Two-Heel Drive

Steve amassed a list of links to discussions about his “Scared Indoors” series of podcasts.

Check it out.

If you’re a gear hound, you’re probably already one of Rocky Thompson’s devoted readers. If not, the back story: Rocky’s the guy Backcountry.com brought in to be the company’s tell-it-like-it-is gear blogger. I have no idea what they’re paying him, but I do know he’s starting to build an audience, because he linked to me twice in the past week and my traffic got nice bounces both days.

The example of Rocky obliges a little trip down memory lane. (You may want to skip this if you have no interest in the early days of blogging … in which case you’d pass the sanity test.) Anyway: Back when blogging was starting to become mainstream, when the InstaPundit Glenn Reynolds became the leading online apologist for right-wingery, a phenomenon emerged called the “InstaLanche,” which described the flood of traffic lucky bloggers would get if Reynolds linked to their blogs. A 50-visits-a-day blog could enjoy a 5,000-visit spike, which caused many a delusion grandeur that lasted for the 48 hours it took for the blogger’s traffic to return to its usual obscurity.

If it turned out the lucky blogger had anything Glenn’s readers wanted to read more than once, however, an InstaLanch could essentially launch a blogger into A-List status. This would, of course, require you to be a clever and engaging right-wing blowhard, but hey, the price of fame is never cheap.

One of the challenges for outdoors bloggers is we don’t have a Glenn Reynolds who can send us an eyeball avalanche (how’s that for a mixed metaphor?). But we do have Rocky, who’s always trolling for interesting tidbits having to do with gear and might be interested in the gear-related posts of outdoor-blogging types. I would caution you to be careful what you wish for — if you’re hoping to drum up some sales for your “gear store” affiliate schemes, he might opt to expose you as a buck-chasing lowlife. (I have no fear of this because no matter how fast I try to chase the bucks, they always seem able to run faster).

So here’s to Rocky, the closest we have to King of the Outdoor Bloggers. May he make us all famous for 15 seconds.

Tom had a nice walk the other day from the Bear Valley Visitors Center.

In all honesty, I’m totally blown away by this hike, the land that it goes through, where it ends up. Although flat and easy, and no marathoner by any stretch of the imagination, it’s still nine or ten miles, and still does require a modicum of stamina and sturdy, reliable body parts, for all the tromping around and scampering about in insatiable bursts every five hundred feet or so of “look-see” forays to explore overlooked nooks and discover underappreciated crannies, can tend to do some tendon damage to already over-stressed lower extremities. Ah, the price to pay for doing what you love to do, what you live for, what you crave like a drug.

Tom notes that he hadn’t been there in 20 years, owing to noisy crowds and overzealous park rangers, but he had a fine time this time. There are some things a crowd can’t kill, like Yosemite Valley and Point Reyes, and some places you have to go back to even if you’ve promised you never would.

The Uncooped blog, which shows more promise with each new post, points to the time-honored human habit of going in circles, which results from one leg being slightly stronger than the other. The post links to an English-language summary of a study pointing out that most people are are stronger on their right side and instinctively turn to their left, which we see everywhere from the walking paths at your city park to the “go fast and turn left” ethos of the Indy 500. I liked this elemental theory for why this may be:

The basic driver behind this phenomenon seems to be the fact that all cells in nature are composed of amino acids which have a left spin. Chemists can manufacture amino acids with a right spin, yet we can’t use them. Apparently both types of amino acids existed in the primordial soup at the beginning of life hundreds of million years ago. Yet life developed only from those with a left spin. The favorite theory is that at that time - when the earth did not yet have the protective ozone shield - radioactive rays from the cosmos did more harm to the amino acids with a right spin. Yet why those with a left spin would be more protected - if at all - is still a mystery.

And yet all of us left-handed types are clearly so more highly evolved….

The Mungo Says Bah blog has some nice ones.

In case you’ve forgotten (or never really knew, as in my case), a lunar eclipse takes place when the earth gets right in the way of the sun, (i.e. right exactly between the sun and the moon) such that the earth’s shadow (lighter shadow is the penumbra, and the much darker umbral shadow appears later) appears across the face of the moon. The blood-red or orange colour is the result of the final bits of sunlight that are able to refract around the earth’s atmosphere - the earth’s atmosphere blocks the blue light and allows through predominantly the red portion of the spectrum which we see.

I hope one of my parallel-universe selves is an astronomer. I keep thinking I’d love to stare at stars and planetoids all night but never seem to get around to 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.)

Google’s search ‘bots have been lecturing me of late.

They’re telling me all the big money’s in mending people’s aches and pains, vs. doing things that cause them, like, say, walking over jagged terrain all day.

Bottom line: I should have a heel blog rather than a hiking blog.

I know this because I keep getting all these Google ads on my pages for podiatrists and heel-pain remedies. I want ads from gear suppliers and guide book publishers. I get a few, but I also get all these “heel” ads. They annoy me.

Of course it stands to reason that people who walk the most have the most foot troubles, especially those who go long distances without much rest. Hikers do have heel issues, but that’s not why Google’s ‘bots sends me these ads. They’re not that bright.

All the ‘bots know is that the second word on every page at my site is “heel,” so they assume it’s all about heels. Last week I had a post about plantar fasciitis, and I guess that’s all they needed. Now I’m Heel Central (though I must admit it’s better than when I was getting from ads from shoe stores hawking stiletto heels).

All this because I thought it’d be clever to use a play on “four wheel drive” to name my blog. How all this came to be is mildly interesting to other bloggers, less so to hikers, but hang with me if you’ve got some time to kill.

A few weeks back I did some noodling around and tried to figure out how to make my pages show up in more Google searches. Turns out there’s a bunch of search-engine-optimization plug-ins for WordPress, which I duly installed and watched the googlers pour in at an astounding rate of 14 per hour, up from the previous flow of 11 per hour (hey, it all adds up). At last count 56 percent of all my visitors were from search engines, and most were searching for places to hike in the Bay Area. All good, right?

Sure, but something else happened: I put the Google ads back on my pages and noticed, as advertised, hiking-related ads started showing up. I get paid every time somebody clicks (not much but it still means getting paid to blog and hike). Google never tells you which ads people click on, because they don’t want you goosing your content to rake in more money. They never tell you who wants to advertise on your site, either, so you’re pretty much stuck with whichever ads Google’s top-secret algorithms decide your page ought to have.

Some of the time this works out fine: Backcountry.com and REI.com ads show up on some pages. There are ads for people who make state park maps and such, and people who have romantic backcountry getaways for rent (I guess, because I’m not allowed to click on my own ads to see for sure). I got yurt ads last week when there were stories about Santa Clara County Parks buying them.

Google ads work something like this: Advertiser X says he’ll pay Google dollar amount Y every time somebody clicks on a specific keyword or phrase in the “sponsored links” section of Google’s search results. Keywords are auctioned off to the highest bidder — and Google keeps it all if somebody clicks on one of those sponsored links. If a publisher like yours truly puts a Google ad on his page, Google gives the publisher a slice of this click-based bounty.

Some keywords are worth more than others. Keywords about real estate, insurance, getting out of debt, getting over your erectile dysfunction — in other words, stuff people want to know as much as possible about because it has to do with love or money or staying alive — are worth the most.

The demand for information about hiking in the Bay Area is considerably smaller, so my keywords sell for quite a bit less, understandably so. But here’s the strange twist: Google has thoughtfully calibrated its system to automatically place the highest-dollar keywords on people’s pages. Its robots see words but don’t always understand what they mean, just yet.

When Google’s bots scan my pages, the second word they see in the title of every page on my site is, of course, “Heel.” And because humans walk upright and tend to muck up their heels, they’re looking for ways to make their heel pain go away. Doctors and pharmaceutical companies, who have the most ad bucks to spare, pay more for keywords than mere online retailers.

So, Google’s ‘bots look at my page, notice that the second word on every page is “heel” and calculate that the most profitable reader of my San Francisco Bay Area hiking blog is somebody whose feet are unfit for my site’s intended activity.

Well, maybe they’ll start hiking once their feet get healthy.

If I could do one good deed during my time on this planet, it’d be this: getting everybody who has a blog off their fannies and out into the woods for just a few hours a week.

I blogged seven or eight years before I started hiking … I’ve blogged about politics, journalism, life in California, life in Illinois, movies, music, ballgames — but the only thing I’ve blogged about that makes it truly seem worthwhile is getting outdoors, away from the computer and its online tentacles, and relearning what it means to be just one more species on a planet run rampant with them.

It seemed last summer when I decided to go local that a hiking blog had great promise in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has, I suspect, more bloggers and miles of trail per capita than just about anyplace on Earth. Only one flaw in this plan: most bloggers don’t hike, and most hikers don’t blog.

Which places Two-Heel Drive is somewhere in the gamut between fundamental contradiction and complete absurdity. I don’t think it has to stay there, though.

What I’d like to do is get the word out to other bloggers and get the idea into their heads that the best way to recharge your internal laptop is to turn off your computer after you check your e-mail on a Sunday morning and head for a trailhead. Grab a map at the sign board, walk as far as you feel comfortable, take a few pictures, and when you get back home, put that on your blog.

You don’t have to be a hiking freak like me and write about it all week long, but one post a week about hiking could well save your life. It did mine.

A few bloggers who need to get out more:

• Scobleizer.
• Dan Gillmor.
• J.D. Lasica.
• Valleywag.
• Silicon Valley Moms.
• Silicon Valley News Blog.

Well, that should be enough linkbait for a start.

Pretty much every day I’m amazed at how much better this blog is because people share comments. If you’re reading via an RSS feed, clicking on the headline will bring in all the current comments, but the comments feed is more direct and efficient, with the bonus of letting you know about comments on old posts — these are especially interesting when somebody connected to a news event chimes in because they found the post via a Google search. (One long-ago contributor to my Banned for Life page had left this earthly coil and old friends of his left condolences. Odd but affecting.)

Anyway, click here to sign up for the comments feed. You’ll be glad you did.

This one’s from Clyde Soles, a veteran mountaineer, rock climber, writer and photographer. Soles has written a couple books for climbers, including this well-regarded title devoted to the subject of knots. He’s already had one provocative post pointing to evidence that the social costs of sloth are lower than the social costs of living a long and healthy life.

There is now scientific evidence that it’s less expensive to be unhealthy. Using data from the Netherlands (2003), researchers created a mathematical model to predict lifetime health costs of lean non-smokers, obese non-smokers, and lean smokers. It turns out that the “healthy-living” group has the highest cost on society. Why? Because we live longer. And that means more expensive health interventions in the long run. On the bright side, our health costs are the lowest until around age 56.

My mom, an expert on industrial health plans and employee wellness (she built a plan for a Dow 30 company), has told me time and again that research demonstrates this notion as false (specifically: staying fit prevents expensive health interventions, while sloth causes them), but I guess that means I need to talk to my mom more — I’m sure she’s up on this study.

Be that as it may, Clyde’s blog shows great promise. His pictures are pretty, too.