The Four Stages of Cat Hiking
At one point in the evolution of our cat Leesha, aka Furry Purry, she evolved from a typical mostly-inside house cat to a car cat who traveled thousands of miles, and finally to a hiking cat.
Her first hike of note was a hike in the Redwoods along the mid-coast of California above Santa Cruz. She hopped out of the car on her pink leash, sniffed an entry post to a trail, and then off she went into the dank duff with Louise in tow.
Lots of people hike. Some percentage of them hike with dogs. Some rather small subset, we imagine, hike with cats. Cats hike differently than dogs.
There's a parallel in human hiking.
I have friends whose primary consideration in hiking is how much ground they can cover in a set amount of time. They tend to cover a lot of it. What of it they actually see is a matter of debate. They like to tell people about how much ground they covered -- what they saw is incidental.
I used to fight forest fires, and hiked a whole bunch, usually with some kind of encumbrance on my back -- hose pack, fire gear, a chain saw -- things that took a measure of the enjoyment out of the hiking, but I covered some ground.
Now I hike with a camera. I cover less ground and see a lot more. Kind of like Furry Purry.
We discovered over time that there are four distinct stages of cat hiking - unlike dog hiking which pretty much has two stages -- full tilt everywhere until exhaustion, and then exhaustion.
Cat hiking, on the other hand, is comprised of four stages. Or Five Stages, if you count the preamble to the hike.
The Preamble (prior to ambling) is to use your cat instinct to detect, by intuition or smell, whether there has been a bear or a coyote or a bobcat or a mountain lion in the neighborhood recently. On more than one occasion, Furry Purry hopped out of the car in one spot on a road, and refused to budge out of the car on another part of the same road. She stayed ensconced in her little cat house in lieu of cat hiking. For example, on three of those occasions we found: 1) bear poop a couple feet from the rear bumper where we stopped, 2) coyote poop a few feet from the front tire where we stopped, 3) a huge bull bison just over a small rise 100 feet from where we stopped. So it didn't take us long to determine that exiting the car was optional in cat hiking.
Furry Purry Elects to Stay Put in the Preamble Stage
Once a hike passes the Preamble Screening, Stage One is walking alongside or slightly behind Someone Big And On Your Side who keeps an eye out for bears, coyotes, hawks, owls, and anything else that might take a little too happily to cats. This is an important point. When, as a cat, you don't feel like the Someone Big is paying enough attention to guard duty, you might have to crouch and put your ears back, which slows down the hike.
Stage Two is making sure that things that need sniffing get sniffed. And that all holes that might need looking into get looked into. That also slows down the hike, but adds significantly to the texture of the experience. It also means that in snake country, Someone Big, i.e. Louise, needs to look into holes ahead of you.
Sometimes in Stage Two, as a cat hiker, you need to climb up high to look around for danger and mice. When you are up there, you can also have some fun pretending you are a bobcat.
Someone Big Checks a Snakey Hole Ahead of the Cat Hiker
Furry Purry Goes all "Bobcat" on an Outcrop.
Stage Three is the contemplation stage -- mostly contemplating whether to go any further or just lay down in the trail for an hour or so in a spot where there's good general sniffing to be had. This is a pivotal stage in cat hiking -- binary, one might say. The cat hiker will either decide that contemplation is a semi-permanent state or may decide to revert to Stage Two by and by. Furry Purry often decides at Stage Three that contemplation in a given spot is a semi-permanent condition, which then leads to Stage Four.
Stage Four is the Human Assist stage. It entails picking up the cat hiker and melding it with the human component of the hike -- Someone Big then carries the cat hiker back to the rig. Or to the next spot where sniffing takes precedence once again over contemplation.
Hiking, Sniffing, Contemplating, Human Assisting
So, note to "we covered more ground than you could have covered" types -- stick to dogs. Cat hiking is simply not going to be your cup of tea.
Brian and the Furry Purry. Text and photos copyright GoinMobyle, LLC 2009