Israel has one of the most extensive country-wide hiking trail systems in the world. More than ten thousand kilometers of trails cover all of Israeli-controlled territory, and on every holiday break, hundreds of thousands of Israelis use the trails to explore the country's rural spaces. Few Israelis, however, are aware of the political uses of hiking, or how walking and waymarking have served as means of controlling territory in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This talk will explore how Jewish immigrants to Palestine in the early twentieth century used hiking to link their bodies and identities to the land they knew as Israel, and will describe how the Zionist urge to explore the land eventually served efforts to conquer and control it. It will also examine how Israel's culture of European-style hiking has contributed to the rise of a parallel culture of Palestinian hiking, and how Palestinians in the Israeli-controlled West Bank are now using walking and waymarking as means of asserting their own presence in contested lands.