How to take familiar outing and make it new again

While some people have descended into the world-class Niagara Gorge just once, I have been more than 100 times, easily. Yet there is never an inkling of boredom. Much like learning the ins and outs of another person, a natural area can be experienced over and again again in a different light. This only furthers your appreciation and understanding for the subject of your attention.

One common question I hear as an outdoor tour guide is, “Do you ever get bored of hiking or canoeing the same place, over and over again?” My answer is one the woods have taught me since childhood. I can take the same place and reinvent it in my mind's eye, based on how and when I choose to enjoy it.

For example, consider Rockway Falls, Balls Falls, or the famous Niagara Gorge. I have visited all of the aforementioned places dozens of times. If a running waterway is the main attraction of the journey, then try soaking up the different feelings of hiking upstream versus downstream. Watching and hearing running water flow away from you versus towards you seems to be a completely different tone. And I believe this is a primal instinct initiator.

Our species instinctively associates upstream with wild lands and frontiers. As homosapiens colonized the world, we often settled along broad rivers and rich deltas near the end of a river's run. However, the river started upstream somewhere, where the water's meekness was not attractive to the settler of the times. Therefore, many upstream ecosystems remain wild and untainted to this day, and that makes us feel a little bit of wild inside ourselves.

Hiking upstream ca more invigorating and enlivening. As we explore up the massive river or gently tumbling brook, the water and its audio attributes come at you. It feels like the energy of the river is flowing into you as a force, versus a drawn away calmness of watching water get further away. However, that feeling is a therapeutic delivery of calm and relaxation that no therapist can give.

When you think about it, a water droplet in the unending wilderness north of Lake Superior eventually flows by Chicago, Detroit, and Toronto. A remote fishing tribe in Papua New Guinea takes advantage of fishing at the mouth of the river, yet there is not another human upstream for hundreds of kilometres. It's almost as if an unspoiled period of time in the form of water was coming down to you. If you hike downstream, you can embody and enjoy the opposite theme, where you just want to see where things are going, versus where they came from. Some hikers also express that they are admittedly stubborn on hiking a linear versus a loop route. They explain they don't want to see the same scenery twice, and I can appreciate that mindset.

Yet hiking back the same way is a completely different experience and is worthy of celebrating. Think of yourself hiking up a large mountain. The pitch is obviously uphill, so what do you find yourself looking at most of the time? You are observing the physical landscape and trail immediately in front of you. Yet, when you are obliged to turn around and head back downhill, you are now presented with an open vista, a view that spreads as far as they eye can see.

Whether it a snow-capped mountain from the Rockies or a hike up the Niagara Escarpment, going up versus down on the same trail is an appreciably different adventure.

Lastly, we have the privilege of living in a small percentage of the world that experiences four distinct seasons, further allowing the transformation of a familiar trail into a brand new happening. A hiking trail coated in snow, mud, grass, or colourful leaves with different temperatures and sounds is something we regard as normal, yet most of the world's population doesn't get to watch their favourite place change and entertain us as dramatically as here.