Opening his Saturday night keynote speech at the Spring Hiking Weekend in Wellsboro, Tioga County, with a question, outdoor writer Mike Bleech asked the assembled KTA audience, “Why do we hike?”

A couple answers started to frame themselves in my brain, but before I or anyone else could get a response on the soundtrack, teenager Dominique Walker nailed it and put all our thoughts to rest. “Because it's life!” she called out joyously from her seat near the front.

One possible response that came to my mind was what Appalachian Trail hiker Ralph May told me last spring. “I hike because I like to eat,” he said. “Hiking is the only way I can afford to consume my favorite foods.” Yes. That’s one reason I hike, too. Flat out: So I don’t get too fat!

Challenging myself is among the biggest reasons I hike. I want to achieve and maintain the degree of physical fitness required for hiking many miles a day, climbing the hills, jumping from rock to rock, fording streams. As most of us know, completing major hiking goals also entails many mental challenges—all the logistics of finding trailheads, studying maps, planning routes, selecting and organizing gear, and being alert for blazes and hazards—and little pleasures along the trail.

We also hike because we enjoy and appreciate nature. We are awed by majestic views, thrilled to see a bear or some deer or a flock of turkeys, delighted by spring beauties or a painted trillium, impressed by hemlocks 2 feet in diameter, soothed by babbling brooks, amused by a chipmunk.

We hike because it improves our physical and mental health. We breathe more oxygen; we strengthen our muscles; we clear our minds; we think and ponder; we erase stress; we refresh our spirits so that we are more ready to handle other routines, bounce back from difficulties, and be the kinder, wiser friends and family members we want to be. We expect to live longer and better.

Above all, we hike because it's life! Recently I read a couple articles about headsets that are coming that will bring all kinds of “virtual reality” to their wearers. Understandably, this can be fascinating and some great stuff. If you can’t afford to visit the Great Wall of China, then put on a headset—you’ll see it as if you’re there! If you’re too scared to bungee jump or ride a zip line, take the ride in your living room! And when you get too old and your knees or other body parts have worn out, you can still have all kinds of fantastic “experiences” far beyond the limits of the TV screen. It will seem just like the real thing. But it’s not.

That’s not life. Life is finding that box turtle yourself, not just looking at someone else’s picture of it. Life is experiencing the numbing cold of wading that stream in your bare feet, with snowflakes dancing in the air and miles of trail before your destination. Life is seeing blue sky ahead, anticipating the top of the hill, and then going up and up and around and around it for another hour, learning about false summits. Life is going to sleep with the sound of a thousand insects chirping in the woods around you and waking briefly in the middle of the night to a bit of moonlight illuminating the tall trees that surround you. Life is feeling the hunger and the thirst and the total exhaustion. Life is coming across that marvelous waterfall when you were soaked with sweat and desperate for cooling refreshment! Your heart may pound faster with a virtual reality program confounding your brain, but if you never had to nurse a blister on a toe or part briars with your own scratched hands and forearms or simply will your feet and legs to keep going for 1 more mile, then it wasn’t life. It was just virtual reality.

To quote Thoreau’s Walden: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

“BECAUSE IT’S LIFE!”