Best For:
Nature lovers seeking hiking reflections, readers who enjoy friendship growth arcs, wanders pondering on emotional storytelling within nature, & all outdoorsy or literature lovers in between.
The Essence:
Reading Time: 🕰️ 11 mins | Weight: 🥊 medium/heavy| Mood: ☀️Reflective • Hopeful • Nostalgic|
The Vault:
- The Twos: treks, years apart, different versions of us, & separate states – Raccoon Creek State Park – Mineral Springs Grotto & Hocking Hills State Park – Old Man’s Cave Loop
- A look inside: new friendship forming, the same friendship some time later, & how the trek you plan for like life is not always be the one you get.
- Bonus: what happens when life keeps moving between these moments.
The Clean Starting Point Myth:
I’ve been hiking my whole life.
Wandering though many different geographic areas, not quite lost physically while wondering through many emotional and mental wars. You could say has always been my thing.
I know it’s cliche but I was doing it before I knew what it was.
That’s not what this is really about though.
This exists more comfortably in an off trail bond I’ve built that like many other bonds grew into me sharing my love of nature with someone else.
It isn’t often that people arrive in our lives as fully formed “important” individuals. However we all know life is surprising.
This post looks at the development, growth, and changes in a friendship I built with someone who became very important to me instantaneously.
A relationship so important… yet, it still somehow kept growing as typical bonds do.
Bonds:
Most bonds are built and maintained with repetition, small shared moments that don’t feel like anything while they’re happening, and inside jokes.
These two treks are just some of those moments this bond was forged in. While trekking them we weren’t aware they would be anything significant.
We just saw:
- Weirdos (us),
- Walking
- Wilderness
That’s how these things seem to begin, most of the time.
- Quiet.
- Ordinary.
- Forgettable…. in the moment.
These are not just memories of being outside or my typical trail reflections.
They are third party reflections on two specific hikes, Raccoon Creek State Park in 2021 and Hocking Hills State Park in 2023, that show how a friendship formed, shifted, and carried through time.
Showing the way friendships bloom in ecosystems that we did not fully understand while living in them.
The First Time Everything Was New:
October 2021 – Raccoon Creek State Park- Mineral Springs Grotto:
Before anything else, there is this:
“Where is the car?!”
Taelor says that was her first memory when asked about her first hike with me.
Not the waterfall nor the grotto, it was not anything scenic.
Just orientation or maybe it was survival logic. Finding the exit in her head before anything else could settle in. Which, honestly, makes sense.
Nothing about that day was familiar yet to any of us. The terrain. The pace. The people. The version of Tae walking through it.
Everything was still a learning curve in real time. Still, there were moments where the trail opened up and something else took over for Taelor.
The water running through stone and the light shifting through the trees. That feeling you only get when you realize something is bigger than you expected it to be.
“I was really just in awe of it all.” Which was what Taelor said of the hike after remembering wondering where the car was located.
Which sits oddly next to everything else she said about that time. Because life outside the trail was not light for ay of us at this time. It was heavy. Unclear in ways that don’t translate easily into explanations.
She didn’t frame it softly either, what she said was,
“At that time, I didn’t think my life was going to go forward.”
There’s no decoration in that sentence. Just weight.
Yet Tae still went outside, still walked, and showed up for a day that, in hindsight. This all held more meaning than anyone involved could see at the time.
That’s the part that matters, not the difficulty of the hike physically.
That it existed at all in that season of all of our lives.
Trust Doesn’t Announce Itself:
Some parts of this interview are more subtle than others. They don’t land loudly. They sit and build pressure over time.
The way she described support during that hike falls into that category, for me.
Being checked on, having her pace considered, and the consistency of the reinsurance that she was okay. Coupled with the fact it wasn’t need for her to ask for it.
All very small things that all add up.
“That was when my trust for Axton grew.”
That’s the kind of sentence that doesn’t need context to be felt. We all know that trust usually isn’t built during the big moments.
It’s built when nothing is being asked for and someone still shows up anyway.
When a Plan Stops Being Simple:
June 2023 – Hocking Hills State Park – Old Man’s Cave area:
The plan was light, I’d have even called it flexible. A highlights reel of the park for my friend and I. Yea right..
We all know that’s not what happened.
Somewhere in the middle of the day, it turned into distance, real distance. We clocked roughly eight miles of terrain that didn’t once ask our permission to become more than we signed up for. But rarely does nature ask consent.
Taelor felt it, just not all at once.
Gradually through her legs regardless of our pacing and through the questions that start repeating.
“How far? How much longer? Where are we?”
Still, Taelor kept moving.
“Feeling exhausted from walking way more than I initially thought but feeling accomplished for finishing it even though I didn’t think I could.”
That sentence doesn’t need interpretation it explains itself.
“Mind Said Yes. Body: doubting but hopeful.”
– Taelor
That’s the entire hike. Not just confidence and definitely not just fear. They both exist at the same time without canceling each other out.
It’s the willingness to continue even when the body is negotiating every step differently than the mind is.
That’s where the real shift happened between 2021 and 2023.
It wasn’t found in difficulty but in the response.
The Cave & the Climb Stayed Separate in Memory:
Old Man’s Cave and the climb were not blended together in Tae’s memory.
Beauty on one side; Effort on the other. The cave was something to take in; The climb was something to get through.Both mattered just in different ways.
“It was the true start of feeling good about the accomplishment afterward.”
That’s the line Taelor uttered that marked the change.
That line was recognition.
That was noticing that finishing something hard can actually feel like something worth holding onto in the end.
What Stayed & What Shifted:
If you line the two hikes up side by side, the physical reality doesn’t change much.
Tired is still tired; uncertainty still shows up. Of course our bodies still reach their physical limits.
But what changes is how it gets carried.
In 2021, everything is new and untested.
In 2023, there is already proof that hard things can be finished. That’s the gap, not the miles; it is the memory of capability.
Two Treks:
These were never meant to be “important hikes.” That’s the part that makes them important now. They were ordinary days outside that happened to sit inside bigger seasons of life.
The water still runs at Raccoon Creek and the climbs are still there in Hocking Hills. But the version of us that walked those paths once is not exactly the same anymore. That’s what this is really about.
“📍It is not the trail, it is what changes while you’re trekking it.”🗝️
-Axton
TLDR:
A friendship changes over two hiking trips as does one person’s relationship with hiking.
Reflect on a first time hiker’s trip to Raccoon Creek State Park and a later trip to Hocking Hills State Park.
Coming Next:
Part Two moves forward from these across two 2026 multiple state treks with Taelor and I.
Current trails. New us. New context. Same friendship.
No one of this stopped at Hocking Hills. It just kept following us in different directions. Now you can too.
Read More:
Ohiopyle with Taelor. Coopers Rock with Taelor. Tae & I in Maryland.
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