The best hiking routes end in the pedicure chair

In his famous, posthumously published 1862 essay “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau admitted that while spending time wandering outdoors was among mankind’s noblest of pursuits, it also “will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character – will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature.”

Thoreau did not mention that long nature walks would also produce a certain roughness of the soles of the feet, and cause a thicker cuticle to form on the heels and the bases of the big toes. Though I’m sure he would have added it in a later draft.

Hiking may be a respite for the mind, but it’s a tribulation for the feet. Even the religiously foot-health-minded, the podiatrist’s-office regulars among us, sometimes end our nature walks with aching plantar fascia or hot spots blooming inside our Smartwools. So allow me to recommend the post-hiking pedicure, a maneuver I make whenever I can. After long days of restoring the soul, a trip to the nail salon offers a needed restoration of the sole.

You could be forgiven for not knowing that pedicures aren’t just aimed at toenail aesthetics. Many involve a deep, exfoliating pumice-stone sandblast of the soles, as well as a relaxing rubdown for the toes, heels, arches, ankles and calves. Some salons seat their pedicure clients in electronic massage chairs, where a keypad lets you choose whether a pair of disembodied pseudo-hands kneads, knocks or chops at your back (and with what level of intensity).

For an unsuspecting civilian plucked off the street, I realize, this latter bit might be unsettling. But for a hiker who’s just finally, triumphantly dropped their pack to the ground for the last time, it’s heaven.

I wish I had thought to make exactly such an appointment after my first big hiking trip of adulthood – where I finished my third day and 36th mile of walking through Argentina’s Los Glaciares National Park in hot, stupid tears because of the blisters on my feet and what I now know was a developing case of plantar fasciitis. I have only a dim memory of gingerly tiptoeing back to our hostel afterward, leaning pathetically on my hiking poles on the pavement, but I know I said some unprintable things to my hiking partner.

By the time she and I visited the Great Smoky Mountains the following year, though, our arrival into the mountain town of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, took us past a strip-mall nail salon and gave us an idea. As we ended our trip in Asheville, North Carolina, we treated ourselves to Cheerwine, some acclaimed local barbecue and a cheap, rejuvenating pedicure. Immediately, we were in agreement: On future trips, we’d be sure to build in a little time for pampering ourselves upon our return from the wild. A few years later, when we had finished 50 miles’ worth of day hikes over the course of a week in the Canadian Rockies, we found a low-budget place in Canmore, Alberta – where, reclining in our massage chairs, we relived our favorite memories of the trip while our feet forgot them.

There is also, as a nota bene, a more involved option for when your dogs are barking post-hike: the more aggressively podiatric reflexology massage, in which a massage therapist spends 30 minutes to an hour focusing on each part of the foot individually. Though its stated purpose is to treat a host of maladies elsewhere in the body, a nice long foot massage is a nice long foot massage – and, like the pedicure, it, too, offers a profoundly effective method of de-hobbitizing your feet after returning to civilization. That said, I tend to save this bringing-out-the-big-guns approach for the most grueling athletic endeavor on my calendar each year: Fashion Week.