Two-Heel Drive, a Hiking Blog

Steve Sergeant sent me an e-mail last night wondering about the status of the Ho Down, whose planning I’ve been willfully neglecting for some weeks now.

Here’s the deal: If y’all want to organize a meet-up, go for it, but I’m going to have to bow out. I’ve got two solid weeks of nothing on my calendar starting a week from next Monday, and I have every intention of just kicking back for the duration. I figure I’ll end up doing a fair number of scouting missions for my Mercury News column, so that should generate some words/pics around here. With any luck no more stupendous wildfires will break out (though I have to admit the Henry Coe updates have been good for traffic here).

I have vacation the last two weeks of September, which means I’m free for an outing either the weekend of Sept. 22-23, or 29-30.

Last year’s outing at Gumboot Lake in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest was great fun attended by the elite of outdoor bloggers who had the weekend free and didn’t mind hanging out with the likes of yours truly. A small number, but a worthy group. (This year I will show restraint and self-discipline no matter how much wine is available for sampling).

Here’s a page that will have all Ho Down-related posts (including this one, just scroll past).

GoBlog’s Climb_CA tells me he’s interested.

Naturally, I’d be most interested in a California/West Coast locale, though I realize I owe at least a couple of you a return flight.

Car camping seems like the best option, and since we’ve got a bit more time to plan this year, Yosemite might be the best locale. There are National Forest campgrounds outside the eastern entrance that probably won’t be too crowded that late in the year. Could get cold in the high country, but that’s why we all have our zero-degree down bags, right?

Suggestions and volunteers welcome. (Another idea in honor of this week’s Wildebeat: Lassen Volcanic National Park. The peak’s fairly easy — like Mission Peak if it were at 8,000 feet — and we could all gather at Bumpass Hell and remark on the wonderful smell of sulfur).

UPDATE: Wildebeat Steve says he’s free the weekend of the 22nd — any other takers for that one?

Last post on 2006 stuff, I promise. For bookkeeping purposes, here’s one last list of Ho Down-related links:

Fedak’s pix here.

LittlePo’s write-up here.

GoBlog write-up here.

BestHikes post here. Many more of Rick’s pix here.

Winehiker Russ’s write-up here.

Trout Underground posts here, here and here.

… and I’ll give it a rest for awhile. I just wanted to provide quick impressions of the people I met over the weekend.

Climb_CA: Much nicer in person. Tall and buff, able to scale impossible rock scrambles on no sleep with toddler on his back without complaint. Doting daddy. Dot-com survivor who handed out getoutdoors.com refrigerator magnets which were, he said, the last remants of the VC money his site scored during the Bubble years. Alpinist who climbs mountains to get away from the bugs at lower altitudes.

John Fedak: Much more talkative in person. Smiles a lot more than we see in his pictures. Also tall and buff, a competitive swimmer in his youth. Makes a living doing geeky Silicon Valley high-tech stuff but hasn’t been ruined by the money-grubbing culture. Comes from Pittsburgh, will never stop rooting for the Steelers.

Szu-ting Yi: Little Po is not precisely “little” in real life. She’s from Taiwan and doing amazing things in the United States, like leading backpacking trips and learning to ice climb in the Alaskan high country. Lives in Philly, where she’s getting studying for her doctorate in very advanced computer science. Strong hiker who has run marathons. Excellent campfire tender.

Rick McCharles: Best Hiker is a Canadian who has been everywhere: Asia, South America, all over the United States. Coaches gymnastics and recruits acrobats for Cirque du Soleil, but hasn’t had actual job for a very long time. Lives to travel, can tell you how to score a hostel bed or a ride into Tibet from China.

Tom Chandler: Trout Undergrounder is one of the smart kids in school who grew up, had a successful career in the big city and moved to a totally cool mountain town to free-lance. Knows all the cool places to camp and hike around Mount Shasta, even though fishing is his main thing.

Russ Beebe: Winehiker host has been camping and hiking since high school in the ’70s. Excellent cook, well-informed student of wine subtleties lost on all of us with untrained palates. Advocates lost art of singing around campfire (singing voice after several glasses of wine suggests why the art was lost).

Great people, a great weekend. Szu-ting and Rick paid for my gas, so all I had to do was point the Hiker Hauler northward and start living it up.

The weekend after Mother’s Day is Trail Days 2007 in Damascus, Virginia. I’ve made up my mind I’m going. Rick of Best Hikes has the dates — May 18, 19, 20 — penciled it in, and Cutter says he can help with the planning. I liked the idea of doing this even before I learned the following about Damascus:

Damascus, Virginia, is a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and is the gateway to the Mount Rogers National Recreation Area. It is traversed by the Appalachian Trail, the Virginia Creeper Trail, the Trans-America National Bicycle Trail, the Iron Mountain Trail, the Daniel Boone Trail, the Crooked Road Musical Heritage Trail, Virginia’s Birding and Wildlife Trail, and lies within a short distance of hundreds of miles of other hiking, horse, and biking trails.

Now that, ladies and germs, is a lot of trails.

The primary caveat of Trail Days is that’s Hiker-Palooza, with more stinky bearded white guys than you can shake a Leki at. It draws crowds in the 10,000-20,000 range into a town with a population of less than 1,000. It won’t be pristine solitude; it’ll be a big, noisy ol’ party. Which is all the more reason to go.

Most blogger meet-ups entail a bunch of geeks getting together for for a few hours of beer, cheeseburgers and lamenting their negligible readership. What we just pulled off with Ho Down No. 1 — a three-day campout five hours from the nearest metro area on six weeks’ notice — showed me that outdoor bloggers have no qualms about kicking it up a notch.

Next time we’ll have seven months to get the word out and help people make up their minds to come along. With all those trails, biking and running bloggers have a reason to join the festivities. Ho Down No. 2 sounds like a can’t-miss meet-up.

We drove, we drank, we hiked, we dined. We slept under a stupendous autumn moon, snacked at the foot an immense exctinct volcano. Good times, as Winehiker Russ put it.

With no further ado, here are my pictures from the first-ever International Outdoor Blogger Ho Down:

Friday night: Tom of Trout Underground
admires the campfire.

Saturday morning: Gumboot Lake is a lovely little body of water. Four determined fishermen from the campsite next door piled into this rubber raft in search of bites. To Tom’s chagrin, no fishing transpired among Ho-Downers.

Rick of Best Hikes and Szu-ting (AKA
Little Po) chat amid the morning chill. It was 38 degrees in my tent when I got up just before dawn.

Like I said, lovely lake.

Special guest blogger: Wally the Wonder Dog. He’s a mix between a bassett hound and a black lab, which gives the impression his legs were left in the dryer too long.

The hike: We headed up to a small section of the Pacific Crest Trail and hiked along a ridge to a place called Seven Lakes Basin.

Mount Shasta in the distance.

Climb_CA and The Boy. He may be all about the ‘tude at GoBlog, but he’s an impressively doting father (to say nothing of his strength as a hiker: he went everywhere the rest of us did with The Boy in a backpack carrier and hardly broke a sweat.)

Fall color at the rim of one of the Seven Lakes.

Rocky scenery on the trail back to camp.

The gang minus Your Photographer, from left: Rick, Climb_CA, Szu-ting, Tom (kneeling), John Fedak (whose ankle is mostly fine) and Winehiker Russ

Fedak explores an ammo box full of goodies left for Pacific Crest Trail thru-hikers.

Back at camp, Szu-ting and Rick further The Boy’s education.

First course of Russ’s excellent gourmet dinner.

Expended wine bottles around the campfire. Yeah, we all were a bit tipsy. After all the hiking, eating and drinking I went to bed and was asleep about 13 seconds after my head hit the pillow. Woke up the next morning detecting a definite draft and noted that I had neglected to zip up my sleeping bag. It was only 36 degrees in there, so no big deal.

Szu-ting attends to fanning-the-flames duty.

Sunday: We do one more hike, a mile and a quarter up to Horse Camp.

Uh, yeah, it goes that way.

The Sierra Club keeps this stone hut at Horse Camp

He looks like a chipmunk but he’s actually a squirrel, Russ informed us.

OK, one last look at the mighty peak.

UPDATE: Rick’s pix here.

Tom of Trout Underground has posted a couple pictures from our weekend outing near Mount Shasta. Heres’ one post. Here’s another.

I’m busy unpacking and restowing gear but I’ll try to get some pictures posted this morning.

Rick’s flying in from Canada, Szu-Ting’s flying over from Philly and a quartet of Bay Area bloggers are meeting Mr. Trout Underground near Mount Shasta around dinnertime for food, camping and chit-chat. Saturday we hike a bit of the Pacific Crest Trail, then it’s a gourmet dinner courtesy of WineHiker Russ, a campfire and more chit-chat (lubricated by some of Russ’s favorite wines) and another night out in the woods, then Sunday we pack it all up and head back home.

I’ve already tossed a challenge to a potential host of the Second Annual Ho Down: I mentioned to Cutter that he ought to host a blogger meet-up next year at Trail Days in Damascus, Virginia. He’s led Boy Scouts across the Rockies so plotting a get-together among thru-hikers should be a snap.

I’ll have words & pictures next week, and you’ll all be so green with envy that you’ll be chafing at the bit to attend Ho Down No. 2.

These are the confirmed bloggers for the Mt. Shasta meetup:

• Little Po
• Trout Underground
• Fedak
• Wine Hiker
• GoBlog
• Best Hikes

GoBlog has also invited every biking blogger on earth, but has no takers so far.

Note that Rick McCharles, of Best Hikes, and Szu-Ting Yi, aka Little Po, are flying in — Rick from Calgary and Szu-Ting from the East Coast. I realize this means that when Ho Down 2007 happens, us West Coasters are going to be obliged to travel somewhere. But we’ll worry about that next year.

For now we’re wondering whether to stick with the plan to hike up to Horse Camp — two miles with a thousand feet of elevation gain) or to car camp somewhere closer to fishing opportunities; we fully expect Tom of Trout Underground to avail us of his fly-fishing expertise. Wine-hiker Russ plans to prepare a gourmet meal on Saturday and will bring a couple examples of choice vintages. Climb_CA will bring his little boy along so we can get an early start on corrupting his morals. Fedak will be able to regale us with tales of his orthorpedic surgery. I’m telling you, this is not to be missed.

As I mentioned the other day, I’ll be bopping around in southern Utah for the next week, starting tomorrow, and will be home on the 24th. After that, final planning will happen in earnest.

As a prelude to our weekend in the shadow of Mount Shasta, check out these excerpts from an account of the second successful summit bid, published in the Daily Herald (San Francisco) on October 9, 1854:

Substituting flannel overshirts for coats, and divesting ourselves of all dead weights, such as pen-knives, combs, etc, we fell into line behind our leader at 4 o’clock, to commence the ascent by starlight. In a few moments the frozen snow presented a smooth surface to our feet, as heading north-easterly we followed a gulch leading up between a sharp ridge of cragged rocks upon our right, with a similar ridge bearing nearly east, upon our left. At first we walked rapidly and comfortably, but as the grade increased our pace decreased, until at a point perhaps two miles from camp, the moon peeped over the bluff before us, seemingly directly overhead. Planting our staffs and iron shod heels firmly into the ice, we slowly climbed, halting frequently to regain our wind, and reached, as it were, a trail or track over which an avalanche had possibly passed, leaving the loose boulders bare. Here we sat down very carefully, least we should provoke acres of loose stones into motion. Daylight now enabled us to select our steps, trying each stone before our weight was trusted upon it. We made however frequent slips, and traveled abreast to avoid the showers of rock we each set in motion, which bounding down with great velocity, probably suggested it to others, as well as myself, the thought that one false step would enable us to travel with a degree of speed much greater than that yet attained, and this too in anything but an upward course.

…. and finally, the summit:

Two hundred yards above us, the most easterly and highest peak towered in a sugar-loaf form. Addressing ourselves to the work, we accomplished our task, and clung to the rocks around the flag upon the very top. Breathing with much difficulty, we rested silently until at the suggestion of Capt. McDermit, we united in three cheers for the stars and stripes, and for the party that planted them there five weeks before. It was now 9 o’clock. In five hours we had made the summit–the whole world lay below us, and we feasted with delight upon the varied and extensive scenes presented to view from all points.

Kinda cool to think that in the midst of attending to the business of civilizing the wilderness, guys got together to do totally frivolous things like climb mountains.