Walkin’ Man Brings City Folks Message From the Wilderness

Walkin’ Jim Stoltz walks for a living. Since 1974 he’s walked 18,000 miles, most of that distance in the vast, empty American wilderness where grizzlies and coyotes and mountain goats outnumber people.

Sometimes he stays on trails, but often he bushwhacks across territory where peaks and creeks are unnamed, where it’s unlikely he’ll cross another’s footprints. Now and then, when he feels compelled to know the Earth’s contours more intimately, he leaves his topographic maps behind and follows his instincts.

If his path loops back on itself Stoltz doesn’t mind. He’s no 9-to-5 man. He figures his job is just to keep “walkin’ ” and taking photographs and singing songs inspired by long, solitary sojourns to sacred places that are “wild to the heart.”

That doesn’t mean that this lean, bearded mountain man’s two- to four-month-long hikes are without purpose. Rather, he is like a frontier scout, surveying the unknown territory and then pleading with the rest of us not to tamper with it.

Accompanying himself on guitar and illustrating his songs with enchanting slides, Stoltz performs 100 or more times a year, to support himself and to spread his message. At an appearance in Tarzana earlier this month he said he fears that Americans will wait until wilderness areas shrink to isolated islands encircled and enfeebled by development.

But, perhaps because he has spent so much time alone, listening to the hoot of the owl and the howl of the coyote, Stoltz manages to convey his grim message without preaching.

At the start of his performance, he invited the 35 or so members of his audience at the Adventure 16 outdoor equipment store to put on their imaginary backpacks and come along for a “celebration of the wilderness.” With a powerfully expressive bass voice that conveys a deep sense of calm, Stoltz is like a trusted guide who can take novices into dangerous places and bring them back safely, somehow changed, somehow wiser.

Performing in front of a display of freeze-dried turkey Dijon and three-bean chili meals, he had no problem getting the appreciative khaki-and-leather-and-bandanna crowd to go along on his multimedia hikes. But he says that he often feels awkward and lonely in cities, as if his true home is out there, beyond the traffic jams and the manicured lawns and the washers and dryers and the answering machines. Out there with the critters and the sky and the rivers that still flow unhindered.

When he’s not hiking or performing, he lives in Montana with his wife. Stoltz says he likes to take her along but also needs to be in the backcountry alone, where he can listen to the wind and watch the sky and write his songs.

In Tarzana, within earshot of the humming Ventura Freeway, he sang about the northern Rockies of Idaho and Montana, the Canyonlands of southern Utah and the area of New Mexico known simply as the Blue. Although all of those areas are publicly owned--by the federal Bureau of Land Management or the U. S. Forest Service or other agencies--they aren’t all designated as wilderness. And that makes them vulnerable to development or mining or grazing or other uses.

Some of the songs were spiritual, urging listeners to pay attention to “the choir singing in your soul.” One about hiking the Great Divide from Mexico to Canada claimed that to do so is to “know what it means to be alive.”

Introducing a ditty called “The Food Chain Song,” inspired by hikes in areas frequented by grizzly bears, this throwback to an era when the continent was still largely unexplored said:

“The thing that you have to realize when you go out into ‘grizz’ country, especially when you go out by yourself, is that you become part of the food chain. . . . I think us humans tend to get quite uppity in our dealings with Mother Nature. I think it’s very important that we have places where there are critters bigger than us. It humbles us, puts us in our place.”

Penny Hames, a 31-year-old Warner Center loan processor, was there with her fiance, Dale Cronaw, a 34-year-old computer programmer. This summer they’re planning a honeymoon hike in the Badlands of South Dakota and then on up to Montana and perhaps even to Canada.

They’ll have two weeks, but a good chunk of that time will be spent driving to all the places they want to go. Long hiking trips sound romantic, Cronaw said. But “it’s really grueling . . . and it’s painful” to carry the equipment and the food and the water. “It’s hard for us to shed the comforts we’ve come to know. But when you do it there’s a real sense of satisfaction.”

Still, Hames said, when she’s hiking she doesn’t wear a watch and she lets stress just drain out the bottom of her boots. “I just want to take it all in,” Hames said. “It’s what I’m going to hold onto for days while I’m back at work, inside those four walls.”

That’s the way most people think of the wilderness, a place to visit during brief trips away from work. A place where pretty pictures are taken and good memories forged.

But Stoltz was nudging his audience to do more than take an occasional walk in the woods.

“Now is a very critical time for America’s wild lands. They’re more than just places for people to hike. They’re the last of the wild places . . . and we all have a responsibility to keep those wild places wild.”

After all, he said, “wilderness is where things work like they’re supposed to work.”