Now blogging from North Carolina's Triad (Greensboro/Winston-Salem/Highpoint) and hiking the trails as I find them.
All New: Map page for my North Carolina hikes
Most of the content here reflects five years worth of hikes in the San Francisco Bay Area. I've created a Guide to Bay Area Hikes for those who are looking for nice dirt paths to trod in Northern California.
Can’t imagine I’ll get any hiking done this weekend, as we’re moving to our new place.
Next weekend, though, I should be all settled in and ready get out there again.
If you need some hiking bloggage, check out Gambolin’ Man’s adventures in Southern California’s High Desert.
In other news, the new Yosemite Half Dome permit system is up and running.
We’ve had two blizzards this year, the most recent arriving last weekend. Each produced a blanket of snow no more than 6 inches deep, which sounds like a pittance to those in colder latitudes but is plenty enough to paralyze travel in the north-central region of North Carolina.
Deciding to travel in this kind of weather poses an ethical dilemma — as much as I’d love to be the first one digging my car out of the lot and heading out to document the winter wonders, our region isn’t really equipped to handle a lot of traffic when the weather gets icy and the roads get slippery. “Don’t travel if you don’t have to” is the mantra from The Authorities, which also provides a convenient excuse to stay indoors.
My resolve to do my civic duty and stay indoors lasted through last weekend, when I simply could no longer bear the idea of staying inside when everything outside was coated in snow. I ventured as far as Salem Lake Park, which was suitably frosted for the occasion. A couple snapshots:
Snow lines the trees and shore alike.
Shoreline reflections.
Anyway, I had to demonstrate that I haven’t been completely shirking my responsibility to venture outdoors and report back here. Tomorrow’s moral quandary: it’ll be sunny and pleasant, but the trails will be muddy as all get-out from the melting snow. Hmm.
The blizzard that buried the Northeast this weekend left a mere 4 or 5 inches of wet, sticky snow in our neck of the woods. Sunday was bright, sunny and seasonable, with only one hitch: the blizzard socked in all the nearby state parks where I was thinking of going hiking.
Here’s a shot of the peak at Hanging Rock State Park, just up the road from Winston-Salem. The roads were passable in the daytime; things get interesting overnight, when all the snowmelt in the roads freezes.
Ice is the bane of Triad travelers all winter (which, thankfully, is pretty much tapped out by the end of February). It’s what forces parks people to close up shop on days when some of us would really prefer they let us in.
I can’t see the hiking picture improving till March; I might get some trail time in, but the ice has a way of ruling the day.
Till then I’ll have to find other stuff to blog about. Heck, if you’ve put up with me thus far, you might as well stop in now and again.
I’ve just returned from a four-day trip to visit family back in Illinois, where I hadn’t put in a holiday showing in 10 years. Two 13-hour drives in four days is some fun, I’m here to tell you. At least I got to pass through some mountains, albeit at 30 times my typical hiking speed.
I’m not entertaining any excuses this coming weekend; as long as we don’t have an ice storm (the bane of winter travelers in the Carolinas), I plan to get some dirt-walking in.
The nice thing about arriving to 14-degree temperatures up north is that our days in the upper 30s and lower 40s seem positively balmy in comparison.
The ugly flu that’s making such a nuisance of itself has visited our little household. I’m not sick but my better half is, and I couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for strolling amid nature’s wonders when one of its bugs is taking all the fun out of life right now.
Long as I’ve got your attention, might as well commit shameless promotion for the content we’ve been cranking out over at Trailspace.com. If you haven’t stopped by in the past week, here are some highlights:
And if I haven’t run you off already, please consider lending your voice to the Trailspace forums. The board’s moderators have a low tolerance for flaming gasbags, which means we’ve got a knowledgeable, civil community of hikers hanging around. We can always use more.
Also, one of my duties — lording over the Trailspace product database — has freed up Alicia, my editor, to update the Trailspace Blog much more frequently. Updates available on Twitter and RSS feed.
For those unfamiliar with how Trailspace turns a buck: Dave, our chief techie and overall honcho, has crafted a price-comparison system that culls prices and basic product data on upwards of 40,000 products from a couple dozen top outdoor retailers. Say you’re in the market for a Hennessy Expedition Asym hammock. Our comparison engine generates price quotes from five retailers. If somebody clicks on one of those quotes and actually buys something, we get a small commission. It all adds up when 250,000 users a month click their way through our database.
The rarity of posts here since I arrived in North Carolina in mid-August hasn’t been the result of redwood-separation anxiety… it’s been because my main hiking-related preoccupation for the past two months has been helping Dave and Alicia build this business. They’re hikers, backpackers, skiers and snowshoers with jobs just like the rest of us. They’re not in this to see how much cash they can siphon from Web surfers’ wallets — they could make considerably more with just a few minor compromises in their standards.
Trailspace is the rare company turning a profit while producing original content. It’s here to stay, so you might as well make use of it — blog, forum, product reviews. Nothing would make me happier than seeing my small Two-Heel Drive audience finding at home at Trailspace. It’s where I’m going to be as long as they’ll have me.
No hikes to report this week, but we did get some miles in driving down the Blue Ridge Parkway — which has tons of nearby trails, so I did accomplish a bit of scouting for future treks.
We’ve got a mere smattering of color around the Triad (had our first cold weather last week) but it’s already past peak leaf season at the highest elevations in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Colors were subtle rather than spectacular, which actually makes the big blasts of yellow, red and purple really stand out.
As I promised a few weeks back, I’ve created a few pages that sum up the Bay Area hiking experience as I saw it from 2004 to 2009.
Won’t be anything new to the regulars; it’s mostly for Googlers seeking trail suggestions.
Seems I have a full-time job now. Dave and Alicia at Trailspace.com — who hired me first to write some free-lance pieces for their site and later to help update their gear database — have opted to put me to work full-time in an editorial/technical capacity.
A lot of the work will be behind the scenes, making sure people on the prowl for tents and packs find the reviews at Trailspace and perhaps buy something they find there. And we’ll be working on gear guides, how-to’s and side-by-side product comparisons (I know more about baselayers right now than about 99.47 percent of our species).
My ulterior motive for starting Two-Heel Drive was that somebody in the outdoors industry would notice the blog, put me on their payroll and essentially pay me to hike and blog. This gig won’t be that sweet — most of the work on a Web site must be done while tethered to a broadband connection — but it will be connected to two of my favorite things: gear and computers.
I owe a beer to all of you who’ve kept reading the blog through thick and thin — the comments and the hit counts have been like getting a free Snickers every time I post. You guys were paying me to hike all along; I just took my wages in walks through the woods.
So it looks like there’s something to that old saw about sticking with what you enjoy and letting fate work things out.
The blogging will continue — at the very least I’ll be doing my weekly hike write-ups — and now that there’s a regular paycheck in the picture, I won’t feel guilty about blogging when I should be trying to find work.
I’m posting because, ahem, I wrote most of them (and Stuart of Trailspotting wrote the rest, on his favorite Hawaii hikes).
It was an ambitious project: Joost Schreve, EveryTrail’s CEO, hired me to write 25 guides to Bay Area hikes — I’ve been working on them off and on over the past two months; it’s one of the main reasons I wasn’t blogging.
OK, after three address changes and one (probably permanent) career change, it’s time to get back to this business of blogging about hiking. Main motivator: Two Heel Drive has slipped to No. 2 in the “hiking blog” rankings on Google for the first time since I started it in October 2005. (Current leader: The Sock Site’s list of hiking blogs.) This humiliation must not stand.
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