Front Range are reporting that increased visitation has led to trail and natural resource damage as people often step or hike off trail to try to stay six feet apart from others. Additionally, trailheads and neighborhood access points have become overwhelmingly congested as people flock to open space areas. Vivienne Jannatpour with Boulder County Parks and Open Space says regional trails, like the ones Kitching explores in her guidebook, are often a better option than overcrowded and popular open space hiking destinations. Not only are these trails wider, allowing for appropriate spacing between groups without damaging habitat, but they also have multiple access points, which helps decrease congestion at trailhead parking lots. “Part of what we’ve been trying to get across when we say try to stay at home as much as possible is that there’s nature in neighborhoods, there’s little neighborhood trails,” Jannatpour says. “You can go for a hike without going to crowded places,” Kitching adds. “The spirit of urban hiking is doing something different. If you’re always going up to Chautauqua and you feel like that’s the hike that makes you feel fit, well get the same distance somewhere else. We can all do that right now: Turn a different direction — go east instead of west, go north instead of south — see something new.” Her book offers a range of urban hikes from two to 10 miles, although Kitching says many of the routes can serve as a starting point to much longer adventures. The St. Vrain Greenway for example is a great place for an urban hike, a paved path along the river with plenty to BOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE
explore in Longmont. But it also takes you all the way out to Weld County. Not included in the guidebook, however, is Kitching’s Walk 360 Slow Marathon, a 26-mile loop around Boulder that links a variety of different historical landmarks and places of interest in hopes of connecting people more tangibly with their city. She developed the route as the head of the Boulder Chapter of Walk2Connect, a national grassroots nonprofit cooperative that advocates for connection-based walking programs in places from Kodiak, Alaska to Miami, Florida. It was founded
by Denver resident Jonathon Stalls in 2012, after he walked more than 3,000 miles from Delaware to California in search of discovering a respite from the busyness of the world around him. Stalls’ journey spawned a philosophy Kitching, and the larger Walk2Connect movement, calls “life at three miles an hour.” It’s about slowing down all of life — changing the way we work, think and interact with each other — to mimic the average walking pace. It’s about appreciating what’s in front I
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of us at every turn, being URBAN HIKES: awed by the beauty all BOULDER’ explores the 256 around us, which we often miles of urban overlook, especially in our trails in Boulder modern, fast-paced, preCounty. coronavirus world. “Our society moves very fast and being a car-dominated world, we often kind of find ourselves caught up in this 55-mile an hour mindset,” Kitching says. “Walk2Connect really serves to bring people down to a natural human pace and really slowing down everything so that we can nurture our relationships, so that we can nurture our connection to places.” In a lot of ways, Kitching has been advocating for the very lifestyle the current guidelines for staying close to home demand of us for years. Urban hiking asks us to leave the ego behind and explore the places right outside our front door with the same enthusiasm and wonder that we often bring to our adventures in the backcountry. And it’s a lifestyle Kitching hopes will continue long after the pandemic, and the strict public health orders that come with it, end. “That’s what I hope: we really hold onto this philosophy of slowing down, giving ourselves breaks when we need them, moving our bodies so that we keep our minds and our bodies healthy, and just keeping that mindset of connecting to ourselves, to places and to others at a human pace,” she says. “We don’t want to make light of the pandemic. But if it can help inspire more conscious and conscientious ways of being, I think that’s a net benefit in some way.” I
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