I was lucky enough recently to spend a week doing some remote scrambling in the King’s Canyon high country. After five days off-trail without seeing another human, crossing challenging passes and wandering through vast and seldom traveled granite basins, I was fully immersed in the moment. I found myself in a magical landscape of small lakes dotted with bright granite islands and picturesque clumps of stunted pines. After a brief rain the evening before, the morning had broken clear and the air was sparkly clean, with puffy white “happy clouds” signaling the end of the storm system. The meadows were bright green and the edges of the ponds were lined with thick carpets of glowing, recharged mosses.
My work was largely done and I had a long morning of ease ahead. As I wandered around soaking up the scene, I experienced a shift into a sensory state that shocked me with its suddenness and intensity. My mind had quieted into an “embracement,” if you will, of exactly what was happening both within myself and all around me, and suddenly I was seeing with what I can only call “super vision.”
Everything came simultaneously into extreme sharp focus and extreme peripheral awareness. A glance at the ground revealed every pine needle and pebble in exquisitely sharp detail and intense depth and color. Sounds intensified and my skin vibrated with sensitivity to the air. Everything was heightened and vivid.
In tracking, we call this “popping,” when subtle track details jump out of the ground and become obvious. Thanks to years of practice, I was able to hold that state of mind, enjoying it without disrupting it, breathing steadily and simply letting it roll. I wandered along until it began to fade, after a couple of hours, into a more “normal” sensory state. I picked my way down the talus slopes, a sense of inner peace remaining with me long into the day.
More and more I find myself slipping into that mode of perception while hiking. My eyes scan distant vistas, searching for the smallest details I can see and zeroing in on them with telescopic focus. Then I shift smoothly into very close vision, focusing in tightly on the smallest of details right at hand. Ratcheting back and forth, and taking in everything in between, the landscape comes to life and patterns begin to emerge.
Applying tracker knowledge to this level of awareness opens up a landscape in a way that compares to nothing else I experience. Every little sign of animal activity feeds the picture—a nibbled leaf here, a scatter of soil next to a small dig there. Our modern human mind is visually oriented; by pushing the usual limits we place on visual awareness (out of the need to filter sensory input into manageable portions), our senses of hearing, smell and touch are likewise freed from their usual constraints.
There is something satisfying, almost intoxicating and certainly liberating about seeing the land this way. My eyes and ears drink up the patterns of the landscape, the foliage and the topography. The richness of detail close by gives context and perspective to the larger picture. The sounds and locations and the movements of birds fit into the pattern, as both an expected manifestation and a predictor of what will come.
What I love most about this practice is how it can make the most familiar and potentially boring walk become an exciting adventure. When I stimulate this shift by slowing down, abandoning my inner dialog and consciously stretching my visual limits, a walk I’ve made hundreds of times, such as the trail to Abbotts Lagoon or even the stroll across my yard from the house to my workshop, comes to life in a new and ever-changing way.
The surest way I have found to prompt this shift is to simply look farther and focus more tightly on distant details. After a lifetime spent in nature, I’m still teaching my mind to break through old limitations; I’m still amazed at how much more I can actually see. The flick of a deer’s ear in chaparral hundreds of yards away, for instance, will suddenly catch my attention.
That will lead to noticing the activity of sparrows in those distant shrubs, to the awareness of a hawk, silent and almost hidden, in the branches of a tree. The subtle symphony of bird calls from that direction becomes more noticeable and starts to make sense in the context of current conditions.
As my eyes sweep from those distant details, across the landscape and back into the extremely close, I’ve learned to hold the entire landscape in my attention while still honing in on sharp detail. It’s a remarkable process, and the essence of “getting feral.” To the logical mind, it may be contradictory, but in practice, it is readily available, drawn from our deepest perceptual evolution.
Richard Vacha lives in Point Reyes Station, where he makes a living as a craftsman and has studied tracking and awareness for about 30 years. He feels he is beginning to get a feel for it by now, and is building the Point Reyes Tracking School, to offer classes and other programs, at www.PRTS.me.