Two-Heel Drive, a Hiking Blog

This is a little known masterpiece directed by Akira Kurosawa, who made so many it’s easy to lose count. It’s about a company of Russian troops exploring the far reaches of the Siberian tundra in the part of Russia Sarah Palin can see from her back porch. One night this Chinese guy walks up to their campfire, makes himself at home and all but volunteers to join up with the Russians on their surveying mission. His name is Dersu Uzala, and he is among a vanishing breed of Siberian mountain men who live entirely in tune with their surroundings.

Here’s a video of that scene:

Dersu always knows when there’s a tiger in the neighborhood. He insists on leaving food and firewood in an old lean-to so the next travelers who find it might have something to keep them alive.

In one pivotal section of the film, he and the Russian commander get lost near nightfall on a broad expanse of tundra. He knows they have only one chance for survival: chop down as much of the tall grass around them and pile it high for insulation. Great stuff.

PBS is airing all the episodes of Ken Burns’ opus online for the next few days. Watching the first two makes me wonder how John Muir did not simply go insane. Remember, he lived in the Bay Area. And those of you who’ve hiked the Santa Cruz mountains, try to imagine those wooded hills blasted by clear-cutting.

Here’s a guy who walked through Yosemite before commerce had a good crack at the place. At the end of his life, as development has seemed to have eaten up everything around him, the crowning indignity occurs: they put a dam in Hetch Hetchy Valley (a place so abundantly scenic that it’s still one of the prettiest places in America with a 35-fathom flood in the middle of it — if you leave the dam out of your snapshots).

Granted, Burns and company produced this series for full emotional impact. I can’t count the times I felt that dewy-eyed rush of emotion you get when reminded of the things you adore. And then I think of poor old Mr. Muir: he was about 100 times more fanatical about nature than I am. Must’ve said a lot of prayers.

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We’re trying an experiment at our house in which we have no television (we can watch Netflix movies on demand, but that’s it).

This means no chance for me to share my incisive insights (which is more difficult than you might imagine, as my family shares a genetic quirk in which some of us lack certain upper incisors … this is all I will ever reveal about my teeth, I promise!)

So please plug in some comments and let me know how it’s going. I felt like I got the idea after viewing a bunch of videos last week, but I’m interested in everybody else’s thoughts. Of course the cynics might complain that there is nothing remotely controversial about the splendor of our national parks and our collective wisdom in having built them, so PBS doesn’t exactly earn Silver Stars for distinguished bravery in airing this series. (Generally, though, the cynics need to get a life).

Anyway, share your thoughts with the class if you’ve got a minute.

Cody Townsend’s day job requires him to fly down mountainsides, occasionally touching skis to the surface to prevent plummeting to certain death. The other day he posted this way-cool video of one of his adventures, which required three hours slogging up a narrow stone slot in exchange for a 60-second thrill ride back down the hill. The vid:

Flashing Hallways from Cody Townsend on Vimeo.

The blog post explaining his motivations in greater detail.

(Hat tip: The Adventure Life)

Bryce Canyon National Park, 2006

I just spent an hour watching previews and excerpts from the latest Ken Burns magnus opus, “The National Parks, America’s Best Idea,” which opens Sept. 27 (this coming Sunday) on PBS stations nationwide. If you haven’t seen it already, the 25-minute preview opens with a park ranger recalling his oneness with Yellowstone bison at 60 degrees below zero. You kinda get the shivers, and not from his depiction of the cold. Another part has a cinematographer recounting a nighttime shoot of a river of orange molten lava flowing into the ocean at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. It’s pretty cool on a computer screen; imagine seeing it live.

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A new book by William A. Hart Jr., “3000 Miles in the Great Smokies,” recounts the tales he collected in 40 years of hiking in the Great Smoky Mountains. A sampling was posted in the Citizen-Times of Ashville, NC:

The tale then turns to Rose’s stature as a wilderness boss and to a woodland expedition he made with a friend.

As was the habit, Quill and his companion sought lodging at a cabin along the trail. That night, several young men staged a rough fight to intimidate the new guests.

“After the sham battle had raged for a few moments,” Hart records Jenkins saying, “Quill pulled out his long-barreled pistol and called to his friend: ‘John … let’s kill these SOBs before they hurt themselves.’” The fighting stopped.

Something about living in the woods produces a “let’s cut the crap” perspective.
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I found this on Vimeo. It’s called “Wait for Me.”

Wait For Me (3 Minute Documentary) from Red Light Films on Vimeo.

Hiking Marin: 141 Great Hikes in Marin County

If you want to hike the North Bay, from the Marin Headlands to Point Reyes National Seashore, Don and Kay Martin’s “Hiking Marin” will get you there. Each hike has detailed shaded-relief maps, turn-by turn directions, distance and elevation gain, and ratings for difficulty and overall quality. You also get tips on great places to see waterfalls and wildlife, and the authors’ appraisals of the best hikes in the region.

What really sets this book part is the downloadable maps, which can be printed out and save you the weight and bulk of carrying the whole book, which would be a tight squeeze in your fanny pack. I respect the Martins for refusing to give away their maps online, but the process for downloading them is a royal pain. First off, there’s the matter of finding the password: Each geographic region in the book has its own section with a table-of-contents page. Each region has its own password, which is at the bottom of the TOC page.

It gets better. I’ll walk you through the process:

1. Pick a hike in the book and bookmark it.
2. Go to the Marin Trails site.
3. Click on the “Download any map” link for the overview on all downloads options.
4. On the overview page, click the “Download any map and hike” link.
5. Refer back to your bookmarked hike. Enter the hike’s number (it’s in the top left hand corner) in the first field on this page, and the first five letters of the hike’s name in the second field and click on “go.”
6. If you type all that in correctly, the download proceeds. When it’s done, a “password required” field pops up. Refer back to the password on the region’s table of contents page.
7. Enter the password, open the PDF and print the map.

Got all that? I suspect the work of Rube Goldberg’s third cousin twice removed.

This book goes for $21.95 at REI.com (with free shipping if you pick up in your favorite store). Is it worth it? I say yeah. I’ve used it quite a few times and have never gotten lost. Each hike has in-depth, turn-by-turn directions, which are handy for those of us who don’t live in Marin and can’t afford to drive all that way and back and spend half our hikes getting unlost.

I just figured if I review this book on Two-Heel Drive and somebody buys it in a burst of enthusiasm about those downloadable maps, they need to know what they’re in for. Last time I hiked in Marin, I grumbled through the download headache, but but once on the trail, I thanked the authors every time I pulled the printed map out of my pants pocket to read “go left at that unsigned trail junction” without having to stop and unpack the guide book.

One thing I’ve noticed from my few Marin visits: people have been hiking there for so long that the parks have miles and miles of unsigned use trails. Most parks in the South Bay are almost impossible to get lost in because there are so few options beyond the main marked trails. Not so in Marin. I’m not sure I’d ever hike there without a guide book.

Veteran Marin hikers might not get a lot of use the Martins’ book, but just about anybody else tempted to try out the county’s countless trails might want to give it a look.

(And if you buy one today at REI, I earn $1.10! Think of all the fun I’ll have with that much money burning a hole in my pocket. Oh, wait, I’m not renting a grass hut on the Kalahari. Alas.)

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Previously reviewed: “Bay Area Ridge Trail” by Jean Rusmore

I remember as a child hearing about these guys whose plane crashed in the Andes in 1972 and who survived on the flesh of their deceased fellow passengers. “Stranded” is their story, remembered in stomach-knotting detail more than three decades later.

The film takes a tack familiar to documentaries about Vietnam vets who return to the villages they once attacked to bring the horrors out of hiding and deal with them head-on. The guys on that Andes mountainside landed in a moral wilderness combat survivors might find familiar, wondering why they survived unscratched while the person in the next seat was killed instantly; worried about how low they would sink to stay alive; racked with remorse over their survival compromises.

The story of the survivors plods along a bit until certain wake-up facts show up on the screen: Day 60. We know the rule of threes, that you can make it a few weeks with no food under somewhat normal conditions. On a freezing mountaintop at 19,000 feet, however, your body burns way more energy, so the grim decisions come much sooner. Sixteen young men men survived for two months up there. The movie is expertly crafted to explain their side of the story, but you’ll definitely get that queasy feeling if you dwell too long on it. (Another fine study is “The Custom of the Sea”, which illustrates the pact between sailors trapped at sea and the clueless public that confronts the survivors’ deeds).

The dining-on-sinew angle, though, is secondary to the remarkable effort these guys made to stay alive. Two of them hiked across the Andes for over a week — with no mountaineering experience, no gear, no GoreTex — until they found a few shepherds in a valley who sent for help. A helicopter went back for the rest of them in a couple hours and it was all over.

The “how I did it” narrative is strikingly familiar to that of the protagonist in “Touching The Void,” who worked his way down a different Andean mountainside with a shattered knee after his climbing partner cut the rope connecting them to save himself: never thinking further than the next step, he just kept going.

Here’s an Amazon page with several “Stranded”-related items. It might be worth checking out on Amazon’s video-on-demand service, though Netflix subscribers who’ve rigged their computers for instant movies can watch it for free.

No matter which way, if you’re into the survival genre and haven’t seen it, you’ll want to. (Note it’s in Spanish with subtitles).

The little blue Bay Area Ridge Trail markers are all over the hills we hike around these parts. Typically they mark high, wind-swept lengths of trail where you rest up and enjoy the view before seeking out shade and shelter in the forests of oak, redwood, madrone and Douglas fir.

In some utopian future a single contiguous Ridge Trail will collar the entire nine-county region of the San Francisco Bay Area. While I’m not entirely sure we need a Bay Area Ridge Trail, Jean Rusmore’s guide to the trail’s completed sections is essential reading. Not so much for the descriptions of the Ridge Trail’s links—far too many track old logging roads that skirt much sexier trails nearby—but for the experience of discovering that the Ridge Trail is a common link that binds all the Bay Area’s hiking opportunities, from Stinson Beach to Novato to Fairfield to the southern reaches of Silicon Valley.

Rusmore’s guide has all the essentials: maps for each section, an index with a table comparing all the features of the parks that contain trail links (yes, it tells whether your dog will be welcome). Each hike offers turn-by-turn descriptions and encourages side trips to nearby attractions.

To me, though, the best parts are the little gray boxes highlighting the history of the Bay Area. Ohlone encampments, Spanish ranchos, mercury mines, logging mills and mines. You find out that the same forces which felled the great redwoods evolved into the forces that set land aside where new ones could take their place (it’s disturbing to think that an entire old-growth forest in the Oakland Hills was cut to the last tree. It’s somewhat humorous to learn an idiotic land developer brought in all these Australian eucalyptus trees, thinking he’d make a killing selling the fast-growing wood for lumber. Turns out it was too soft, and worthless. You’d think he’d have asked a few Aussies first.)

My only regret is that I waited so long to get around to reading this book. The descriptions of hikes I’ve done seemed spot-on, though Rusmore does tend to downplay some of the things that might annoy the purists among us. Hey, it’s her book.

In any case, you want to find out how we’re all in this together — and get some clues on where to hike in the opposite end of your corner of the Bay Area, the book is definitely worth a look.

Click here to buy at Amazon.com

(Thanks to the folks at Wilderness Press in Berkeley for providing a review copy).

Also by Jean Rusmore:

• Peninsula Trails: Outdoor Adventures on the San Francisco Peninsula
• South Bay Trails: Outdoor Adventures in & Around Santa Clara Valley : From the Diablo Range to the Pacific Ocean