Hiking Research

I can’t say exactly when I finally realized how important wilderness is to me. I started venturing out when I was 19, and had just moved to the mountains of western North Carolina to attend college. I was (and still am) in awe of the beauty of the mountains. Living in a small college town next to Great Smoky Mountains National Park provided a gateway to explore an United Nations International Biosphere Reserve every day. I ventured out on trails, went out on mountain ridges t

Acadia National Park, Maine (USA) Photo by Mark Ellison Have you found yourself seeking to escape the stress, noise and pollution of your everyday environment, if only for a few minutes? Places that are available to escape to are becoming harder to find as the world’s population continues to increase; combined with the fact that more than 50% of the world’s population now lives in an urban environment. Kaplan & Kaplan (1989) described escape as “an absence of some aspect of l