Two-Heel Drive

Dave and Cindy Peters have already logged their first 100 miles from the wall at Campo on the U.S.-Mexico border. They’re now calling themselves Zelda and Tarzan. How Dave got dubbed:

At Scissors Crossing we stopped to rest and make a decision whether to proceed up a hot dry stretch through the San Felipe Hills or to wait it out until early morning when it is cool.

While here at Scissors Crossing another hiker named Zoner gave David his trail name. David was dubbed Tarzan because of the Cheetah gaiters he wears along with his jungle shirt and hat. I don’t want to be Jane because David would have an excuse to drag me around so we’ll wait to see what comes about for me.

Cindy did the wise thing: chose one before some embarrassing trail faux pas did the deed for her:

Last night we had several hikers congratulate us on our 24 mile day as we came into camp at Barrel Springs. Nomad, who is a two-time AT thru-hiker, suggested that my trail name should be Wonder Woman or Super Woman, but neither one hit the spot for me. The next morning the name Zelda pop into mind, which I thought was consistent with the other names mentioned. My sons both love the game, The Legend of Zelda. I ran it by some other hikers and they thought it was perfect. I love it too!

So, Tarzan and Zelda made it to Warner Springs resort and it is paradise. The soap smells so good. And a thru hiker that lives near here named Warner Springs Monty heard about my blisters through trail talk and brought me some Epsom salts to our room. What a great trail angel!

As long as I’m on the subject of local through-hikers, I’ve been meaning to mention one I found last week: JJ, a Bay Area guy who says he used to weigh 400 pounds (down to 290 at last count, as I recall). A briefing from his first day out:

Knees good. Tired. It is much further from Hauser Creek this year than four years ago. And more bicycles. I counted 12 between Campo and Hauser Creek.

Lots of people already on the trail. I’m off for a shower after a
quart of chocolate milk and a quart of cranberry juice.

More later.

Lots of good stuff at JJ’s web site, Old Man Walking, which won’t have many updates for the next few months while he’s working his way north (the The Trail Journals link above should have them, though).

Jellybean, from Mile 43 of the Pacific Crest trail:

I was sitting on a rock out cropping yesterday to air my feet and eat a snack. I could see down into the valley and interstate 8. I was thinking Wow! Its so much better to be sitting here looking at the trucks go by than it is to be in a truck watching the mountains go by!

Priceless because Jellybean Jean is a long-haul trucker half the year, and a through-hiker the rest. Previous Jellybean journals: 2002 PCT | 2005 AT | 2006 AT | 2007 AT

A thread at trailspace.com asks: where do I start if I’ve discovered I love hiking but now I want to go along on some overnighters? Lots of good replies there already — such as: learn to sleep on the ground first by spending a few nights on the patio — to which I would add:

1) Take a course: The Sierra Club holds them every spring around the Bay Area, for instance. (Alas, this year’s Loma Prieta Section course is already under way).

2) Rent gear the first couple times: A quality backpacking kit can set you back anywhere from $400 to $2,000. Quality gear tends to last years, so you can be stuck with something for a very long time.

3) Corollary to renting: Shop on E-Bay or Craigslist for second-hand gear. Lots of people lose interest after the third or fourth time out, and many are willing to part with their stuff at significant discounts just to get it out of the house (where it’s a constant reminder that they need to get out more).

4) Be very picky about your pack: Even if you’re renting, try several out with at least a 30-pound load to get one that feels natural on your back. Walk around the store for an hour, climb some steps if they have them. A poor-fitting pack can make your life miserable.

6) You don’t really need a stove. Prepared food can suffice the first few times (this is less applicable to those who can’t get moving without coffee).

5) Make sure you know why you’re doing it. Backpacking adds a considerable layer of complexity and difficulty to a hike. It’s difficult to sleep on the ground, particularly if you’ve never done it before. Trying to snooze with all the noises in the woods can be nerve-wracking — and sleep-depriving — the first few times. You have to decide if you’re a hiker or a camper — if the main point is racking up the miles, go with the lightest, most basic kit you can stand; if your main idea is a getting a good night’s sleep and waking up with the birds in the outdoors, take on more weight but walk fewer miles.

6) Start heavy and get light: This is the only way to appreciate the ultra-lighting movement. Steve Sergeant hikes with a kit that weighs 12 pounds fully loaded and fits in an average sized daypack, but it requires all his knowledge gained in three decades in the outdoors to know how to use it, and he goes out all year, in all weather, to stay in practice. This kit is not for everybody (myself included — I just don’t have the self-discipline).

These are just a few things that spring to mind. There are tons of books, discussion boards and blogs (especially in the UK) devoted to backpacking. All of them are useful, though they are heavily biased in favor of backpacking.

There’s no shame in day hiking — when time is at a premium you have to ask yourself if you really want to devote whole days or weeks to hiking and camping, and to pony up the cash in gear and gas to do it, and to be away from loved ones, sleeping on dirt, cooking on tiny one-burner stoves, and so forth. It’s hard, but that’s often reason enough to try something new and stick with it till it gets easy.

(And never forget it involves going places where there are no toilets.)

A few choice links from the archives:

• Learning to be light part 1: the class. Summarizing Steve Sergeant’s lightweight backpacking course.
• Learning to be light Part 2: the outing. An overnighter at Henry W. Coe State Park with Steve’s class.
• Finding gear on the Web.
• Where I buy gear.

Inspired by this link at Backpacker.com, here are some tent pictures of mine in various settings:

My REI Quarter dome at At Cache Creek Wildlife Area.

Same tent, behind Mission Peak at Eagle Spring Backpack Camp.

Moon through the webbing, Immigrant Wilderness, Y Lake.

Hidden Spring, Henry Coe State Park.

Post your links in the comments if you’ve got ‘em.

Sgt. Rock says there’s only one plausible reason for duct tape on the ceiling:

It snowed all night best as I could tell. It also turned out the shelter roof leaks. I woke up at about 0330 to a bag soaked through from a drip on the ceiling. It leaked in a few spots which left stalagmites of ice on the floor but the one over me just soaked through my down bag. Now I understand why there was duct tape on the inside of the shelter on the ceiling as some previous hiker must have tried to stop a leak on himself as well.

Sarge was over 500 miles up the trail at Damascus, Va, on the 27th of February, so he’s making excellent progress. A few hardy through-hikers start out in the winter every year to experience hiking in the snow and having the trail to themselves, and to get as far north as possible before the summer heat hits. Little close to the edge for my taste, but I’m not exactly a Medal of Honor winner in the courage department.

(Yes, it looks like I’m well on my way to falling off the wagon and getting re-addicted to Trail Journals. Only takes one cigarette to get somebody smoking again, same concept.)

I went trolling for interesting candidates to follow for this hiking season. I was hoping to find some Bay Area types who are doing the trail this year (I did, but I’ll get back to that) but one journal stopped me in my tracks. It belongs to Paul Sandall, whose daughter, Emily Sandall, died on Half Dome at Yosemite on Nov. 8, 2006 (my birthday, no less). From Paul’s first entry:

Years ago I bought Ray Jardine’s book, The Pacific Crest Trail Hiker’s Handbook (2nd edition, 1996). It sat on the bookshelf and my oldest daughter, Emily, borrowed it. She was working at Voyager Outward Bound in Red Lodge, MT, at the time, otherwise living in Missoula, MT. She wanted to hike it someday with a friend, preferably male, certainly not her father. But, yes, I had always, or at least since 1996 or so, been intrigued with the trail myself.

I come to the trail now, out of need, out of hope, looking for some measure of healing, some measure of community with people like Emily, looking for strength, wisdom, but mostly hope.

You see, Emily died in a hiking accident in Yosemite, November, 2006 at the age of 25 and our world has since been turned asunder. So the trail is a thread on which to start mending the rip, or perhaps find some temporary patch.

I hike to honor my daughter, to do something she was not able to do herself, to look for her spirit in the wilderness, to hear her joyful laugh in the wind, to meet her again.

Paul is of retirement age so he’s packing in the work and planning to head up from Campo in early May. His family has set up a foundation for Emily, who sounds like one of those people the outdoors universe could least afford to lose. So, good luck, Paul. This online discussion thread has more on Emily’s accident.

As to local folks, David and Cindy Peters are gearing up for the big walk. Jeff Singewald, Elevator from ‘06, is their transcriber. If you know of anybody other locals planning a through-hike, let me know.

I’m doing the big loop at Big Basin to check out the water flow … pix & chatter tonight.

Sgt. Rock, keeper of the Hiking HQ discussion board, has retired after 22 years in the Army and is heading north on the Appalachian Trail. I started thumbing through his trail journal when this part from a post in early January stopped me in my tracks:

The plan was to get up early to make up some miles I missed yesterday. So I went to bed early and set an alarm for 0700. But something happened. This morning at about 0200 I heard a rifle shot really close. As I lay there thinking that was too damn close I heard two more with the crack that comes when a bullet gets close to you. Then there were large explosions and I looked into the draw I was beside where a low hanging smoke was drifting. I could see helmets of soldiers in the smoke and moonlight and heard voices yelling at soldiers. Then machine gun fire and someone saying “Up there on the trail”. I was worried it was me so I tried to get out of my hammock as a machine gun opened up. I couldn’t move or speak. I was getting in a panic trying to get out of that hammock so I could hug the ground. Finally I bolted straight up.

All was quiet. There was no smoke or soldiers. No gunfire or explosions. Just a quiet night. I lay there sweating, my heart pounding away. I realized it was just a nightmare and tried to go back to sleep. I lay there for hours playing it over in my mind. It seemed so real - I could actually smell the smoke and hear a radio plus what sounded like voices talking in Arabic. I finally passed back out at 0400, but I ended up sleeping through my alarm and getting up late.

I used to hang around at the Sarge’s site a lot more but had gotten a bit out of the habit … I never realized all the while he was keeping his site and helping out with Whiteblaze.net that he had never actually hiked the AT all the way — though it makes sense, it’s hard to get six months off to go hiking when your employer is the Pentagon, which has better plans for you in exotic climes.

So anyway, here’s to the Sarge living his dream. And hoping the sleeping gets better.

His Trail Journal is here.

Steve sounds like he thinks this might be a bad thing.

Steve has a point: the only way a hiker gets his name in the paper is when he dies dramatically, stupidly, wastefully, or otherwise -fully. (Although there are, ahem, exceptions.)

The problem with the blame-the-media argument is that it can be applied to pretty much everything, because the media deal in sensation — conflict, absurdity, pathos, voyeurism — because sensation draws eyeballs, and eyeballs keeps media people in rent and hiking shoes. If there were anything remotely newsworthy about the 150 hikes I’ve returned home safely from, well, trust me, I’d be making a lot more than $2 dollars a day in this blogging thing.

While it’s true that harrowing adventure tales scare some people away, these tales always attract people as well. We still had a Gold Rush despite tales of gunfights, wild Indians and grizzly bears.

I think a more pedestrian explanation for why fewer people camp and hike of late might simply be that people used to take their families hiking and camping because it represented a cheap family outing. These days, with affluence so much more widespread, people take their kids to Egypt or send them to space camps. They’ve got plenty of money, they don’t need to sleep in tents and hope their kids stay out of the poison oak.

As long as backcountry tragedies are still regarded as “news,” society is functioning about as normally as can be expected, given the limitations of the species that invented it.

As long as Rebecca’s out there in the snow, I don’t have to be.

We found a nice campsite near but not too close to the rim, and then spent the rest of the day eating and enjoying the scenery. A typical outing. The only downside to Dewey Point is that other people generally have the same idea - it’s a popular destination for snowcamping outings, especially for first-timers. We had our general area to ourselves until a large group stomped in just before sunset (we had seen them about six hours earlier two miles back - must have been a long day for them) and set up camp within a couple hundred yards of us. They weren’t terribly annoying, but still - when there is snow on the ground, you can set up camp anywhere. Why choose a location so close to others? I dubbed them the VonLoudendorks 2 (they reminded me of a group I encountered on the JMT this summer).

Click on her pix to see her swell new GoLite Xanadu (those kids at GoLite are so clever — see, it’s a dome tent, and if you remember English class — or lyrics to obscure, pretentious Rush songs — you’ll certainly recall that “pleasure dome” place.)