Last Fourth of July weekend I hiked up Mt. Baldy, a low summit in the small yet lovely Bridger Mountain Range just north of Bozeman, Montana. I started the hike from the “M” trailhead, surely the most traveled trail in Gallatin County. Mt. Baldy too is a popular local destination. One expects company out on these trails, especially on a holiday weekend, but that was not the case this day.

During the course of the next four and a half hours over ten or twelve miles of trail at the slow, steady hiking pace I am now reduced to, I saw only four other people. My total human contact from these meetings amounted to less than a minute. That was it -- no one else, only me alone on the trail with the mountain. Even the birds and the insects were fairly quiet, perhaps subdued by a stiff breeze. The pace, the solitude, and the quiet led me to some musings on the question of available human space.

I don’t move through this high country as fast as I used to, or as much as I wish, so perhaps I have missed out on what is going on. But my impression from casual empiricism is that it was my generation, now in its 50s and 60s, that was really into serious backpacking and hiking long distances with little obvious purpose except the journey itself. Today’s youth seem to favor more exciting stuff -- extreme sports, cliff climbing, trail races, mountain biking, kayaking, and the like. Nevertheless, there still are plenty of hikers around, and many of them seem to complain continually about the loss of open space, as if there soon would be not only suburban sprawl everywhere, but also crowds of people in the backcountry.

America, however, is really still a vast and uncrowded land. (For example, Montana, from where I write, has about as many people as Indianapolis, Indiana, itself a well-greened and -parked place.) Viewed from the proper perspective, there is more space available than ever before. It was the early generations of Americans, living in cramped, dark houses and surrounded by a hostile environment, who really faced crowded conditions. Today, even the average poor American lives in quarters far more spacious than those of our early ancestors, while enjoying opportunities for travel hardly dreamed of by previous generations.

By historical standards, our psychological space, that space we know is available to us even if we never care to explore it, has never been larger. Regularly we travel long distances for work and play, free from the confines of home and hearth, while a continent lies before us beckoning our spirits of adventure. Only the shortage of time constrains our opportunities for exploration.

Using 2000 Census data, economist Randal O’Toole recently concluded that the United States as a whole is 94.6 percent rural open space. Now even the forest is creeping back just outside our urban doors. Wild animals begin to find their way into our suburban lives, bringing some of the amenities and dangers of the wilds close to home.

The permanent provision of open space, both private and public, increases daily through the use of conservation easements, private purchases, and tax dollars. Hundreds of millions of acres of government land, private preserves, city parks, suburban landscapes, golf courses, and agricultural land provide incomparable opportunities for the experience of open space, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Within these spaces may be found thousands upon thousands of miles of trails. Only a lack of imagination keeps us from seeing the possibilities before us. Open space, personal space, physical space -- these are not goods in short supply, nor will they be anytime soon.

And for those (perhaps) few of us still seeking a lonely venue for a hike “from here to there,” with a little foresight and a bit of luck we will have no trouble finding an empty mountain peak for our temporary occupation. God willing, I’ll be on the hunt for one again before long.