Watching a video of a Glacier Peak flyover, and even more impressive than the amazing views & nature, is Gary Paull's incredible detailed/intimate local & geological knowledge, his orientation and pattern recognition skills... I've always been in awe of people who're so aware of and linked to their environment(s) and their place within (even if it's here more about the physical rather than social aspects). To me this is what hiking is partially about: Not just an activity, but more so a method & process of deeply connecting with a place/environment, using each visit for learning & trying to understand it, to navigate it without map, to appreciate its history, how it came to be, why it is the way it is etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4s1RMPH9p0
Each time this is a vivid reminder of Brian Eno's "Big Here / Long Now" concepts (even if his European framing and many other aspects of the Long Now foundation/funding are problematic):
https://longnow.org/essays/big-here-long-now/
"How could you live so blind to your surroundings? How could you not think of where I live as including at least some of the space outside your four walls, some of the bits you couldn't lock up behind you? I felt this was something particular to New York: I called it "The Small Here". I realised that, like most Europeans, I was used to living in a bigger Here.
I noticed that this very local attitude to space in New York paralleled a similarly limited attitude to time. Everything was exciting, fast, current, and temporary. Enormous buildings came and went, careers rose and crashed in weeks. You rarely got the feeling that anyone had the time to think two years ahead, let alone ten or a hundred. Everyone seemed to be passing through. It was undeniably lively, but the downside was that it seemed selfish, irresponsible and randomly dangerous. I came to think of this as "The Short Now", and this suggested the possibility of its opposite - "The Long Now".
"Now" is never just a moment. The Long Now is the recognition that the precise moment you're in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future. The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes. It's ironic that, at a time when humankind is at a peak of its technical powers, able to create huge global changes that will echo down the centuries, most of our social systems seem geared to increasingly short nows."
— Brian Eno
: Canon Rebel t4i}
