Interviews with Five Barefoot Hikers

Over at MightyGoods (they sell various travel gear), they have an article up in which they interviewed five different barefoot hikers.

I thought I’d answer the questions myself.

Here’s the article: 5 Barefoot Hikers Share How They Pack (and Why They Sometimes Bring Shoes).

The five hikers are Richard Keith Frazine (of The Barefoot Hiker fame), Cody Lundin (of Dual Survival fame), John Sifferman (from the Physical Living blog), Sarah Dittmore (who writes the Adventure Travel Blog), and Kenneth Posner (who writes at The Long Brown Path).

Go ahead and read it first. I’ll wait here.

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OK. Are you back?

Here are my answers to the questions.

What top 3 things do you bring besides the common stuff everybody brings?

Actually, not much. I have a little ditty bag that contains a pair of tweezers, really strong fold-up reading glasses, a pen-knife, and a compass.

The reading glasses are because I’m getting old. I find that I rarely use the tweezers at all. In the past two years, I’ve used them maybe twice. The most recent was removing a small thorn that had penetrated my “spongy” sole. (For those who haven’t been following that, in December I ruptured my Achilles tendon playing tennis. The lack of stimulation on my sole while trying to recover had a rather interesting effect on it: it stayed thick but got rather spongy which picks up material from the surface I walked on.) The other time I used it was last year when I stupidly didn’t pick up my foot enough while stepping over a cactus.

I’ve used the compass something like once in 10 years. I usually also carry a topo map (no GPS!) of the area I’m in, and (so far) I just don’t get lost.

As a general rule, I do not carry backup footwear. I used to but never used it, so I quit carrying anything. The only times I still will carry any is when hiking in the desert Southwest on a sunny day. That’s as protection against hot sand. My current backup footwear is a pair of Cloud Barefoot Sandals from Xero Shoes. Before that, I used moccasins, but they wore out rather quickly when I did use them.

How do you bring things with you?

I use a fanny pack (waist pack). Regular backpacks bother my back, but if I put all the weight on my hips my back is just fine. I have a rather large collection of packs, and which one I choose depends on how much water I think I need to bring and how much extra stuff (like a camera, or if the day starts out cool but I know I’ll be stripping as it warms up and I need a place to stash what I take off). My biggest fanny pack is a Kelty Hawkeye with a volume of 750 cubic inches, and I can carry 3 liters of water. The one I probably use the most is an old JanSport with a volume of 475 cubic inches and I can carry 2 liters of water with it.

What are your top tips for other barefoot hikers?

Following the advice of Ken Bob Saxton, listen to your feet. If you are just starting out, start out slowly and work your way up. It can take up to six months for all of the beneficial physiological changes to happen.

Use moisturizers containing urea, like Flexitol or Gold Bond Foot Cream. This is particularly important in the very dry environment in the desert Southwest (not so much around Ohio, where I live). The first few times I made special trips out west, I got dryness cracks on the balls of my feet and thought I’d picked up a thorn I couldn’t find. The urea-containing creams have prevented that ever since.

And finally, you can do way more than you think barefoot (after all, our ancestors did). When you start off, you’re really careful where you step all of the time. Once your feet are really conditioned, you have to pay way less attention and/or your brain pays the correct amount of attention subconsciously. That gives you the opportunity to enjoy nature with all of your senses.

We go out into Nature to see the sights, smell the smells, and hear the sounds. And then the shod turn off their sense of touch. Barefooters don’t.

Lightning Tree Tower