Two-Heel Drive

The details:

250,000 to 500,000 circulation
WINNER
Backpacker: Jonathan Dorn, editor-in-chief, for April, May, September issues.

National Geographic rakes in the most awards; no surprise there.

Every time I pick up Backpacker, I find myself wanting to go on a camp-out. Every time I put it, down my brain returns to “comfy beds were invented for a reason and day-hikes ain’t so bad” mode.

I do have to give the magazine props for not filling its pages with heavy-breathing profiles of adventure athletes. Most of the time Backpacker is downright useful, which reminds me, I should go looking for something useful to post on the blog this morning. (Useful is dull as dirt, which is why I try not to overdo it).

Saw this on Craigslist yesterday:

Senior editor position:

Wilderness Press is looking for a seasoned in-house editor to hit the ground running in this full-time position. The ideal candidate will have top-notch editorial skills and experience project managing a book from raw manuscript to printer-ready files, as well as an excellent sense of how the titles fit with the company’s larger objectives. The ability to prioritize is essential. Skills and interests in acquisitions and sales and marketing are desirable. Personal knowledge and enthusiasm of the subject areas we publish, including hiking, backpacking, and outdoor adventuring, is important. The editor will report to the Associate Publisher and be a key member of the production team.

Yes, I asked: two and a half years of hiking-blogging don’t qualify: they need somebody with actual books to their credit. Not much like putting out newspaper sections, unfortunately.

But I figure if somebody who reads this blog knows somebody who knows somebody who’s done this kinda work, posting this might be a favor WP might repay when I decide to pen my masterpiece.

And if not, well, WP is Berkeley-based and has helped a bunch of local authors get their books published, so they deserve a little free publicity.

If you’ve done your civic duty and purchased Barb Egbert’s book about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail with her husband and 10-year-old daughter, now’s your chance to see the clan in person at a series of free events at South Bay REI stores.

7 pm, Thursday, April 3, at REI Saratoga, 400 El Paseo de Saratoga in San Jose; (408) 871-8765

7 pm, Wednesday, April 9, at REI Mountain View, 2450 Charleston Road in Mountain View; (650) 969-1038

7 pm, Tuesday, April 15 at REI Marina, corner of Imjin Parkway and 2nd Avenue in Marina (north of Monterey); (831) 883-8048.

Description from the REI publicity machine:

In April 2004, Barbara Egbert, Gary Chambers and their 10-year-old daughter, Mary, set out to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, from Mexico to Canada. When they reached the Canadian border in October, Mary became the youngest person to successfully complete the 2,650-mile PCT in the same calendar year. Join this intrepid family for slides and stories of their remarkable six-month adventure. Come learn tips on gear, planning and how to safely include a 10-year-old on an undertaking of this magnitude. Following the program, Barbara will sign copies of her new book, Zero Days: The Real-Life Adventure of Captain Bligh, Nellie Bly, and 10-Year-Old Scrambler on the Pacific Crest Trail.

Click here to buy the book from Kepler’s in Menlo Park if you haven’t already.

(Note to shaggy commie haters of capitalism: I don’t have any deal where I get a cut of these book sales; I’m trying to help Barb out because she’s recently unemployed — I’m also making a point of linking to Booksense sites, which help keep local bookstores in business).

Barb is the author of Zero Days, her account of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail with her husband and 10-year-old daughter.

As of a couple minutes ago, Barb is essentially unemployed — she’s one of the folks getting their walking papers in the Mercury News’ latest round of layoffs (See RIP Mercury News by a former co-worker if you’ve got a morbid curiosity about what’s going on at Ridder Park Drive these days).

It’s not the sexiest memoir out there, admittedly, but it has the fortunate attribute of being true, unlike so many out there. I’ve come across too many who met her PCT family on the trail. Here’s a review at BooksforHikers.com.

So what do you say, folks, how about a little trail angeling for somebody who walked over 2000 miles in a single summer?

Here’s a video describing those “class” ratings you may see on discussion boards like summitpost.com. It’s the Welzenbach System.

Class 1 is basic hiking, on trail and off; class 5 is straight up the rock face with ropes, pitons and all that stuff the GoBlog boys know how to use right (whole point of rock climbing? The ability to look down on mere hikers from a higher altitude, natch).

Video from Jason Klass and backpackingvideos.com.

Steve at the WildeBeat has posted Part II of his “Scared Inside” podcasts. If you listen you’ll get the chance to hear me rambling at a pace roughly equivalent to Martin Scorsese on crack. As long as I’m on the subject I’ll excerpt some of the many comments from folks responding to last week’s post on this subject:

From Dan Mitchell:
I’ll never forget the time I casually mentioned to one of my work colleagues who has (I now clearly understand) led an entirely indoor life that I was planning a short pack trip. She ripped into me for acting foolishly and dangerously and risking my life and putting the futures of my children in danger. There was no explaining…

From 4WheelBob:
I can’t provide any specific examples, but my entire offices is riddled with a fear of anything outdorrs that creeps, crawls, lurks and hides out just waiting to devour unsuspecting newbies like themselves - including, but not limited to spiders, snakes, coyotes, bats and rodents of all description.

From Randy L:
I cracked up a few weeks ago when one of our office workers spotted a turkey outside the window near her workspace. Our building is very near the wetlands beyond 237, and we commonly see ducks, seabirds, various rodents, and such. She was actually scared of it. She was saying “oh my god” “what about diseases”, and “do the bite?” “Should we call security?”, things like that.

From Rebecca:
I just got an internal email at work. For reference, I work in the Hillview area of Palo Alto, very near the Stanford Dish. This email was to warn people that although we have a lovely campus with pathways between buildings, we share it with wildlife and here is some information about the creatures you may encounter (attached: pdfs on how to deal with mountain lions, rattlesnakes, and those incredibly dangerous rabbits, among other wildlife).

It included a bolded statement that any wildlife sighting should be reported immediately to facilities with a full description of the animal and the location. And make sure to be especially careful walking to our vehicles and between buildings. The email had a very ‘warning! danger!’ vibe, not a ‘look at our wonderful environment - make sure you enjoy it and treat the inhabitants with respect’ feel that it should have.

I do understand the relevance of sharing rattlesnake and mountain lion information given our location, but things like this are exactly what this post and comments are about. I’m picturing a poor facilities guy sitting on the phone and taking reports of every woodpecker and fence lizard that terrified employees see.

One more comment from my exalted post on the Mercury News copy desk: Generally the media are in the business of giving people what they want. And people filter out what they don’t want.

Then there’s the business of telling stories: we are a storytelling species that has a bad habit of imposing a narrative on situations where there might not be any story at all, just a collection of stuff that happened. The almost instinctive urge to tell stories — rather than, say, provide a listing of known facts — obliges us to find the most interesting way to tell them. Or in the case of TV, the one that gets the best ratings. (With newspapers in a smoking death spiral it’s absurd to say anything we do “sells papers” anymore).

Best ways to tell a story: zero in on conflict, tragedy, irony, humor, emotional extremes, lurid “forbidden” details, departures from acceptable behavior. This tends to yield overheated copy that exaggerates dangers, romanticizes risk takers, and produces stories that attract audiences and advertisers.

The most practical solution for fear of the outdoors is for people who go there to take indoorspeople out with them and let them find out for themselves that death is not stalking them from behind every tree trunk. This is much harder than railing against the news media because it’s roughly the equivalent of taking your stamp collection to work and trying to convince your co-workers how cool it is.

But we’re not talking about collecting stamps; we’re talking about nurturing advocacy for wild places that’ll all get cut down if people remain paralyzed with fear at the concept of three hours of walking upright on dirt.

Might make it worth a try.

It’s over at my home page.

(Well, a lot of the movie happens in the outdoors and the central character does a bit of hiking to find a bunch of money that he decides to keep, putting a homicidal lunatic on his tail. So that’s kinda about hiking, right?)

Remember Eric Rudolph, that zany abortion clinic bomber who fled into the western Carolina woods and evaded a massive federal manhunt for five years? Well, I went slumming this morning and tracked down and Outside Online article from 2003 that goes on for more than 4,000 words speculating that he must’ve had help to stay alive on the lam all those years (gee, yuh think?). A diverting read, though my internal editor kept wincing at every depiction of Southern Mountain People as, well, Southern Mountain People.

A very old list (2004 was like centuries ago!) from National Geographic Adventure (which exists, near as I can tell, to stick it to Outside) profiles the top 100 adventure books. A few I liked:

7. Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey (1968) Abbey is our very own desert father, a hermit loading up on silence and austerity and the radical beauty of empty places. Early on he spent summers working as a ranger at Utah’s Arches National Monument, and those summers were the source for this book of reverence for the wild—and outrage over its destruction. But really his whole life was an adventure and a protest against all the masks of progress. He wanted to recapture life on the outside—bare-boned, contemptuous of what we call civilization—and to do it without flinching. He helped ignite the environmental movement, teaching his followers to save the world by leaving it absolutely alone.
Simon and Schuster, 1990.

Have to read that one sometime. His Monkey Wrench Gang was great fun.

13. Roughing It, by Mark Twain (1872) Twain lit out for the territory when the Civil War started and knocked around the West for six years. Roughing It is the record of that time, a great comic bonanza, hilarious when it isn’t simply funny, full of the most outrageous characters and events. It is not an adventure book, it is an anti-adventure book, but no less indispensable.
Penguin, 2000.

More great reads, which, come to think of it, would take time away from your essential blog-reading responsibilities. When will I ever learn?

The San Francisco public TV/Radio station has a bunch of cool outings outlined at its Quest page. Among the highlights: Exploring evidence of earthquake activity along the San Andreas Fault at Los Trancos Open Space Preserve, and checking out the fossil record at Mount Diablo State Park.

I realize this makes hiking seem more like a school field trip, but at least you don’t have to go there on a bus full of screaming kids.