Nate said:
I know some have contended that the only way to really find the "cool stuff" is through bushwhacking. Perhaps I'm missing something, since that has yet to be my experience. If so, please enlighten me, since I sincerely want to understand what the draw is.
This is a deep subject, which some of us have thought about for a while. Bushwhacking is definitely not for everybody. I suppose I got into travel off-trail initially because trail hiking at some point started to seem kind of ...dull. Predictable, unchallenging. When I was a kid, living in DC, there was one thirty-mile stretch of the W side of Shenandoah National Park which was easy day trip distance, and after a while we had done all the possible appealing trail routes. So we started adding in off-trail segments to create new interesting circuits. And so forth. It was a natural evolution.
I also think some of us have this "exploratory" urge which is much better satisfied through off-trail travel. An urge to go find out for yourself what lies in a particular summit, valley, ridge route, without reading all about it beforehand in some overly detailed guidebook. Just look at the map, speculate, go. Or see some interesting-looking route from some other high point, and go check it out.
As with any skill, there is definitely pleasure in doing some non-trivial thing gracefully, economically.
On a perhaps more philosophical note, I would say that there is no better way to develop intimacy with the landscape than this kind of travel. You really have to know a lot more about a place. I could write a whole book (well, an article, anyway) about various off-trail travel precepts in western Washington, mostly derived through hard experience. Things which you would have no clue about, would never notice, if all you did was walk trails in the summertime. After a while you just develop an intuition about where the easy routes are going to be. And you also develop an intuition about where you are., and where you are going. And you start to feel like you belong there. This is a thing good in itself, this connection with natural landscape.
I think it helps a lot if you are into observation of nature. I personally love observing forest subtleties, and I love crossing life zones. I love starting low, where the trees are big, and heading up through the hardwoods zone, into the conifers, speculating about disturbance histories, looking at the understory, noting where certain plants occur, noting animal sign. It's all good, really. Immerse yourself in nature's subtlety, complexity, and infinite variability. You might say that you could do all this from a trail, but it just doesn't work as well. It's not as intimate, and there's the distraction of other people, and you're travelling faster, so you have less time to notice things.
It becomes glaringly obvious if you've ever done a really long, or particularly difficult bushwhack, when you finally pop out on that trail and start trail-walking, that when you are trail-walking, you can just park your mind, daydream, pay no attention, get zoned out. It's almost like being a passenger in a car, looking idly out the window at the scenery going by. When you are bushwacking, by contrast, you are always *there*. Paying attention. Focused. Not thinking about your work, or some romantic prospect, or your kids. Just as one is occasionally in the mood for an undemanding scenic drive, and automobiles are undeniably useful, those of us who like off-trail travel still spend time on trails. It's just that sticking to trails gets dull and unsatisfying.
Regarding this "it takes too long" idea, I would ask, do you always take the shortest trail up a mountain? Or do you sometimes take the most interesting or appealing one? Many alpine climbers long ago abandoned the notion that getting to the top was the sole point of climbing. The route you take, the style you do it in, the overall esthetics of your route, are at least as important. Why bother to climb the north face of the Eiger when it takes too long, and is dangerous besides, and you can slog up one of the trade routes?
