I've taken an interest in some light day-hiking lately, and it started crossing over to my other nature-inspired passion, space. Although it's hardly new for a space enthusiast to imagine the experience of being on another world, I would like to go further and try to hatchet out some details of what the experience would be like, what sort of equipment would be involved, what challenges and dangers, etc.
The first question before us is, where are we? Obviously we are preferring to be on a pretty low-latitude area of Mars on the Day side, with temperatures usually in the low negative tens to the low single-digit positives. So dressing warmly is a must. However, the area close to the ground is consderably warmer than the air, so optimum heating may have to account for that and spend more energy keeping the helmet and torso warm than the boots.
Since the air has only trivial pressure, a helmet and pressure suit are mandatory. Although CO2 will not instantly kill you, and neither necessarily will explosive decompression (you may simply sustain massive vascular damage), the sudden combination of being exposed to frigid cold, near-vacuum, unbreathable gases, and toxic chemicals such are in the composition of Martian dust could be fatal in a short time and having lasting repercussions even if one survives. We don't know this for sure, of course, but it seems likely given what we do know - the hazards might be less extreme than imagined, or they might be even worse. But there are view environments on Earth that offer the unique opportunity of hiking in places where literally everything will kill you - the atmosphere, the temperature, the chemical composition of the rock, possibly (over the long-term) the gravity, if that causes neuromuscular atrophies.
There are some fascinating ridgelines nearby, but be careful about walking toward them - in a gravity environment of 0.38 g, your momentum will carry you quite farther than you at first intended, and you may have to start moving more like someone wading in a pool, bounce-stepping rather than walking and moving your arms in slow, swimming-like circular motions rather than the jab-pump common to terrestrial running. If you are unpepared, you mind find yourself unable to stop in time before reaching the edge of a ridge and have to cling for dear mercy to the edge. Fortunately, since you only weigh a fraction of your normal weight even with all your gear on, and the gravity is so low, it not need be as arduous to pull yourself back, and if you fall, considering the distance is manageable enough, you come off unscathed even at distances that would kill an Earth hiker.
Despite the relative thermal benignness of the ground over the air, you would still have to be wearing rigorous thermal protection regimes in both boots and gloves - simply sticking your hand into the ground would be more than enough to kill the flesh through hypothermic necrosis and make amputation necessary. Meanwhile, your footsteps would sound like strangely hollow thuds, given the low atmospheric pressure in which sound translates poorly. The wind would occasionally be visible as dust wisps, but would not be felt or heard - the air is too thin to have enough effect.
Considerably steeper slopes would be safe to climb since the lower gravity would give them greater cohesion in the lower gravity field, and there would be less momentum to rock slides that did occur. Precarious vistas should show suited figures "walking" confidently up slopes that our intuition tells is is sheer madness, and making child-like swimming motions when they run across flat surface for maximum speed, the Sun a baseball-sized orb overheard in the grey sky, attended by an occasional fleck of blue (the Earth).
But you would have to be careful of the dust - the invasive, pervasive, corroding dust that accumulates in pools into which may find yourself comlpetely disappeared, or else just mired up to your foot out of communications range, or just with tenacious cakes of it sticking your suit joints. It comes to pollute the smell of everything you do, because some will always escape cleansing and end as grit in your socks, in your harness joints, in the hydraulics of your vehicles, and so on. You know it's vaguely carcinogenic, but you accept that because...you're on Mars!
The Sun rises and sets in 25-hour days, leaving the terrestrial calendar open to reintrepretation and a scorching case of jet lag. You watch its silent, blue-tinted sunsets in awe and realize that you are truly far from your home, especially as the chill suddenly sweeps in and your suit has to jack up into high gear to keep you from freezing to death within minutes.
Perhaps you trip and fall on your air supply at some point causing a leak, and watching it silently streaming out in ice-crystallized mist into the near vacuum while you call for help and try to set up an emergency air bubble around you. The land, the sky, and the stars here do not know you, and do not recognize your plea, but fortunately another human does and zooms up in whatever kind of vehicle is being used. Its headlights create thick cones of illumination in the great dark, unblemished by any insect or cross-illumination. No crickets attend the Martian night, no frogs, no audibly appreciable wind; no creaking of wood or ice; no thrushing of branches; not even the desert wind of an Earth wasteland; just the silence, and the newcombers breaking it for the first time in aeons.
I'll eventually post a more comprehensive diary on Mars, once I finish with the Earth section of my series, but this was just a little musing I thought worth sharing.