Growing up, I played a game that eventually became a show called “Where in the World is Carmen San Diego,” whose apparent intent was to teach kids world geography, but whose unintended consequences created a small generation of trail hounds who love a cappella music.
Carmen San Diego started me on a lifelong pursuit of gypsy souls, from Davy Crockett to Anthony Bourdain. Following these intrepid people also delivered me to some of the best trails of my life. I remember reading John Muir’s “My Summer in the Sierras,” and then decades later having a pang of longing fulfilled as I came out of the Wawona Tunnel and saw Yosemite Valley for the first time. The John Muir Trail did not disappoint.
I read Edward Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire” while I chaplain in Idaho; a book that changed the course of my life, as I chose to go to school in Texas, not Virginia, since Arches National Park was on the way from Boise to Austin.
A poem about Haddie Stillwell took me to Big Bend National Park. “The Land of Little Rain” by Mary Austin fanned a tiny ember of love for desert landscapes, and “Eating Stone” by Ellen Meloy continues to bring me back to Bluff, Utah, year after year. The Carmen San Diego effect has been a blessing in my life.
Most recently, I’ve been on the trail of Hudson Stuck. An Englishman who flipped a coin in 1885 — heads, Australia; tails, Texas. Tails it was, so Stuck and a close friend caught a freighter to New Orleans and then on to Junction City, TX, where they worked as ranch hands. The romantic life delivered adventure, but not much in the way of livelihood, so the educated Stuck became a teacher in San Angelo, Copperas Cove, and eventually here in San Marcos in 1888.
I picked up his trail here and over the last year followed him to Sewanee University, where his papers are kept, and he trained as a priest in the Episcopal Church. Next, he went to Cuero, then Dallas, before his final frontier of Alaska. There, he logged over 10,000 miles on a dogsled as the Archdeacon of the Yukon.
Alaska was where Stuck’s trail took an unconventional turn, because chances are you’ve never heard of him in the same way you’ve heard about Edmund Hillary (first to the top of Mt Everest), or Alex Honnold (first to solo El Capitan), yet Stuck led the first successful expedition to summit Denali, the tallest mountain in North America.
Unlike some of those other names, Stuck took a back seat to his indigenous partners. He brought along Walter Harper, of the Koyukon people, who went on to be the first member of the party to summit the mountain, and to this day is commemorated in Alaska on Jun 7th—Walter Harper Day.
I hope to follow Stuck to Alaska one day, and maybe even to the summit of Denali (remarkably, Stuck was 50 when he achieved this feat), but in the meantime, I’ll track him through the pages of “A Window to Heaven,” his recent biography by Patrick Dean, and imagine walking beside him on the trails of the Spring Lake Natural Area, surely an activity of his as he wiled away his weekends here in San Mar-
