The slow feel (forest bathing in Mueller State Park)

 

I feel like a latecomer to foresting bathing. Colorado’s state parks often hold sessions. Despite my interest, it took me a long time to bite. The forest bathing exercise brought an opportunity to see a place I knew relatively well in new light. 

I try to get up to Mueller State Park on Pikes Peak’s north slope once a month for a 2-4-mile hike. Outside of peak leaf season, it is rarely crowded, and the scenery always stuns. The quiet drive from Colorado Springs fit the meditative mood that forest bathing seeks to inspire. 

Little did I know I would get an ample dose of new light by showing up 90 minutes early. Past the visitor near Elk Meadows, I braked for a cluster of five mule deer bucks who crossed a few hundred yards ahead of me. I pulled off to watch them graze. 

The bucks were wary, but I kept my distance. Other cars slowed when spotting me with my camera but no one stopped. Until they grazed out of view, I had them to myself. 

I get the disinterest; mule deer are common. I see them on my street all the time and the neighborhood has a quartet of robust boys. Sometimes they eat my shrubs. 

But I could not write these deer off. These healthy boys were in a phase I had not seen. All had well-developed antlers completely draped in velvet. Soon they would begin rubbing the velvet into bloody strands as their hormones build for the rut, which follows the elk rut. The boys might graze peacefully in August, but soon enough they’ll shift into competition for females. They took turns looking back at me, then each returned to their grasses. 

When the sun emerged, the real treat arrived - its angle made the antler velvet glow. I had never before seen a sight like that. 

 As the moved deeper into the forest, headed to Elk Meadows. I wandered a trail for another 30 minutes. It rained heavily the night before, and the cloudy morning kept the moisture from burning off. The rain opened every plant in the forest, and the odors of pine and other high-altitude foliage were relentless and magnificent. 

Here I had to cut the hike short or risk missing the forest bathing session. 

Forest bathing and a vigorous hike don’t really cross oaths. In two hours, we covered just half a mile. But that was the point. Think of it as a great slowdown. You walk slowly, take multiple stops, stay silent, close your eyes and the wilderness of the park opens up. 

We stopped often and took an extended sit atop a group of rocks above the trail. You touch objects in the forest. Bark of a tree, a bed of pine needles, a rock’s surface. You keep your phone holstered. I still took some pictures with my camera but also let the pauses without tech or talking linger. 

We broke from the trail onto a spit of land covered in soft soil and pine needles. The facilitator invited us to wander and find a spot for our focus. I sat at the foot of a dead, soaring pine. I chose it as a focus due to its brown needles and the life it still supported. A gray jay ruffled among the high branches. Below a woodpecker probed for meals under the bark.  

For a different perspective, I saw under several pines where a dead tree formed a mini-ecosystem. The trunk had rotted to where it formed a cave of sorts. The mouth never received sun, and the cavity teemed with life, with patches of lichen and a few seedlings reaching for sunlight. 

The session leader conducted a tea ceremony at the end of the bathing session. We walked the same trail back, but now the rocks and little crannies on the mountainsides were not a blank slate. Through the exercise of forest bathing, we melted into the landscape, became less obtrusive and more attuned to the natural world around us, if only for a short time. 

Elk Meadow