Two-Heel Drive

Cool hiking-related stuff I did in summers past:

• 2007: Tagged along on 4WheelBob’s White Mountain conquest
• 2006: Vacationed at Zion/Bryce/Grand Canyon in Southern Utah.

  Went on overnighters to Tahoe National Forest and Emigrant Wilderness.

  Took Steve Sergeant’s lightweight backpacking course.

• 2005: Vacationed at Yosemite.

I slept on an actual bed every every night in the summer of 2008 and barely got out of the Bay Area. I had four weeks of vacation and couldn’t find time to squeeze in a single camp-out. Upside: nobody had to pretend they were impressed with tales of my outdoor exploits. Didn’t have any.

Lessons/memories/conclusions now that it’s all over:

• Hearing the distant train whistle from the Roaring Camp Railroads from deep in the eastern half of Wilder Ranch State Park is just plain cool.
• Also just plain cool: Walking through groves of essentially newborn redwoods already towering skyward at Pescadero Creek County Park.
• Making little movies of your hikes is not that hard — the video function on your digital camera and some video editing software is all you really need. String together a bunch of short clips, edit out the boring/too-shaky parts and whammo: you’re in showbiz.
• If you find people you like hiking with, find a way to do it. Life keeps intervening on me and preventing this from happening.
• If you’re thinking, “by God I need to spend a week backpacking in the High Sierra,” find a way to commit yourself to doing it. I spent this year thinking maybe I’d get around to it and never did.

What about the rest of you? Any insights to be gleaned from your summer adventures?

I’ve gotten no hiking done in the past couple weekends, and I’ve spent the last one healing up from a minor bit of doctor’s office slicing and dicing that has had two unfortunate side effects: no hiking or blogging. As the “she turned me into a newt!” guy on “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” noted: “I got better.”

Well, I’m better enough for blogging, but no hiking for another weekend. After taking a pretty good breather from regular updates around here, I’m getting back into a blogging mood, so the posts should start flowing again soon.

OK, so I’ve been a bit productive. What I’ve done since yesterday:

• Living with lightning.
• Ankle protection
• What absolute beginners need to know.

Check it out.

I tossed it together this morning because, well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. The page has an RSS feed and everything, so it could be fun, though it will oblige people to actually write stuff, an activity many liken to having a molar extracted.

(Not me, I like getting my teeth pulled!)

We’ve had substantial contributions of hiker lore around here over the years; maybe we can use this page to store it all in one tidy location.

UPDATE: with the new site up and running, you may as well head over there.

Hey, the domain was available (nothing there yet, though). So, here’s the deal: Having written about almost everyplace worth hiking in the Bay Area, I’m working on something new a site inspired by Life Hacker (and all the other “hacker” sites) devoted to handy hints for hikers, backpackers, etc.

My darling spouse has already contributed several tips for organizing and de-skunking a gear closet, for example.

Right now I’m thinking of keeping it down to a half-dozen simple categories:

1. Hygiene
2. Fitness
3. Gear
4. Navigation
5. Food
6. Safety

Suggestions welcome, as always (for instance, would it be better as a group blog?). I’m not giving up this site, by the way. I’m just running out of stuff to talk about.

Why not just build it into this one? Well, this whole site has been a working experiment that has bounced all over the place over the past three years; the result is something of a mess. I want one site built right that’ll attract an audience and do some good in the hiking world beyond the Bay Area. I still plan on hiking on Sundays and writing about it on Mondays, and posting links on whatever news crops up.

Got my new smartphone just in time for my computer to die so it had to be replaced. Getting everything back together has been occupying most of my spare time, but the grim task is mostly done now (just in time to head into the office).

Thanks for hanging in there, folks.

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 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.

When I paid $4.39 for gas the other night, it occurred to me that hiking is getting to be an expensive hobby, given that I live in town and all the good trails around here seem to require an 80-mile round trip.

Not hiking is not among the available options, so I’ve decided to put the ads from you-know-where back on the blog. These pay for about two tanks of gas a month, and they stave off the humiliation of begging. I know they’re annoying, but they do serve a purpose: I get at least 10,000 page views a month from search engine surfers — they’re looking for stuff, and believe it or not, they’re occasionally looking for stuff that appears in those ads.

The hundred or so of you who come by here every day or so can just retrain your eyes to ignore them as you did before. It’ll take about 30 seconds.

I’m not going to waste my time or yours with affiliate links or gear shops or similar nonsense. I will waste your time with all my usual chatter about walking on dirt in these parts, but little bits of sponsorship keep the price such for luxury at its appropriate level of zero.