The path for which I was searching led up the alley of rock and underneath Grionabhal’s face; these things I knew for certain. But I couldn’t find its line. What was it I had been told? You need to look for what shouldn’t be there. This path didn’t exist as continuous track: its route was indicated only by marker stones. But the terrain through which I was walking had hundreds of thousands of possible marker stones…It felt like an uncrackable riddle: How do you find the stone in the alley of stones; the sign in the wilderness of signs? I started to think that perhaps the path didn’t exist at all.
Robert MacFarlane, The Old Ways
This summer we chose a hike in the Snæfellsjökull national park in Iceland suggested by the park ranger. As he pointed the trail out on the map he warned us that it might be hard to follow but to keep the ridge to our left and sweep around, approaching the headland from the right side. It was ‘hard to follow’ indeed, disappearing at the first ancient lava flow we reached. The remainder of our five hour hike up and back was trail-less. The Icelandic landscape being as hostile to path-making as that of the Hebrides. MacFarlane’s description of the part-lost, part-rumored ‘Manus’s Stones’ path in the Hebrides could have been a description of the non-trail we followed ourselves.
The path’s elusive nature was appropriate to the terrain through which it ran. For the two main surface substances of the Western Isles – black peat and pale gneiss – are differently hostile to path-making. The peat swallows paths, and the gneiss refuses them…So it is that many of the thousands of footpaths that seam the Western Isles don’t exist as continuous lines in the land, but instead as trails of intervisible cairns or standing stones.
Robert MacFarlane, The Old Ways
Our trail had started out innocously enough as a well-trodden rut in the springy grass, marked by wooden signposts. The trail winding around the base of the hills, parallel to the road was walked often enough that it was kept clear and the grasses worn down. Initially, as we turned onto the trail heading up towards the peaks, the uphill trail was also clear, if less worn. A little wider than a sheep-trail it took us through the grass to the first lava flow, not of solid rock, but of a gravel deposit of dark red-brown volcanic pebbles with tussocks of alpine grasses and wildflowers. Here the trail vanished. The pebbles could not hold a trail and although we hunted for some time we could not find a trail leaving the rocky area. For the rest of the day I was haunted by guilt. The sub-alpine plants grow slowly and take years to recover from damage due to their short growing season. I knew that we needed to tread lightly. Deciding where to put each footstep to ‘leave no trace’, while navigating an uneven landscape, while hiking uphill was exhausting mentally as well as physically. We had not intended to leave the trail: it had left us. Ours was definitely a “path that didn’t exist at all”.
The peaks rise steeply out of the sea to a glacier and volcano which draw clouds to them. The non-trail to the overlook was not trodden by many over the year – we saw only two or three other groups of hikers heading uphill that day – and I’m sure lack of visibility is one of the issues. We, ourselves, did not make it to the peak. The Texas kids made a beeline for a patch of snow where we stopped to eat our sandwiches in glorious sunshine and clear views. However, by the time we were done and rested, the clouds were closing down and the temperature was dropping fast. We elected to go back down since we had no trail to follow back to safety should the clouds envelop us.
MacFarlane eventually found his path, finding the correct rocks where Manus, the trail maker, had simply “recomposed the landscape a little”. We could have used some Hebridean cairns to guide our way across the peat and rocks. My feeling of guilt as I hiked off-trail echoed my daily self-questioning: how to live in a way that treads lightly on the earth? For that there seems also to be no clear trail.