Poet, writer and walker James Lasdun has published a wonderful exploration of the delights and challenges of the famous Via Alpina, and the experience of walking hut-to-hut.  Published in the April 11, 2016 issue of the New Yorker magazine, this is a delightful and serious essay on the Via Alpina, a trail that wends its way through 8 nations and has more than 300 huts spaced a days walk apart.  He describes parts of the trail, gives glimpses of hut life, and relates his own challenges and observations in walking a portion of the trail in the Triglav National Park in Slovenia.  Its not often that an American general interest magazine devotes space to describing the hut-to-hut experience, and this one — humorous, well-written, and informative — is an especially worthy contribution to America’s growing consciousness of the hut experience of long distance walking.

Lasdun, with his wife, Pia Davis, has written two walking books: Walking and Eating in Tuscany and Umbria, and Walking and Eating in Provence.  From his website is a quote about his writing in general:

“James Lasdun seems to be one of the secret gardens of English writing…when we read him we know what language is for… Lasdun is a poet, and of course, one would expect, on his part, an enlarged attention to prose. It is easy to forget how very ordinary most contemporary prose-writers are… Lasdun’s prose, by contrast, is neither too fancy nor too regular. It is flexible, rich, metaphorical, and lovely… In sentence after sentence, the reader feels Lasdun’s words shaping and then freely donating a world to us, with great flexible artistry.”  — James Wood, The Guardian

I hope we’ll be hearing more from him about walking and huts!

Sam