Ashley Irving: Personal Topic #3

This past summer I completed a hike of the White Oak Canyon Trail with my soccer team. The trip's intent wasn't for team bonding or for building team skills such as teamwork, only to have fun before the seniors left for college in August. The hike was about one and a half miles straight up the mountain to reach a natural water-slide that was the goal destination for the trip. This was my first time completing a serious hike on an actual mountain opposed to "hiking" the mostly flat trails that follow the local river and that go through the woods in my boyfriend's backyard. This trail contained rugged terrain composed of rocks forming stairs that go steeply up the mountain and drastic elevation changes and you go farther up the mountain.

While hiking this trail with my fellow teammates I was able to experience the sense of communitas that is found on long-distance trails to an extent. Although this was just a day hike and the mileage of the hike does not even come close in comparison with the 20 mile days that thru-hikers complete, the distance from the start of the trail to the waterslide was just far enough to allow for communitas to be experienced to a small degree. About halfway up the trail, the team reached a small area that contained a stream that flowed between two boulders, creating a stream. At this place, we decided to stop and wait for our coach to catch up to us and we ran into a couple with an extremely small child with them. The couple chatted with a few of us and asked me to take a picture of the three of them, joking that they needed to document the baby's first hike. This interaction with the couple that we ran into demonstrates the bonding that occurs between fellow hikers. When talking with them, we learned that the father was head coach of a high school varsity soccer team that competed against some of our schools.

Had we run into the couple in a different location other than the trail, the odds of the couple feeling comfortable enough to stop and talk to a group of rambunctious teenagers are not very high. Due to the fact that we were all on the same trail, there was an increased sense of security and a decreased sense of awkwardness in the interaction. This is due to the sense of community that the trail creates and this sense is experienced ten-fold when thru-hiking due to the liminal aspect of the trail that draws people together.