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American Journalism Review reports on what I’ve alluded to in past posts:

The layoff-by-phone drill represented yet another backpedal from the lofty rhetoric of just 11 months earlier, when William Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group bought the paper and its suburban cousin, the Contra Costa Times. MediaNews acquired both dailies in a complicated deal with McClatchy, which in turn had purchased them a few weeks earlier from Knight Ridder, the Merc’s deceased and dismembered former owner. “We have bought the crown jewels of Knight Ridder,” Singleton declared at the time. “They are excellent papers that we expect to make better.”

Perhaps he meant “smaller.” The first layoff at the Merc newsroom (15 people) came just four months after Singleton, known in some quarters as “Lean Dean,” assumed control. A series of resignations starting in June trimmed 15 more jobs. Combined with the Passover cuts, the newspaper’s staff had shrunk by 22 percent in the first year of the Singleton era.

The Mercury used to have more than a dozen reporters in its San Francisco peninsula bureau located about 15 miles from San Jose. Now there’s just one. The Merc gets most of its peninsula news from the short-handed San Mateo Times and the Palo Alto Daily News, a free tabloid MediaNews acquired in the Knight Ridder deal last year. Some parts of the paper’s newsroom have simply just disappeared, among them a five-member projects team that included 40-year Merc veteran Pete Carey, who was part of a group that won a Pulitzer for foreign reporting in 1986. Carey is now a business reporter.

I can also add this: We used to have 40 copy editors. Now we have 15.

Singleton says it’ll be a rough three or four years till things turn around. Well, not so rough for him, I suspect.

I can’t imagine there’s more than a couple hot days a year at the Tomales Point Trail at Point Reyes National Seashore. Yesterday, we decided to go hiking on one of them. We also drove back down the coastline, stopping at Point Reyes National Seashore’s Limantour Beach, Bolinas Lagoon and, finally, the Marin Headlands for the sunset.

So if you’re going to be out huffing and puffing through the heat under cloudless skies, there are few better places than Tomales Point — especially at this time of year, when the elk herds on the peninsula are in the midst of the “rut,” an annual orgy of sex and combat. From July through November, and every bull elk worthy of his pointy antlers will be wanting to cozy up with as many elk babes as possible.

Problem is, elk society decrees that only one really big tough bull elk — whichever one’s agile enough to fight off challengers and still find time for a little nookie — gets a harem of elk babes to himself. A few secondary bulls get lucky, but many of the losers in these battles have to wait till the next rut, next fall.

Yesterday we saw two kinds of groups: bulls guarding their harems, and a collective of bachelors. Bulls with harems stayed farther from the trail, but the bachelors we saw seemed less preoccupied with people (and presumably more preoccupied with the sex they either will or won’t get, depending on the breaks) and more inclined to hang out within camera range.

Speaking of camera range, the digicam I picked up last spring has more zoom and megapixels than previous ones, so it allows considerably better close-up action. I was never more than 30 or 40 yards from the elk. You don’t want to get too close to these guys — those antlers have too many points of impalement.

So, the pictures:

The coastline, looking north toward Tomales Point. It’s worth the two-hour drive just to see this.

A big bull elk, with some of his progeny. Looks like one half of his antlers has been worn smooth by combat.

A couple of his wives. When the gals have mugs like that, it’s understandable that the guys are more preoccupied with other anatomical area codes.

See what I mean?

Another look at Tomales Point. That blue, by the way, isn’t the color of the sea, it’s the reflection of the sky above — hence the bluer-than-usual appearance on a clear, cloudless day.

Here’s the bachelors’ quarters. All this lovely landscape set aside so large, smelly males can have a safe place to plot their attempts at amorous conquest — gotta love that.

One of the guys near a watering hole. Somewhere in Africa, a crocodile is booking his flight.

Sometimes they’ll look right at you. They are kind of cute, especially when they aren’t charging.

Seeing as how they’re guys, there is of course lots of scratching going on.

The guy on the left had the most impressive rack in the collective. Word has it he’s been insufferable ever since his audition for that Prudential ad didn’t pan out.

OK, enough large beasts. We hiked and gawked for a few hours, then headed back down the coast. We took a little detour to Limantour Beach, also part of Point Reyes National Seashore. This stretch of coast isn’t quite as wild, rocky and spectacular as the others, but it does get great waves.

A family frolics in the waters as a large wave crashes.

The family dog has a great time.

A wave crashes behind Melissa. We waded in a bit, but had no swimwear so our frolicking was a bit more restrained.

Small deer near a waterway near the beach.

After we’d gotten a suitable amount of sand wedged between our toes and into our shoes, we headed back down the road. We stopped for a minute at Bolinas Lagoon outside Stinson Beach.

A bird with a very long bill hunts for bugs in the mud flats.

Last stop on the road trip was at the Marin Headlands to watch the sunset. This is my favorite spot in Northern California, which explains why so many of my road trips include stops here.

Late evening glow on the rock face, looking south toward the lighthouse.

Melissa appreciates the fading light.

One last look, then it’s off for home.

All this for less than the price of a tank of gas. A bargain if I do say so.

On Thursday evening, it seemed impossible.

Twelve hours later, it seemed inevitable.

As Friday morning’s sun cleared the hillside and warmed our campsite, I looked to the 14,252-foot summit of White Mountain, set two days of doubts aside and asked myself a simple question: “how long could it possibly take to hike a mile and a half?”

Discovering the answer was one of the most remarkable experiences in my life.

I’ve always been the doubting type, and not because my formal name is Thomas. I fancy myself a skeptic, a rationalist, a realist. Two decades of writing headlines for a living have convinced me that the only thing exceeding the human capacity for self-delusion is our tendency to allow those delusions to cause massive calamities. I’m happier not expecting much from our species.

I know about the power of positive thinking and all that, but I also know that if something appears in my mind to be just plain impossible, it probably is.

And yet, there’s the example of 4WheelBob, the wheelchair hiker who not only did something that to my mind was transparently impossible, but got me believing it was possible, too. A month later I’m still marveling at the turnaround.

On that Friday morning of our White Mountain adventure, Bob’s bull-headed determination had drained all credibility from my skeptical outlook. The reality on the ground, as they say, obliged me to stop dwelling on how it couldn’t be done and start thinking about how it could. And that’s how Bob and I were finally of the same mind: We’ve got all day to reach the top, we concluded, and besides, how long could those last few turns of gravel road take?

Of course it would be the most most grueling day of the whole outing, a 10 hour, 45 minute marathon that obliged Bob three times to crawl up the mountain on this hands and butt when the trail got so steep and rocky that his wheelchair couldn’t get traction.

I hiked to the summit a few hours before Bob got there. I kicked back, soaked up the view and even congratulated myself: it was, after all, my first Fourteener. Most of the trail to the top is visible from the summit, and every time I looked down to see if Bob was still coming, he was still coming. Inches at a time, the rocks constantly tangling those little wheels in the front of his chair, him popping little wheelies to rise over them and push up the trail a few more inches. Painfully, excruciatingly slow going.

I think I was almost as happy as Bob was when he got to the top.

Thing is, my estimates of the impossibility of Bob’s quest had been correct all along. The original plan was to hike in a mile or so on the first day, camp out and hike to the summit and return on the second day. On Thursday, the second day, I hiked most of the way to the summit and concluded there was no earthly way Bob was getting up and down that hill in a day. And he didn’t.

But he didn’t have to. If he camped out one more night and made it to the top in one marathon slog on Friday, he reasoned, somebody could hike back to the trailhead, fetch his SUV and drive it up to a point near the summit that he could hike back to. Fortunately, one of the guys in his support crew was willing and able (he even sacrificed the opportunity to see Bob reach the top), and that’s how the impossible goal became possible.

Bob could go only so far on brute strength alone. Mental flexibility (and friends who wanted him to succeed) got him the rest of the way.

And from here on in I suspect I’ll be much more skeptical of people’s estimates of the impossible.