( Plus) About our reporting: For this piece, the author—a writer on digital trends and the outdoors—spoke with fellow hikers and leaders of cemetery nature walks, reviewed sociological and ecological studies on urban greenspaces, and personally hiked a cemetery to experience the practice firsthand. Picture it: You’re standing in the middle of a truly thriving ecosystem. Migratory birds alight on the oldest fir tree in a city’s sprawling dedicated greenspace.
Mycelial networks fill the soil beneath your feet, whispering messages of warning across the expanse. You breathe in; you breathe out. The myriad stresses of the day begin to release as your hyperfocus is allowed to become fuzzy in the way that time spent outside allows.
You’re standing in the Lone Fir Cemetery in Portland, Oregon. You’ve been hiking in a graveyard. Over the summer, a New York Times op-ed made waves when its writer described their summer vacation of road-tripping to visit cemeteries with their family instead of a more traditional beach sojourn.
Meanwhile, in Portland, Oregon, Efemmera Gendera and Thespis D.Light of Drag Me Outside, their science-rooted and drag-led nature walk group, reached new levels of followers when they posted a sign-up for their inaugural cemetery outing. As a student of digital trends and the history of outdoor leisure time, I had to ask: What is going on with this? Is cemetery hiking a new thing?
What weird sign of the times could this be? And, obviously, I had to embark on a cemetery hike myself. If the idea of cemetery hiking feels like the latest eye-roll-inducing activity of a zeitgeist social media culture hopped up on pumpkin spice lattes and obsessing over #spookyseason, know this: people have been hanging out in cemeteries since at least the Victorian era.
Although it would be anachronistic to describe the early leisure activities that happened in the so-called “garden cemeteries” as “hiking,” urban-dwelling Americans in the 19th century found respite, greenspace, and community within them, as they served as the first urban parks. Put into chronological terms, it goes like this. The Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts—designed by horticulturalists—was consecrated in 1831, while Yellowstone wasn’t officially named a National Park until 1872.
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