Two-Heel Drive, a Hiking Blog

It’s late in the year for best of last year, but it’s rainy here today and I didn’t feel like mucking up already-soft trails and coming home all gunky. Furthermore, I’m going to be off in gearland through the end of next weekend, so I wanted to have at least something on the blog this weekend, as it’s likely next weekend’ll be a bust.

The year started out in most of my usual Bay Area haunts, and ended exploring entirely new trails in the Triad region of North Carolina (also known as Tobacco and Underwear Central). What I recall from my smoking days: Winston was the rough, manly smoke while Salem was the girly menthol. We landed about three miles from the Hanes Mall. But I digress (like that’s a surprise).

The pics:

Coast daisy at Montara Mountain/McNee Ranch State Park, March 29. Write-up here

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Andy Howell explains how to use color filters to achieve cool black-and-white effects. Won’t turn you into Ansel Adams but it will be helpful if you have expensive cameras and high-end editing software like Photoshop.

Adam Paul caught some great bird shots at Coyote Hills the other day.

Alert reader Ron Williams sends a Picasa album showing just how green it is at Almaden Quicksilver County Park at this time of year.

… while they were in your pants pocket?

Yesterday on our road trip I started feeling this burning sensation in my pocket … I thought at first it was the sun coming through the car window, but it kept getting warmer and warmer. Then I stuck my hand in my pocket (I think this is still legal in the hands-free era) and noticed all the coins in there were burning hot, then I noticed the extra pair of AA rechargeable batteries there was hottest of all.

Everything cooled down after I took it out of the pocket. The only explanation I could imagine was that somehow the coins had closed the circuit between the poles of the batteries. Guess I’m lucky they didn’t catch fire or explode… that would’ve been great fun on a curvy mountain road.

Anybody ever hear of something like this happening?

Trailspotting reviews the Kata T-214, a way-cool sling bag for carrying your cameras into the woods. It’s built by a company that makes bags for the Israeli military and looks tough enough to intimidate a terrorist (and might well convert to Uzi-carrying duty; good luck getting through security at SFO). Another fan reviews it in even greater depth.

LowePro makes a few sling bags, too. None of these are precisely cheap at $80 to 40, but if you’re hauling $2,000 worth of lenses and camera bodies, it doesn’t make much sense to skimp on a case. Mind you these are SLR-and-lenses bags — definite overkill for the point-and-shoot-crowd though LowePro has some interesting choices for compacts). I have an old bag from Eagle Creek that has plenty of room for my Canon A710 plus a snack lunch.

More hard-core shutterbugs might like the integrated setup from Kinesis Gear (to lust after if nothing else). This is the kind of gear National Geographic shooters take on African safari. In a pinch they can stuff the bag into the jaws of an attacking lioness.

The system that appeals most to my inner geek is the Rotation 360 pack, which rotates part of the camera bag from back to front in a snap. Watch the video to see how it works. Very clever. A steal at just $279.

Makes me think I might have to get a big camera to justify having one of these awesome packs.

Just this morning, David of Random Curiosity posted this tweet:

Getting my fill of Everest climbing by watching this: http://snurl.com/28×7z while reading this: http://snurl.com/28×89

And thus saved me the trouble of looking up something cool to post on the ol’ blog here.

(Look, if you can’t rehash other people’s work in lieu of producing original content, you have no right to call yourself a blogger.)

A reader e-mails to ask where hikers from Marin might want to live if jobs oblige a move to the South Bay. Just to make it interesting, the reader asks, could it also be at least somewhat affordable? Well, that takes Palo Alto, Saratoga, Los Altos (and Los Altos Hills) out of the picture but hey, who wants to live around all those dull moneybags anyway (just because they have better jobs, sexier clothes, bigger houses, faster cars and their very own poolboys, it doesn’t make them superior to the rest of us, right?). A few thoughts, based on my travels and home-hunting experiences:

In San Jose

Berryessa: This neighborhood on the east side of San Jose is close to Alum Rock Park and seems mostly unpretentious and perhaps less pricier than other parts of town (kiss the Rose Garden goodbye, for instance). It’s near the trolley line, if that matters, and it’s close to I-680, which means easy access to the Santa Cruz Mountains on the weekends (Steve Sergeant lives there, if you need any further encouragement).

South San Jose: I’ve heard there are housing deals to be had in the south end of town. The neighborhoods around Santa Teresa and Almaden Quicksilver county parks would be worth a look, though I suspect there are fewer deals around Almaden Quicksilver.

Elsewhere

Santa Cruz Mountains: Scotts Valley, Felton and Ben Lomond along Highway 9 are remote enough that there’s not quite as much demand for housing as you might expect, which could make them affordable. Of course then there’s the gas to drive over Highway 17, and the risk from taking your life into your own hands every day in the process and hoping the daily fender-smasher always happens to somebody else.

Fremont: OK, so it has no downtown and it’s mostly sprawl central. But it’s a pretty quick jaunt down to San Jose from there, and it’s right between I-880 and I-680, and it’s not so far from Coyote Hills Regional Park, which remains one of my favorite hang-outs (more for the birdwatching than the hiking, which isn’t especially challenging). I wouldn’t rule it out.

Milpitas: Also close to I-680, a bit less pricey than the South Bay, but suffers from the tract-house mania that infects so much of the region. This page lists lots of hiking opportunities nearby.

Mountain View: Not exactly cheap, but very close to the Santa Cruz Mountains. A careful consumer might be able to luck into a good housing deal (though Fedak, who lives there, tells me the unremarkable house across the street from him is on the market for $1.3 1.6 million).

Campbell: I always pass it on the way down south on Highway 17. It has a cool/funky (by South Bay “Empire of the Geeks” standards) downtown shopping strip. Housing might be a bit more affordable, though I haven’t really shopped it myself.

Sunnyvale: Some of my favorite hikers (Winehiker Russ and Mike and Kathy of the FOMFOK hiking club) live there; it’s close to I-680 and Highway 85, which offer easy access to most of the prime hiking areas. Little ’60s tract houses in Mike’s neighborhood were going for 700k, the last I heard, but I wouldn’t rule out finding deals here and there.

So those are the first ones that spring to mind. I know some of you live in the South Bay, so how about chiming in?

(Those of you from the rest of the world are forgiven for wondering how we can afford such stupendous prices for housing; I just imagine that I’m on vacation all year, which helps reassure me when I can’t afford to take one somewhere else.)

A travel writer mentions what happens when people try to retrace the steps — and recapture the shots — of Ansel Adams.

The first step on an Ansel Adams-inspired trip to Yosemite is to visit the gallery run by his family. It is in the park’s central area called Yosemite Valley, and displays and sells Adams’ work as well as photos taken by several contemporary artists. Before Adams died in 1984, he spent years living in a house behind the gallery and leading workshops there. Now others teach the workshops, and the gallery is managed by Adams’s grandchildren. The gallery’s staff leads free camera walks three days a week. The gallery also shows a free film about Adams once a week, rents out cameras and tripods and sells keepsakes and guidebooks.

I ordered three books written by Adams from the gallery’s Web site before my trip: Adams’s autobiography, his collected photos of Yosemite and a step-by-step explanation of some of his works called “Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs.” By the time our plane landed in Fresno, Calif., I felt well-equipped to step inside Ansel land.

But Yosemite does not often appear as it did at the moments Adams tripped his shutter. Nor is it easy to stand where he stood and capture the same images.

“I’ve had people say they are kind of disappointed,” says Glenn Crosby, the curator of the Ansel Adams Gallery. “They only know the park through Ansel’s eyes, and he was only showing you the keepers. The park is not always as dramatic as his work.”

I have to wonder: who the hell are these disappointed people?

Yeah, Adams was one of the greatest photographers to ever snap a shutter and his images certainly rise to the definition of fine art. But if you can stand in Yosemite Valley or at Tunnel View (to say nothing of hiking into the High Country) and experience disappointment, how can you possibly imagine yourself perceptive enough to appreciate the tiny fragments of it Adams captured in his pictures?

Cameras were invented to preserve the memory of visiting places like Yosemite, but no picture can convey the experience of being there.

OK, rant over. Actually, the article offers a nice overview of the relationship of Adams and Yosemite and is worth a read if you’re thinking of visiting.

Carol took some most excellent pictures the weekend before last during our camp-out at Carrizo Plain National Monument. Check ‘em out. (They leave mine in the dust).

The park district has a page with all the winning entries from its 2007 photography contest.

Sunol Wilderness, Morgan Territory and Mount Diablo are among the stars in the show. Click the link to see ‘em all. More great East Bay pictures are at the park district’s Flickr page.

Jason Armstrong shot the Henry Coe headquarters before dawn with a 30-second time exposure that creates an orange glow in the background. Check it out, it’s way cool.