Heart and Sole: New Year's Resolution 2025 - Walk 10,000 steps every day

January 12: English Ivy at sunrise deep in the woods.

Note Well: The Headline photo ^^^ will change almost daily, so check in often!

2025 is my 77th year on this planet. I feel amazing and energetic and truly blessed to be still alive, let alone to be able to get out in nature and walk. I'm astounded to see that nearly half of the men my age in the US have already kicked the bucket by this age (Social Security Actuarial Life Tables for 2024). I'm beating the odds. What did I do to deserve that???

Maybe part of the answer is the walking itself. Honestly, I'd like to get up on a soapbox and preach the amazing benefits of walking and getting out in the peace and serenity of nature. But all these things are pretty well known, and writers much more talented than me have expounded and pontificated and proselytized on these subjects at length. I don't need to add to their wisdom.

My walks are the most important part and the best part of every day for me. I'll even feel a sense of withdrawal and regret if I have to miss a day of hiking, and so when I got up this morning, it seemed natural to consider a New Year's resolution to help me avoid those few days when I just don't feel like going out because the weather is bad, or because I'm tangled up in some indoor sit-down project. "Sitting is the new Smoking", right. The chair is going to kill us all!

I already have good habits regarding the walking lifestyle. When I wake up in the morning, one of the first things on my mind is "where do I want to hike today." I like to vary my walks, both in the actual route, and also in the reason, theme, or goal of the day's outing. Some days I'll walk to a store, buy what I can carry back home in my daypack, and save the planet a little by leaving my car parked at home. Some days I'm looking for a particular feature of nature, such as trees with 'cancerous' burl growths. That's been a hot one for me lately.

Red Oak with out-of-control burl growth as big as a kitchen table. The growth has just girdled the tree and killed it, just this past summer. Photo from October 20th, 2024, in the back country along the Blue Ridge of Virginia.

In general, I'm always looking for interesting things to photograph, usually something unusual, whether its natural or some sort of man-made oddity. Sometimes, for example, I'll take photos of a plant that I don't know and then get on Google's 'search by image' feature to try to identify it when I get back home.

I love sharing my photographs, so that becomes part of the motivation for creating this blog post. It will serve to make me accountable for my resolution and to give me the excuse to do a 'show and tell' with one or a few photos from the day's hike.

Bonus January 2 Photo: SPRING IS HERE!?!?! (Really???) This south-facing bank along the Middle Patuxent River in central Maryland was loaded with blooming snowdrops today. They're going to get a rude awakening, as the next couple weeks are going to be frigid!

Bonus pic: January 12: The snowdrops seem content enough after 9 inches of snow and ten days of continuous below freezing weather.

Bonus photo, January 5th: ... what I found along the trail!

Bonus Pic - January 10th: American Beech tree in the morning sun.

And so, without further ado. Here we go. The resolution is basic and simple. Here are the rules:

Walk Ten Thousand Steps. That's nominally five miles, and since I use a GPS and not a Pedometer, I'm measuring distance, not actually counting steps. My goal is to hike at least five miles each day in 2025, and probably for the rest of my days - as long as I can haul my carcass out of bed in the morning and strap on a belt pack and get out the door.
Always walk outdoors in a natural setting. No tread mills. No gyms.
Rain or Shine. No excuses, no exceptions.
Take at least one photo of an interesting sight and feature it here on this blog post
Do a little trail work along the way - pick up litter or cut back some brush (I always carry a hand pruning shear in my beltpack).

The creation of this post was my main motivation for the inaugural New Year's Day hike. I intend to update this post every day, adding a new photo up top and describing the day's hike and distance covered. The Chronological List of 2025 hikes begins below:

Jan 1: Destination: Sewell's Orchard Pond, Columbia, MD. 5.212 miles.
Jan 2: Sweet Hours Park, Eden Brook Rd., Kings Contrivance Trails, 6.51 miles.
Jan 3: Destination: Walmart! 5.374 miles.
Jan 4: Big Loop around Owen Brown Community. "Track 11" - a specially designed Loop to be 5 miles: 5.073 as measured today.
Jan 5: Wincopin Trails - Red, White, Yellow, Orange, and Purple. 5.139 miles.
Jan 6: Destination: daughter's house in 6 inches of snow, 8.223 miles.
Jan 7: Patuxent Branch Trail and Lake Elkhorn. 5.362 miles.
Jan 8: Destination: a local Bamboo Jungle. 5.613 miles.
Jan 9: Lake Elkhorn loop - sticking to cushy plowed paved trails. 5.428 miles.
Jan 10: Loop around Sewell's Orchard Lower Pond. 5.349 miles.

I hope 2025 finds you, dear readers, healthy and full of joy, and getting the chance to get outdoors as often as possible and take a walk. Cheers!

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PHOTO ARCHIVE:

Plastic Trail! January 1st. The world is being drowned in plastic, but ... Really??? Plastic trail??? Yep. This is the first all-plastic trail I've hiked. Usually this is just a regular asphalt-paved bike and hiker trail, but the slabs of plastic were laid down over it for heavy equipment during a utility construction project.

Pond on a winter morning - January 2. I'm showing this photo upside down because I think it looks better that way. What do you think?

Headed home on a shopping trip. January 3. Getting to the store is 2.33 miles (one way), all trail, with just one road crossing. To make the extra steps, I took a side trip to a pond. I wear ski goggles whenever the temperature is below about 40 degrees because my eyes just won't stop watering when exposed to any kind of cold air, especially if it's windy.

January 4, early on a frigid, windy Saturday morning. Wind chill in the teens. Saying "Hi" to the church I used to attend, fifteen years ago: Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Columbia (MD). I used to feel very at home there, but the supposedly wide-open UU "theology" has become more and more dogmatic--not in a spiritual way, but politically. Sadly, they seem to have been sucked into the ever-increasing polarization problem in the US, where their niche in the community of religions has always been openness and inclusiveness. I did a few return visits but no longer feel comfortable there.