Fumbling Toward Fulfillment The Metamorphosis of Colin Fletcher Story by Robert Wehrman
C
olin Fletcher was the world’s most famous walker, an extremely popular author, and dubbed the first thru-hiker and father of modern backpacking. His was an outspoken voice supporting wilderness preservation: when Fletcher had something to say, people listened. Few people realize today that most of his fundamental vision for wilderness travel—and his world view— was kindled in the Pacific Northwest between 1953 and 1956.
and The Man Who Walked Through Time are chronicles of his first two mega-treks and were quickly followed with The Complete Walker, in which he
An immigrant who opened up a part of North America we had forgotten, Colin was best known as the first person to force, in one arduous solo journey, a passage afoot through the length of Grand Canyon National Park. Prior to this he walked from Mexico to Oregon along California’s eastern deserts and mountains. This was decades before the Pacific Crest Trail came into official existence. Not many people were doing such Colin Fletcher in Chalfant Valley, CA 1958 things in 1958. explained to us in remarkable detail how Each of these exploits generated to live comfortably in the backcountry. books, both of which appeared during Fletcher urged us to go out into the Vietnam War era, a time when many the green world to reconnect with ourwere looking for alternatives to the orselves and the planet. He showed us dinary life. The Thousand-mile Summer 40
The heartbeat of Cascadia
that walking could be contemplative as well as functional and taught that all things natural, living and non-living alike, should be protected from rampant human development and destruction. The idea resonated with the youth who were at that time being conscripted by their own government and sent to Southeast Asia to serve as cannon fodder. And so it was that hundreds of thousands of college-age students and returning Vietnam Veterans followed Fletcher’s footprints into the wilderness to reconnect with the land. Because of his writings, backpacking quickly became a pastime for millions of others who had not previously identified with the return to the land movement. Families began hiking on their vacations, people went further into the wilderness to camp, fish, climb, or simply commune with nature. This was followed by an explosion of backpacking equipment production and sales beginning in the late 1960s; a boom for which he was at least partly responsible. Two decades earlier, Colin was a lieutenant in the Royal Marines and assigned to the first wave to storm the beachhead at Normandy on D-Day. He was later promoted to captain for heroic deeds that resulted in saving an entire company of marines. Had we >>> Go to AdventuresNW.com
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