t give more people access and get them invested, we’re toast,” Agnes says. And the nature of trail crew hasn’t entirely changed. It’s still “decades of young people going into the mountains with what they can carry regardless of technology.” 

The historian Rachel Gross agrees. “Any generation’s escape to whatever version of the woods that they have is legitimate, since the whole notion of wilderness is constructed,” she says. The modern conception of wilderness is about establishing nature as somewhere “out there” that we get into cars and drive to. Technology isn’t an antithesis to these places. It’s actually what enables us to experience these places.

“A lot of the debates around what any particular technology might do to undermine how an experience used to be is partly about sussing out who belongs there,” Rachel says. That leads to questions of who gets to access these wild spaces—who is considered an insider or expert—and who is deemed to be experiencing wilderness in the supposedly “wrong” or “right” way. 

Rachel doesn’t deny, though, that smartphones change our ability to sit for five minutes without turning toward our devices out of boredom or habit. But, she says, that’s a problem having to do with our phones, not wilderness. “That says more about our everyday lives than it does about the rare times away.”

2025, October

A few months after hiking the John Muir Trail, it’s sunset and I’m finishing a walk at Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve in the Oakland hills. The San Francisco skyline is covered by a low purple line of fog. I snuck up here for a quick hike in between working and meeting a friend for dinner. I text my friend I’m running late, punching the tiny screen while I walk briskly on the fire road. 

Something in my periphery catches my eye and I stop walking, stop texting, and look up. It’s a coyote, paused in the middle of the trail, staring at me. Coyotes in the hills aren’t rare, but they still always feel special. The surprising gift of connecting with a nonhuman animal, something outside myself. This wasn’t a reward for my attention though; I wasn’t paying attention. 

I’m lucky to live in a place like the Bay Area where I can take an evening walk in nature and connect with a moment of wildness, like seeing this coyote. But it doesn’t feel like a wilderness experience. I can hear freeway noise from the trail. I’ve sent work emails while sitting on a bench here.

As smartphones and the internet mean wilderness is no longer a place to unplug, I’ve been grieving the loss of those spaces as forced time away from screens. But maybe I shouldn’t wait for wilderness to force me to have a less addictive relationship with my phone. Why am I willing to be distracted by my phone in the Oakland hills, but not in the wilderness? Why does this coyote deserve any less rapt attention than the marten in the Sierra? 

“Idealizing a distant wilderness too often means not idealizing the environment in which we actually live,” Cronon wrote in “The Trouble with Wilderness.” He asks, “How can we take the positive values we associate with wilderness and bring them closer to home?” 

What is it that I’m actually seeking when I long to “unplug”? I think it’s being fully present in the moment, in my body and mind and in the land. And I suppose I can do that  regardless of whether I’m in the wilderness or on a walk here in the Oakland hills. It’s just a matter of leaving my phone off in the bottom of my backpack.