I am a raw novice to R, playing around with a mini .csv dataset created in
Excel. I can read it in and the data looks OK in Excel and upon initial
inspection in R:

hikes <- read.csv("/Users/eproper/Desktop/hikes.csv", header=TRUE)
print(hikes)

does exactly what it is supposed to do.

Two of the variables are genuine strings, but the others ought to be
numeric, and R will calculate their min, max etc. However, is.numeric
returns FALSE for all of them; storage.mode returns "language." as.numeric
returns "Error: 'pairlist' object cannot be coerced to type 'double'." In
what I suspect is a related problem, any command that calls for a variable
name requires an initial ~ to work. That is, instead of plot(miles) I have
to use plot(~miles).

No doubt there is some very elementary mistake I am making, but I can't
figure it out. Any help would be appreciated.

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