I never thought I'd be hitting the trail in a pair of pink hiking shoes. Let me explain. (And tell you what that has to do with buying local.) Late this fall I was at the New River Gorge, hiking and taking photos for the second edition of Hiking West Virginia (FalconGuides, on the shelves in 2013). I stopped in at Water Stone Outdoors to buy a new pair of hiking shoes that I hoped would see me through the next two years of writing HWV and then the second edition of Hiking Ohio . All told, I plan to put well over 1,000 miles on these shoes. I selected the stiffest pair of hikers I could find, a pair of 5.10 brand Camp Four women's approach shoes. Soon the trouble started. At first, the shoes weren't comfortable, but hey, I needed to break them in, right? Then my left foot started hurting when I wore them. Then my left foot started hurting when I wasn't wearing them. Turns out, there was a small crevasse (okay, maybe a quarter inch doesn't count as a crevasse) in ...