Two-Heel Drive

Here’s a wonderful tale written by John Muir, recalling how he spent one terrific/terrible day on an Alaskan glacier. Stickeen was a little ragamuffin of a dog who accompanied Muir on one of his explorations of the Alaskan coast. He figured the dog would be a nuisance but as is so often the case, the pooch proved to be uncannily good company. One passage, after Muir had crossed a harrowing ice bridge over a certain-death cravasse:

After the end of the bridge was reached I chipped it down until I had made a level platform six or eight inches wide, and it was a trying thing to poise on this little slippery platform while bending over to get safely astride of the sliver. Crossing was then comparatively easy by chipping off the sharp edge with short, careful strokes, and hitching forward an inch or two at a time, keeping my balance with my knees pressed against the sides. The tremendous abyss on either hand I studiously ignored. To me the edge of that blue sliver was then all the world. But the most trying part of the adventure, after working my way across inch by inch and chipping another small platform, was to rise from the safe position astride and to cut a step-ladder in the nearly vertical face of the wall,—chipping, climbing, holding on with feet and fingers in mere notches. At such times one’s whole body is eye. and common skill and fortitude are replaced by power beyond our call or knowledge. Never before had I been so long under deadly strain. How I got up that cliff I never could tell. The thing seemed to have been done by somebody else. I never have held death in contempt, though in the course of my explorations I have oftentimes felt that to meet one’s fate on a noble mountain, or in the heart of a glacier, would be blessed as compared with death from disease, or from some shabby lowland accident. But the best death, quick and crystal-pure, set so glaringly open before us, is hard enough to face, even though we feel gratefully sure that we have already had happiness enough for a dozen lives.

But poor Stickeen, the wee, hairy, sleekit beastie, think of him! When I had decided to dare the bridge, and while I was on my knees chipping a hollow on the rounded brow above it, he came behind me, pushed his head past my shoulder, looked down and across, scanned the sliver and its approaches with his mysterious eyes, then looked me in the face with a startled air of surprise and concern, and began to mutter and whine; saying as plainly as if speaking with words, “Surely, you are not going into that awful place.” This was the first time I had seen him gaze deliberately into a crevasse, or into my face with an eager, speaking, troubled look. That he should have recognized and appreciated the danger at the first glance showed wonderful sagacity. Never before had the daring midget seemed to know that ice was slippery or that there was any such thing as danger anywhere. His looks and tones of voice when he began to complain and speak his fears were so human that I unconsciously talked to him in sympathy as I would to a frightened boy, and in trying to calm his fears perhaps in some measure moderated my own. “Hush your fears, my boy,” I said, ” we will get across safe, though it is not going to be easy. No right way is easy in this rough world. We must risk our lives to save them. At the worst we can only slip, and then how grand a grave we will have, and by and by our nice bones will do good in the terminal moraine.”

But my sermon was far from reassuring him: he began to cry, and after taking another piercing look at the tremendous gulf, ran away in desperate excitement, seeking some other crossing. By the time he got back, baffled of course, I had made a step or two. I dared not look back, but he made himself heard; and when he saw that I was certainly bent on crossing he cried aloud in despair. The danger was enough to haunt anybody, but it seems wonderful that he should have been able to weight and appreciate it so justly. No mountaineer could have seen it more quickly or judged it more wisely, discriminating between real and apparent peril.

Set some time aside to read the whole thing. Muir is a bit long-winded at times but it’s a classic dog story.

Hat tip: Ryan Garou by way of Cyberhobo’s outdoorism.

Many more John Muir writings.

After 15 years of resistance I have finally acquired a mobile phone. Of course it could not be one of those el-cheapo throwaways sensible people own. It had to be an iPhone because, well, Steve Jobs sends secret messages to my cerebral cortex imploring me to stoke his extravagant ego by snapping up the gadgets and geegaws he hawks.

Now that I’m out 300 smackers for the ultra-deluxe model I can’t help wondering if I’d ever take such a pricey device into the woods. Well, photographers regularly haul much more extravagant gear into the wilderness, so what the heck. Next question: will it be of any use once I get there?

It does have a built-in camera, which has no features to speak of. (But you can add a cool app called AirMe, whic uploads pictures to your Flickr account). It has GPS-based location-finding tools, which are major battery hogs and probably useless in the backcountry (and might not know your real location if you’re in, say, the Southern Hemisphere).

Also, the “3G” high-speed cell network is a big-time battery drainer.

I found that the least battery-intensive activity was surfing the web on my couch. Interestingly, perhaps the coolest function is its ability to zoom in on text, documents and other stuff. Presumably you could download maps in PDFs onto it and take those hiking.

Overall it’s a way-cool toy that could save your bacon the same way any other device like a BlackBerry or plain old cell phone could: calling for help from somewhere in cell range. The location tools might be able to help rescuers find you, though I suspect they’re unproven.

One nice thing to keep in mind: lots of folks will be developing iPhone apps in the coming months, so the options will be improving markedly over time.

This’ll be the last one I do for the San Jose Mercury News.

Tucked into a remote section of the Santa Cruz Mountains south of La Honda, the park is one of three grouped nearby. The other two - Sam McDonald County Park and Memorial County Park - have far more amenities (car-camping sites, restrooms, etc.) but don’t have Pescadero Creek’s trails.

Situated deep in the boonies, Pescadero Creek’s two trail heads have zero creature comforts, which probably explains the dearth of hikers. Still, hardy trekkers could hardly ask for a better setting: Well-marked, nicely graded trails zigzag through a redwood forest making a remarkable recovery from the logging era. Add it to your must-hike list.

Read the whole park profile.

B-Real down in Orange County created this running tab of hiker misfortune last month, thoughtfully saving me the trouble of doing the same. Just yesterday he scooped the pants off us Bay Area types with this update on a woman plucked from a Mount Tam canyon:

A woman hiking with a friend on Mt. Tam in Northern California lost her footing on a near-vertical slope and tumbled head over heels for 50 feet. The woman, in her 60s, and her friend hiked up the Swede George drainage. After tumbling down, she landed upside down in a tree. She eventually fell out of the tree and onto the bed of a creek. (I think I’ve seen Homer Simpson do the same thing a few times).

The injured hiker’s friend left her and hiked more than 1 ½ hours to get cell phone service to phone for help. More than 30 firefighters, rescue personnel and park rangers were involved in the rescue that took nine hours to complete.

The Marin Independent Journal’s story is here.

No telling how long B-Real can keep up his current blistering pace, but it should be fun to watch till he gets tired out.

(Hat tip: boyandgirlscouts.com … speaking of which, a must for all you Scouting types).

I made a snap judgment Wednesday to check out Mission Peak at sunset, which I had been fixing to get ready to do for ages. Winehiker Russ loves to lead this hike (just under six miles with 2,000 feet of elevation gain), and now I see why. It’s the same ol’ sweaty slog to the top, but the fading light casts a glow on the hill that you never see at any other time of day; it even causes shade in a few places, imagine that. The sunset itself its just OK on a cloudless night — it can be spectacular on partly cloudy days — but the light show gets much better as the sky turns from purple to black. And if you pick a full moon night, you can stroll down without a headlamp.

Yeah, I took pictures:

Even the cow pictures come out better this time of the evening.

Even with the hills pretty much browned over, the peak looks better in the evening because it’s the only time when the sun illuminates the rocky sections just below the summit.

Speaking of rocks, these were very photogenic in this light.

I took this just a few minutes before the sun fell below the horizon. I planned on taking 90 minutes to reach the top exactly at sunset but didn’t calculate the need for picture taking and rest breaks. Even with my timing off by a few minutes, I still had some nice shots.

Fellow hikers goof off with their cameras. There were about a dozen people up there.

Full moon rises over the Diablo range.

More summit shadows.

Really liked this one.

Lights of Alameda County looking north toward San Francisco begin to flicker in the fading light.

Shot this with a 15-second time exposure, with the camera resting on a fence post near the cattle guard high on the peak.

Another 15-second exposure, facing in the opposite direction, with some Photoshop tweaks to lighten it up a tad.

The walk back is the best part — with the sounds of night creatures raising their usual after-dark ruckus. I even heard a couple coyotes yelping back and forth at each other; a bit scary at first till you realize it’s not somebody screaming bloody murder up the trail.

As is always the case at Mission Peak, you need to be ready for a cold, windy experience at the summit, even in the summertime. It was pleasant Wednesday but it can be all over the map. Just take a jacket along.

More Mission Peak links:

• My park profile, with hard, harder and hardest hike suggestions.
• My previous Mission Peak hikes.
• My Flickr pix | everybody else’s.
• Bay Area Hiker’s Mission Peak page.
• Winehiker Russ’s Mission Peak moonlight hike.

… while they were in your pants pocket?

Yesterday on our road trip I started feeling this burning sensation in my pocket … I thought at first it was the sun coming through the car window, but it kept getting warmer and warmer. Then I stuck my hand in my pocket (I think this is still legal in the hands-free era) and noticed all the coins in there were burning hot, then I noticed the extra pair of AA rechargeable batteries there was hottest of all.

Everything cooled down after I took it out of the pocket. The only explanation I could imagine was that somehow the coins had closed the circuit between the poles of the batteries. Guess I’m lucky they didn’t catch fire or explode… that would’ve been great fun on a curvy mountain road.

Anybody ever hear of something like this happening?

So I’m on vacation this week and needed to do some vacating yesterday, so Melissa and I headed for the hills. We took Ebbett’s Pass, lunched with a through-hiker and gave him a ride into Markleeville, then headed down to Tioga Pass Highway and returned via the Yosemite High Country. We made a quick dash over to Hetch Hetchy, hoping to catch the fading sun hitting the big rocks over the reservoir; got there about 10 minutes too late but it was still pretty cool.

Let’s look at some pictures, pretty and otherwise.

Hiker Hauler reflected in tanker truck’s tank, while stopped for road construction on Highway 4 east of Angel’s Camp.

Doug the through-hiker was a few days behind his trail pals … we gave him a ride into Markleeville so he could call a buddy to come down from Tahoe, pick him up and get him caught up with the pack. He told us he’d lost 17 pounds since starting out in Mexico. We shared our lunch, he generally chowed down.

East side of the range, heading down U.S. 395 near Mono Lake. Had great clouds and sky, though it was a bit hazy in places.

The haul up to Tioga Pass was awesome.

Tree-framing, one of the things I can do. The light was great in the afternoon.

Nothing to see at Tioga Pass, as usual.

Well, this one did come out OK.

Nice clouds paint the sky.

One of the excellent rocks along Highway 120 near Tenaya Lake.

Hard to take bad pictures at Tenaya Lake.

Half Dome from Olmstead Point. In honor of all you Half Dome hikers.

Fading light at Hetch Hetchy. Maybe I just needed a better camera.

Moon over Hetch Hetchy.

The Santa Clara Open Space Authority has been piling up over $50 million most of this decade because it added a fee to people’s property taxes to pay for open space, trails and other things. A trouble-making anti-tax group sued, saying the fee was actually an illegal tax, and took its case all the way to the California Supreme Court, which sided with the anti-taxers. From this morning’s Mercury News:

The Supreme Court struck down a special fee on Santa Clara County property owners meant to pay for open-space acquisition, possibly wiping out a $56 million reserve collected over the past seven years.

The decision came in a case that has been closely watched across California, as local government officials have struggled to find new ways to pay for mosquito control, street improvements and other community needs.

The county’s Open Space Authority established the property assessment in 2001 to acquire open space from Milpitas to Morgan Hill. After property owners in the area approved the fee in a mail-only vote, 300,000 of them began paying $20 more per year.

But the justices found that the assessment violated Proposition 218. The 12-year-old law is known as the “Right to Vote on Taxes Act” because it was designed to limit local governments’ ability to raise revenue without voter approval.

The court said that since the broad land-acquisition plan in theory benefited the entire community, not just property owners who bore the burden of the fee, the assessment should have been put to a countywide vote.

My hunch is the open-space folks in the South Bay felt a bit intimidated by the excellent batch of parks owned by the Mid-Peninsula Open Space Authority and wanted an Open Space Authority of their very own, but they didn’t want to muck up the works by, you know, letting the people decide (of course the people were hoodwinked into voting for a proposition requiring a three-quarters vote for new taxes, effectively guaranteeing they’ll never get any new services, no matter how bad they need them, because 26 percent of any population will vote against new taxes on general principles).

A more apt summation: right-wing shills kill a perfectly reasonable — and cheap — property tax assessment that has the perfectly laudable goal of setting aside open space for recreation and habitat preservation. I’ll grant you that government tends to have an insatiable appetite for taxpayers’ money, but there’s no way, shape or form in which this pittance of a fee is enabling government’s worst tendencies. In fact, it’s one of the few things government can get right.

Something about that story set off my B.S. detector at about 6 p.m. today … which may very well have been when investigators were making up their minds that there wasn’t a lick of proof that the guy who fell down a ravine in Foothills Park actually got bumped by a big cat. From Mercurynews.com:

The report of an attack, which came from an unidentified 50-year-old Portola Valley man on Sunday, touched off a swift investigation that brought three state game wardens, a professional tracker and a team of hounds to the 1,400-acre park on Monday. Meanwhile, a forensics expert in Sacramento examined the victim’s shirt for telltale signs such as fur or saliva.

All came up empty, leaving officials to conclude that the man’s alarming story was mistaken.

“He believed, I think truly, that he’d been attacked,” Palo Alto police Agent Dan Ryan said. “We have just not been able to substantiate that with the science.”

No wonder it seemed so damned unlikely … though this of course killed my theory for why it might have actually happened (hey, I spent a solid six seconds coming up with that theory).

A guy on Channel 2 News just said the hiker’s shirt had no trace of an attack — no hair, no rips, no punctures. But he also noted the hiker did not recant his story.

The Hikes column in Thursday’s paper will be my last. For once it’s not an austerity measure imposed from above; it’s me being more frugal about my free time … basically all my hiking hours were going into the column, and it got to the point where I was putting in miles for pay rather than sauntering through the woods for fun.

Hopefully this will free me up to do some purely recreational hikes that aren’t necessarily bound by the limits of easy/moderate/hard hikes in within easy driving distance of San Jose.

All the columns will remain archived here, though.