April | 2019 | Sonoma Overlook Trail • Montini Open Space Preserve

Clearly, some of you are deep. You are able to pull quotes up from the dark (dimly lit?) recesses of your mind and get them on the pages of our Hiker Notebook — or perhaps anywhere else. You rock.

From “Annie S.” comes this stanza from William Wordsworth’s I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud (with an illustration, even!):

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

Certainly, daffodils can be spotted on the Overlook, so extra points for accuracy. One could just imagine lying on one’s couch (as one does), pondering a recent solo foray on the trail, and appreciating the opportunity to commune with nature alone, even if you also (and we often do) appreciate sharing the experience with others.

Also along the theme of solitude and communing with nature alone comes a portion of Lord Byron’s, Childe Harold, Canto IV:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

This quotation actually showed up twice. Was it the same person? You decide.

Some chose to quote poets of the more modern era, as this hiker did when supposedly quoting Jimi Hendrix, but this quotation is disputed, and has been variously attributed also to Sri Chinmoy and William Gladstone, in slightly different versions. If anyone has serious evidence backing up this quote, let us know. Meanwhile, the words still ring true, even if no one said them exactly this way ever in print or voice.

Lastly (in this post), we have a quotation from one of our world travelers by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), from his book The Innocents Abroad:

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

Like I said, some of you are deep. But you may need to do a better job of checking your sources. In the end, though, it probably doesn’t mean a whole lot who said it, as these quotes ring true to us anyway. And thank you for sharing these wise words with us on the trail. May you continue to do so.

Photo credit: Lauren Marie.

When I first decided to review all of the entries in the 23 notebooks of hiker comments (so far!) gathered over the years, I had no idea what I would find. To be honest, after hiking the trail nearly every day for a decade I never made an entry and hardly even looked at them. I’m not sure why, but I hadn’t. So I didn’t really know what I would find.

What I found was both somewhat predictable and also surprising and remarkable.

I found that the people who hike this trail cover a lot of ground — from kids forced by their parents to take a hike they didn’t want to take, to teenagers and others coming up the hill for purposes other than exercise or the view (*cough*), to those seeking solace after loss and heartbreak, to those inspired to spend some time drawing, or creating poetry, or recalling quotes that were meaningful to them. And then there are those who feel inspired to look beyond themselves to encourage others, or to provide messages of hope and renewal. In other words, pretty much a complete slice of humanity and all of our drama, but with a significant skew to the positive.

By far, when people write in these notebooks they are coming from some pretty great places emotionally. And even those who are dealing with very tough times are on the trail to gain strength. In sum, people seek interaction with nature during both good times and bad, and they find reasons to be thankful for the experience no matter where they are emotionally. Except, that is, the kids forced up the trail by their parents. That will never change, sadly.

After reading what must have been thousands of entries, I want to tell you that you are an amazing group of people, who have come to this trail from all over the planet. You hail not just from Sonoma or nearby cities and counties, but from Australia, England, Germany, Greece, Israel, New Zealand, South Africa, and many other countries and U.S. states. And by far the messages you leave tip the scales heavily to appreciation and gratitude. There are so many entries relating to these sentiments that I haven’t even decided how to handle them yet. You love the trail, you love the interaction with nature, the views, the exercise, you love so many aspects of it and you have so much gratitude. Thank you for that.

As one of a dozen or more who work to make the trail a great place to be, I want to speak for all of us about how this makes us feel. It makes us feel so happy to know that you appreciate the trail as we do. And may you all get to experience it as often as you like, and if you do, please feel free to leave an entry in the notebook. I know I will, myself, finally. You’ve all inspired me.