Slow Travel in Nature

 Exploration and Slow Travel

“These days, people talk too much
Can't say no, get caught up in the come and go
Untether from that restless soul, and take it slow,

All these people waiting on anything to happen
Just caught up in another distraction, so they don't feel a thing
But oh I want to feel the weight of every single minute
Catch up all the time that I've been missing
Every high and every low”
                                Satellite Station, Slow

Living and Travelling with Intention


As our plans for the year kept shifting, amid the frustration, there was a strange gift hidden in all that uncertainty… time. Time to get back to writing, to share the stories of our other treks, to sift through months of photos and memories, and to finally answer the backlog of emails from readers who’ve been travelling alongside us in spirit and nature groups, asking us to give a presentation.


Most of those messages are wonderfully encouraging. Yet, among them, a surprising number have carried a similar sentiment with people exclaiming : “I no longer need to hike that trail because I feel like I’ve already done it, reading your blogs or watching your YouTube videos.” Such sentiments have stunned us. What at first might seem like a compliment has, in truth, hit us like a stone in the gut. Our intention was always to inspire people to get out into the world - not to make them feel as though the act of reading about it was a substitute for the real thing.

We sought to inspire, not replace.

No amount of online reading, watching videos, or even asking ChatGPT can serve as a substitute for doing. People were made to live and to experience, not simply survive and stuff their days with content.

That fear of ours, the worry that secondhand stories could replace firsthand experience, reached a further crescendo a few months ago when we stumbled across a book on Amazon claiming to be a “hiking guide to the Great Trail.” Out of curiosity, as two of only 6 or 7 people to have fully hiked this trail we bought a copy. What we found was both infuriating and heartbreaking: entire sections lifted directly from our blogs, stitched together with vague filler that was hollow at best and, in places, dangerously misleading to any planning their own journey.


Lives Lived Only Online


To hike, to bike, to travel … these are not hobbies you can fully experience from a page or a screen. They are acts that must be lived. Every trip teaches you something: about yourself, about the world, about what it means to move through landscapes rather than past them.


Lately, we’ve felt an unease building around the rise of what some call “AI slop”, the flood of false, shallow, and suspiciously plausible-sounding content spilling into every corner of the internet. It often carries a tone of authority but offers no true detail, no grounded knowledge, and no lived authenticity. Worse still, we’ve begun seeing books churned out and sold for profit using our own images and words, stripped of their context and stitched into something that has no soul.

There is also a quieter danger online: the toxic positivity that so often seeps into online portrayals of travel and adventure. The airbrushed sunsets, the flawless trails, and the constant smiles. Each of these creates an illusion that the outdoors is always easy, always perfect, and that if you’re struggling, you’re somehow doing it wrong. Real journeys have hard moments. They also have moments of awe you can’t stage or plan.

Life is to be Lived and Experienced


It feels as though our online world is drowning in imitation, and with it, our shared objective reality is being quietly eroded. Knowing what’s real and who to trust is becoming harder. That’s why it matters now, more than ever, to go and see the world for yourself. Step outside and know your neighbours, know your own community. Spend time with your friends in person. Be willing to travel to other regions, meet other cultures, and gather your own ideas and options through lived experience.


In an age when anxiety and uncertainty have become normalized, our hope remains simple: that time in nature … real, unfiltered time … can restore what the digital noise erodes. That walking into a forest, hearing the wind through the trees, and experiencing the slow pulse of the natural world will remind us, and you, what’s real and what’s worth holding onto.

“...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. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear, nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life….” Walt Whitman, Walden

See you on the Trail!
Location: Sechelt, BC, Canada

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