Two-Heel Drive, a Hiking Blog

One of our regulars in the Trailspace Forums is a veteran backpacker who posts under the handle Tipi Walter — so called because he lived in a tipi he built himself a mile from the nearest road high in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Stories of the tipi and other accounts taken from decades of trail journals have been posted at this blog. One choice nugget from the pre-tipi years:

THE DOG
For many months I’d go to sleep there and in the middle of the night a stray black dog would curl up next to me and sleep. By morning at the crack of dawn he was gone. We were friends and we didn’t even know it. I miss that fellow.

Walter has lived our Walter Mitty fantasies of chucking all the crap and heading to the woods. He’s also gone on more than a hundred multi-night outings dutifully recorded at his TrailJournals account. One day on the Benton MacKaye Trail with his girlfriend, trailname Little Mitten:

Finally after miles the trail left the creek and became a real trail and then it was hard hiking on rocks, rocks everywhere. This part was in many ways the hardest part, trying to make time but all body parts screaming, knees bleeding and calves knotted up, arms tired and the back burning.

Mitten stumbles and falls, cheeks turn red and burning, eyes bulging out and lips seething, shouts floating on the wind going nowhere. Her walking stick is flailed against rock, a broken wish to destroy all things natural and yet she goes on, biting the bullet. We go down on the right side of the creek and there are a thousand rocks to step over. I move fast because I want to camp, to simply hear the big creek and cook and camp.

We slow down and trip, I in my own way am in ecstacy. Backpackers of all people will understand. As we continue down I am looking for an old car engine block sitting in the middle of the trail, I know once I find it we are getting closer. I see it and sit down to rest, Mitten is far back and seeing red. All is well in the Citico Wilderness.

Walter’s last wild outing concluded around New Year’s, a 15-night outing characterized by ruinous cold and tent-bending snow.
Now that’s hiking, folks.

Another one finds Carolina…

I happened upon another recent addition to North Carolina’ hiking-blogging roster, one Jenny Bennett, who moved to the mountain town of Brevard in the fall of 2009. No telling what you’ll find here (Jenny’s also an authority on the Boer War), but chances are it’ll always be worth a look.

Last week’s Gore-Tex blogger summit offers a compelling illustration of how advertising will happen in the years to come. Here’s what happened: GTX hosted 15 outdoor bloggers for a two-day pow wow designed to do two things: Burnish the company’s brand and build positive vibes online at very low cost. Of course the company had a cover story about wanting feedback from actual users, but please: 15 is a pretty scant sample size.

Back of the napkin calculation: roundtrip airfare for 15 people: $7,500; two days food/lodging: $4,500. Gore-Tex would have to pay twice that for a single fullpage ad in Outside that we’ll all gloss over anyway.

What GoreTex gets for its $12K is worth, well, a lot more. Jason Klass, for instance, first posts a 3:57 ad for Gore-Tex on his blog one day, and the next day he’s posting about how eVent is perhaps no better than Gore-Tex despite all the anecdotal evidence to the contrary.

From a corporate branding standpoint, this is positively brilliant. Professional video producers would’ve socked it to GTX for several times more than it cost the company to fly Jason in. Getting hobbyists to do the work of pros at pennies on the dollar is as smart as it gets when Joe Marketing Executive is putting his ad budget together.

I’m singling Jason out because he’s smart, capable and video-savvy — all requirements for a good blogger. I can’t say for sure that he’s an all-around nice guy, but I’ve twiddled with video enough to know that producing them for free is a supreme act of decency.

Jason’s general goodness no doubt figured in the calculation to invite him to the summit. You’ll notice that a certain trained skeptic with 20 years in the news biz was not invited.

See, here’s the thing: if I’m Jason and GTX flies me out at their expense, puts me up in a hotel, buys me lunch and gives me a really cool tour explaining how all their cool fabrics work, what am I going to do? Produce 3 minutes and 57 seconds of GoBlog smart-assery? Or am I going to be as generous as my hosts?

This is the dollars-and-sense calculation Gore-Tex made when it threw this shindig together.

None of this makes Gore-Tex some kind of Snidely Whiplash curling his mustache as he gets bloggers to do his bidding. GTX actually took considerable risk — the company can’t control what the bloggers will say, nor can it control public reaction to its summit. The rest of the outdoor blogosphere could write it off as a publicity stunt and in a fit of “why wasn’t I invited” pique rain scorn on all who attended.

And here’s the thing: Gore-Tex doesn’t want stroke pieces from pliant bloggers; it could hire hacks on Craigslist for that. It wants actual users of its gear to say what they really think (even if it’s “waterproof/breathable is neither and we all know it.”).

My decade in Silicon Valley taught me one thing too well: any business can be wiped out if somebody else invents the technology they need to survive in the marketplace. Gore-Tex honchos don’t want to be around when somebody else invents a permeable membrane fabric that won’t wet out.

I’ve read only a few of the bloggers’ reactions to the summit. So far they’ve all been glowing. So Gore-Tex gets a short-run ego boost that will be of no use when somebody in a basement invents GTX out of existence (Google did it to newspapers; it can happen to any of us).

Who should be the most terrified of what all this means? Anybody relying on “traditional” forms of advertising like print ads and 30-second spots on TV. The world is getting better and better at tuning them out, leaving companies no choice but to throw in with users of their products to figure out how to market them.

Conclusion for bloggers who get invited to events of these kind: Attending doesn’t make you a pawn in some dastardly corporate marketing scheme.

By the same token, you’re under no obligation to be polite just because your hosts were. The best “thank you” you can give a company is to tell ‘em how you see it with no sugar-coating.

Blogs represented at the GTX Summit:

Calipidder.

Gear Talk with Jason Klass

Teton AT

Shayboarder.com.

Camping Blogger.

Modern Hiker.

Rock Climber Girl.

Singletracks.

Basically there’s Danny Bernstein’s This Hiking Life and all the rest. Danny (short for Danielle) posts live from the Smokies most days. It isn’t all elk sex in front of God and everyone, but it’s almost always about great places to walk on dirt.

More fine blogs:

• Smoky Scout — Owned by a Girl Scout leader who hiked over 1,000 miles of trail at Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The other day she took her book club to Linville Gorge. “Fortunately they were too breathless to curse me before they saw the view, and then all was forgiven. “
• Postcards from the Smokies: Lots of great photography. More of a travel blog than a hiking blog, but the best way to see the best parts of the Carolinas is on foot (an observation thankfully lost on the Wright Brothers, whose Kitty Hawk exploits are engraved into the state’s license plates.)
• Smoky Mountain Hiking Blog. Newsiest of the bunch — currently reporting where the fall colors are peaking. Go-to site for trail and road closings.
• NC Lookouts: Some folks make a habit of hiking to the state’s forest lookout towers. The blog represents the North Carolina Chapter of the Forest Fire Lookout Association; author is Peter J. Barr, who penned a book on forest tower hikes in North Carolina.
• Old Dan Walking: More Smokies treks from a techie guy who provides in-depth descriptions of his hikes, but also thoughtfully provides links to the pictures for those too busy to read.

I’ll ad more as I find them. I’m sure I’ve missed a few. Add your faves in the comments.

Folks have been posting up a storm lately (must be hiking season or something). Let’s take a look:

• Adam Paul is posting great pix and commentary from the Southern California high country desert — (hey, it’s not Joshua Tree’s fault that U2 became bloated and insufferable for a few years there.)

• CampingBlogger Roy Scribner continues to ignore my example and insists on posting only useful information for camping people. (This time he revisits the 10 Essentials; he mentioned his paratrooping days and I was hooping to see something lethal on his list. No such luck).

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Tripbase.com is drumming up free publicity from link-hungry bloggers spreading the word about its series of awards for notable travel-related blogs. Two-Heel Drive ranks No. 2 in the walking-backpacking category, bested only by a guy attempting 36,000 miles, 4 continents, 25 countries, crossing a frozen sea, 6 deserts, 7 mountain ranges over 12 years.

I’m guessing a few more weekenders to the Sierra would not have pushed me over the top.

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I figured if I’m going to stick with this deals page idea, it needs a home page that’s done up right with permalinks, RSS feeds, tags, categories and other doo-dads that WordPress thoughtfully provides.

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Peaks near Tahoe, Nov. 2008

I once asked Fedak what he did for a living; he replied in English, the words all recognizable, but I have no idea what the hell it was. But it was something in high-tech, where business sucks this summer, so John’s renting a place up near Lake Tahoe and trekking the season away till business picks up.

A visit to his home page shows he’s been putting in major miles above the tree line.

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Shannon Des Roches Rocha, keeper of the excellent Squidalicious blog, has a son named Leo who is autistic, which means he a) doesn’t like crowds or noise; and b) has oodles of boyish energy that must be burned off productively. Taking him hiking is just the ticket.

(Her blog is great fun, and not just for parents of “special needs” kids).

I experimented last week with showing a short summary instead of full posts in my RSS feeds, but I’ve decided to bail on that approach and have restored the full view. Here’s how come: (more…)

In case you’re curious:

• Lowepro Off Trail 1 Camera Bag — An interesting choice for hard-core hiking photographers. It’s a fanny pack that holds two big lenses and an SLR body. Last year’s item on camera bags and packs for hikers is a fan favorite.
• Bay Area Ridge Trail: The Official Guide for Hikers, Mountain Bikers, and Equestrians — Jean Rusmore’s guide to the Ridge Trail. Reviewed here.
• South Bay Trails: Outdoor Adventures in & Around Santa Clara Valley — Rusmore’s other book for South Bay hikers.