Good Sentences: Hiking (February 2025)

As students at Michigan (and many other universities) prepare to go on Spring Break, we thought we’d put together some materials related to a common vacation activity: hiking.

Enjoy!

—The Good Sentences Team

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1. Fiction: To Build a Fire by Jack London (1902)

Favorite Sentence: “Empty as the man’s mind was of thoughts, he was most observant.”

—Picked by Selena LaBair, Class of 2025 (Most Recent Hike: Sleeping Bear Heritage Trail in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore)

2. Poetry: Visiting Mountains by Ted Kooser (1985)

Favorite Lines:

“Here, lost in a mountain’s
attention, there’s nothing to say.”

—Picked by Ian Stevens, Class of 2025 (Most Recent Hike: The Dune Climb in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore)

3. Essay: Saturday Morning Hike by Miranda Weiss (2016)

Favorite Sentence: “Kara and I agreed that being here was the highest use of this bluebird day.”

—Picked by Alex Haft, Class of 2025 (Most Recent Hike: Mt. Megunticook in Camden, Maine)

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Michigan Sentences: Here is an article about research that examines the potential benefits of taking nature walks in groups. The research was conducted by a team that included Sara Warber, an emeritus professor in the University of Michigan’s Department of Family Medicine.

• “Group Nature Walks Linked to Improved Mental Health” by Beata Mostafavi (2016)

  • Sample: “Walking is an inexpensive, low risk, and accessible form of exercise, and it turns out that combined with nature and group settings, it may be a very powerful, under-utilized stress buster. Our findings suggest that something as simple as joining an outdoor walking group may not only improve someone’s daily positive emotions but may also contribute a non-pharmacological approach to serious conditions like depression.”

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Syllabus Sentences: Here is an assignment I give students when they are trying to balance two questions that have many parallels to planning a good hike: (1) How much should I challenge myself? (2) How much recovery time should I build in?

• “Red Days and Blue Days” (Feedback Lab #5 of Feedback Loops)

  • Sample: “The point is to design a system that will allow you to better plan for and navigate the inevitable ebbs and flows of energy, opportunities, requests, disappointments, and surprises of a full life.”

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Book Recommendations

• For good sentences about a monumental (and ultimately fatal) hike

  • Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer (1997)

    • Sample: “Getting to the top of any given mountain was considered much less important than how one got there: prestige was earned by tackling the most unforgiving routes with minimal equipment, in the boldest style imaginable.”

      

• For good sentences about walking in general

  • Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit (2000)

    • Sample: “I sat down one spring day to write about walking and stood up again, because a desk is no place to think on the large scale.”

      

• For good sentences by someone who has a famous hiking trail named after him

  • My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir (1911)

    • Sample: “We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell.”

      

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Quick Tip

Here’s a quick tip about a writing move that John Muir—the author who has a famous hiking trail named after him—uses several times My First Summer in the Sierra: putting the prefix “un-” in front of words where you wouldn’t necessarily expect it.

Sample:

• “The sunsets, when the trees stood hushed awaiting their good-night blessings. Divine, enduring, unwastable wealth.”

• “Everything rejoicing. Not a single cell or crystal unvisited or forgotten.”

• “The most resisting, unweathered portion of the surface is scored and striated in a rigidly parallel way, indicating that the region has been overswept by a glacier from the northeastward, grinding down the general mass of the mountains, scoring and polishing, producing a strange, raw, wiped appearance, and dropping whatever boulders it chanced to be carrying at the time it was melted at the close of the Glacial Period.”

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