Picture By: Pema Tamang

Hiking Club is one of the enthusiastic clubs formed to organize college hiking events not only to explore places, but to explore self. Since the establishment of the club, it has been able to provide wonderful hiking experiences to students and college staff. Until now, the club has successfully conducted 18 college hikes, 2 partial hikes, and 2 two-day hikes. Beyond hiking, the club has organized hiking for education (HIFE) in order to reach different schools in remote areas via hiking and provide them with necessary educational materials. The club has also conducted its first cycling event and hopes it will continue. Among DWIT’s total of 140 students, approximately 110 students have participated in hiking events so far.

Beautiful Benefits of Hiking

Hiking is a long distance walk. It is especially done to free ourselves from daily stresses. It is a healthy form of exercise. Hiking is an escape back to nature and a great way to get a good workout while forgetting all about the day to day hassles of city life. We would like to categorize hiking benefits into three categories:

1. Physical Benefits
2. Social Benefits
3. Mental Benefits

Physical Benefits:

1. Reduce risk of heart disease and heart attacks, stroke, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and some cancers
2. Decrease sugar level
3. Hiking burns your calories and helps you lose or maintain weight

Social Benefits:

1. Bridge the gap between your friends
2. Easy friendship with strangers
3. Explore nature
4. One can get social inspiration as well

Mental Benefits:

1. Hiking helps to set aside everyday stresses and demands and stimulates good feelings
2. Boost your mood and energy levels

Places or People during hike?

Place matters a lot when we hike alone or when there are lots of strangers. The place does not matter much when we hike with people of our company. People like travelling to beautiful places if possible with people whom they are familiar. 

Our Plan

To interest Deerwalkers in hiking, we are introducing four strategies:

1. Hike with Professionals
2. Theme Oriented Hiking
3. Ranking for Hikers
4. Polling Hiking Places

Hike with Professionals is a strategy where we will include professionals that you like to hike with. Professionals may include teaching staff, people from Deerwalk Services, and also people outside of the Deerwalk family.

Objective: Hike to learn professionalism.

Theme Oriented Hiking is focused on hiking for something that counts. Hikes conducted so far by the hiking club are based on entertainment. Now we are going to add some extra value, that is, we shall now hike to generate something valuable.

For example, hiking for good constitution, hiking for female education, hiking for photo contest, and much more.

Objective: Hike for social awareness.

Ranking for Hikers will be initiated to award and motivate people for hiking. Each semester, the top three hikers will be awarded.

Objective: Motivational activity.

Polling Hiking Places Until now, the Hiking Club sets the place, date, and time to hike. From now onwards, the places will be decided by people’s choices. The Hiking Club will provide three options of places for hiking, and one with the highest number of votes will be selected as the place for hiking.

There are no shortcuts to any place worth going