That night we would sleep out near Red Rocks(a 13 mile long sandstone escarpment west of Vegas….).In the morning our guide would lead us along a trail snaking up and down across small arroyos(small deep -sided gullies) and a dry streambed, past the gorgeous foliage I remembered from earlier trips, junipers with desert mistletoe, tiny-leafed desert oaks ,yuccas, manzanitas, and an occasional barrel cactus, all stunted and spread sparsely by the rocky soil, aridity, and scattered boulders in a way that recalls Japanese gardens….When I turned back to look at Las Vegas and the Strip as I had so often looked at Red Rocks the day before, Paul(her guide), would say, ‘Don’t look back,’ but I would stare, amazed how thick the city’s smog was…’ Distance is deceptive on the Strip: the major intersections are about a mile apart, but the new casinos with their twenty or thirty hotel towers tend to look closer because their scale doesn’t register….’ ‘I was hot and weary from the four miles or so I’d gone from Fremont Street, for it was a warm day and the air was stale with exhaust. So ‘one December morning I stepped out ….onto Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas…’ ‘One of the least celebrated aspects of this arid, amnesiac boomtown is its spectacular setting, with mountain ranges on three sides and glorious desert light, but Las Vegas has never been about nature appreciation. But then she decides that proving that it’s easy to walk in a well-known part of Britain didn’t say anything about the future of walking. It is full of enthusiasm for simply getting about on foot ,wherever and whenever it is streaked with an activism that makes her willing to cheer all kinds of applied walking including protest, pilgrimage, therapy and exercise.įor her final chapter Rebecca is looking for ‘a last tour of one of the sites of walking’s history and that locale(starting at Chatsworth and heading to the Peak District) seemed to have everything. Hers is a sinuous course propelled by abandon yet guided by a firm intelligence. She joyfully trespasses across disciplines and genres, tracing a path through philosophy, palaeontology, politics, religion, and literary criticism. She doesn’t press on towards a goal but savours detail and varied perspectives, considering the nature of mountaineering, the life of the London streetwalker, the conflict of public rights of way and private property in England and the USA.

H Auden’s poem ‘Walks’ is, and probably always will be, the most succinct addition to this series on literature related to walks and walking(by the way I should add here that Auden wrote the libretto for Glyndebourne’s ‘The Rake’s Progress’, the composer being Stravinsky and the set designer, David Hockney), then Rebecca Solnit’s book on walking(reissued recently in paperback), relishes the nearly encyclopaedic task she sets for herself.

Wanderlust by rebecca solnit