Review by Amanda K. Jaros
As a mother, backpacker, and nature lover, I’ll pick up any book on these themes. It’s rare to find a book that covers all three. So, I was delighted to read Andrea Lani’s Uphill Both Ways: Hiking Toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail, a story that melds together my favorite topics with insight, creativity, and depth.
Like all mothers, Lani loves her children with everything she’s got. Like many mothers, working an unfulfilling job and raising kids is simply not enough and Lani dreams of shaking up the status quo. Referring to Cindy Ross’s book Scraping Heaven, (also about long-distance hiking with kids) Lani says, “The book gave me the first inkling of hope that family life could include adventure, could consist of more than diapers, play dates, and car seats” (135). Her need to live outside the box prompts her to pack up her husband, 15-year-old son, and twin 11-year-old sons to head west from Maine to Colorado for 45 days in the wilderness.
Uphill Both Ways has an interesting twist—this is Lani and her husband’s second hike of the Colorado Trail—which allows for a unique historical perspective on both the landscape and Lani’s own interiority:
When I hiked the trail twenty years ago, I hoped to develop a closeness with nature, a growth in my relationship with [now husband]Curry and some kind of spiritual awakening…This time I want even more. I want to relive that first Colorado Trail hike and, even more, redo it, better this time, with a lighter pack and a lighter outlook. I want an epiphany… I want to slow time, to watch the world pass at two miles per hour, and to witness who my children are now, at this moment in their lives… Most of all, I want to restore some joy to my life (15).
That’s a tall order for a 500-mile walk in the woods. But as we follow the group across the days and miles, the family does slow down, and though the boys hike faster and want to go farther than Lani does, they fall into a rhythm together.
Each of us is not just one thing: mother or hiker or worker or writer. Lani knows that we are each many things blended together, and she seamlessly threads these pieces of herself and her hike into her book. She shares the essential details of a backpacking story: the discomfort of five stinky hikers squeezing into the tent every night, the various physical ailments family members sustain, the laughter and trail magic with other hikers. She also shares the everyday details of a motherhood tale: getting her kids to stop teasing and bickering, her fear for the boys’ safety when they’re swimming in cold water or hiking alone, the joy of reading books aloud together in the evenings.
Offering a break from the family squabbles, reconstituted oatmeal, and sore shins, and giving readers a chance to see the bigger picture, Lani weaves in relevant natural history information. Describing the geology of the area, Lani writes, “At around 25 million years old, the Colorado Rockies are mere infants compared to the 480-million-year-old Appalachians…We’re hiking through just a moment in a long history of geological drama, stretching far back into the past and far into the future” (59, 60).
At the heart of this book is Lani’s love for the natural world, particularly the Colorado Rockies, and her desire to share that place with her children before climate change irrevocably alters it. The natural history sections also allow Lani to contemplate threats facing our planet:
Over the two decades since we first hiked the Colorado Trail, the pine forests of North America…have experienced an unprecedented epidemic of bark beetles. In Colorado, mountain pine beetle outbreaks spread over 3.4 million acres of lodgepole, ponderosa, and limber pine forests between 1996 and 2013…Depending on which experts are correct, we’re standing at the edge of either an apocalypse or a large-scale forest renewal (71,72, 73).
Uphill Both Ways is more than a hiking travelogue, more than a motherhood journal, more than a natural history reader. It is one woman’s attempt to unify the pieces of her life in search of happiness. It’s also a reminder to other women out there. You don’t have to be just one thing. You can be a mother, or not, and all the other things you inherently, fundamentally are. It just might take a lot of planning, some blisters, a few extra chocolate bars, and a long walk to get there.
Uphill Both Ways: Hiking Toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail by Andrea Lani
University of Nebraska Press, 2022, 298 pages, $21.95 paperback
ISBN 1496229002
Amanda K. Jaros is the editor of Labor of Love: A Literary Mama Staff Anthology. She is author of 100 Things to Do in Ithaca Before You Die and the forthcoming In My Boots: A Memoir of Five Million Steps Along the Appalachian Trail. Her essays have appeared in Flyway, Terrain.org, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. She lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband and son, where she serves her community as a county legislator. Learn more at amandakjaros.com and Instagram @amandajaroschampion.