It seems like it always happens at the worst spot, but luckily, not this time: I was running, outside, and I needed a place to hide for about 90 seconds. The situation wasn’t desperate, but it was going to be desperate soon.
I was on a multi-use path that paralleled a two-lane highway, not that busy, but busy enough. Luckily, I found a small bridge over a drainage, providing just enough cover for me to do my thing, and be thankful this hadn’t happened in the manicured neighborhood I’d passed through 15 minutes earlier.
I’ve probably run hundreds of miles on this paved path, ten feet wide, running alongside a heavily used railroad track, and then rolling up and down hills next to roads and highways. The views are mostly farm fields, with the occasional house, and some bits of forest. It’s not exactly Fifty Places To Hike Before You Die terrain, but it’s something.
Maybe you have a place like this too: One where you go to be outdoors—not total immersion in wilderness, but enough nature to get you by. Maybe you can hear car traffic not too far away, or trains rolling by, and if you broke your ankle, you wouldn’t die of exposure because someone would pass by within an hour or so, or you could crawl to a not-too-far-away convenience store. Or maybe you have a cell signal.
But you can see and maybe even smell trees, maybe walk on dirt, see or hear some water, and, possibly most importantly, maybe even find foliage dense/tall enough to obscure an emergency squat. And you can get there on a weekday, before work, or after work, or on a lunch break, to get your dose of biophilia:
I’ve been lucky to spend time in some amazing places. And in those places, I’ve seen many things that have made them special, and worth the effort to travel there. Maybe you have too.
But lately I’m finding myself grateful for all the less-famous, more urban/suburban places I spend way more time and take far fewer photos: the trails where I can hear the interstate, or see the lights of the city if I’m out past dusk, or where I’m surprised to see a “wild” animal.
I spent years running laps around Denver’s urban parks: Cheesman Park, City Park, Washington Park. I never saw a moose or an elk in any of those places, but I spent a lot of time staring at trees and enjoying not having to look both ways before I crossed a busy street as often as I would if I were running down a city sidewalk.
Nowadays, I live in a much smaller city, but spend lots of my outdoor time traversing the same two-mile stretch of our riverfront path. It’s on my way to a trailhead that goes up a mountain, but is within view of the city almost the entire time. On my trail runs, I’ve seen elk on the trail as semis rumble down the interstate at the bottom of the hill, an osprey with a still-dripping fish in its mouth as I crossed a creek running through a neighborhood (hey man, it’s catch and release here!), and a bear about 200 feet from our University’s football stadium.
But I often think back to this moment almost 20 years ago, when I was maybe not that happy, and would go on bike rides around Denver by myself at night, when the Cherry Creek path was empty aside from me and a handful of folks sleeping underneath the overpasses. The path runs just below the busy multi-lane traffic of Speer Boulevard, cutting through the center of an urban area of 3 million people, but it runs next to a creek, and there’s even a tiny bit of singletrack down there.
I was in my head, pedaling hard for no real reason, and a fox darted out from some bushes and ran in front of my bike’s headlight. I nudged my brake levers to slow a little bit, not wanting the fox to feel like I was chasing it, figuring it would bail off to one side or another, but it just kept running in front of my bike for a hundred feet, then 200 feet, then maybe 300 feet, until finally it ran up an off-ramp, and I resumed my hard pedaling, convinced that something like that would never happen to me again.
It wasn’t in a national park, or an Instagram-famous spot, and I didn’t have to get on a plane to fly somewhere interesting. I just had to be outside.
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