AMC Outdoors, September 2004

During the last five years, Claudia Mausner spent all her time exploring nature—from indoors. Cooped up in the libraries of New York, the doctoral student’s outdoor exposure was limited to window views of trees and lakes. But the project occupying her time—a dissertation on human interactions with nature—kept hiking at the fore.

Hiking is “in my bones,” says Mausner, 47, a New Jersey native who also grew up biking, canoeing, and camping. So it seems only natural that her work at the City University of New York would lead her outside. Mausner had recognized a gap in her field of environmental psychology (the study of people’s attitudes toward and behavior in natural or built surroundings): social scientists intent on learning how people interact with nature relied almost entirely on responses to still photos in lab settings. Wondering whether videotaping in the field would be a better methodology, Mausner went to work.

Through contacts in the New York–North Jersey Chapter, where she’d spent four years as Public Service Coordinator in the late 1980s, Mausner recruited 12 members to hike in pairs along a five-mile stretch of the Appalachian Trail. Outfitted with microphones and micro-videocameras like those she’s wearing in this video still, they talked about what they saw, smelled, touched, and heard. Mausner then developed a system called HIKEN (Hiker’s Experiential Notation), based in part on orienteering symbols, to “transcribe” their reactions—ranging from musing on the trail’s difficulty to recoiling from wet moss.

Now armed with her Ph.D., Mausner hopes to continue her research. She also hopes trail designers will begin to solicit more user input and consider all of the senses as they plan, build, and maintain trails. And her message to hikers is this: “Give yourself time and space to appreciate what you see, hear, touch, and smell. Allow yourself to become immersed in the experience. It takes slowing down.”

— Katharine Wroth is co-editor of AMC Outdoors.