If I could do one good deed during my time on this planet, it’d be this: getting everybody who has a blog off their fannies and out into the woods for just a few hours a week.

I blogged seven or eight years before I started hiking … I’ve blogged about politics, journalism, life in California, life in Illinois, movies, music, ballgames — but the only thing I’ve blogged about that makes it truly seem worthwhile is getting outdoors, away from the computer and its online tentacles, and relearning what it means to be just one more species on a planet run rampant with them.

It seemed last summer when I decided to go local that a hiking blog had great promise in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has, I suspect, more bloggers and miles of trail per capita than just about anyplace on Earth. Only one flaw in this plan: most bloggers don’t hike, and most hikers don’t blog.

Which places Two-Heel Drive is somewhere in the gamut between fundamental contradiction and complete absurdity. I don’t think it has to stay there, though.

What I’d like to do is get the word out to other bloggers and get the idea into their heads that the best way to recharge your internal laptop is to turn off your computer after you check your e-mail on a Sunday morning and head for a trailhead. Grab a map at the sign board, walk as far as you feel comfortable, take a few pictures, and when you get back home, put that on your blog.

You don’t have to be a hiking freak like me and write about it all week long, but one post a week about hiking could well save your life. It did mine.

A few bloggers who need to get out more:

Well, that should be enough linkbait for a start.