Two-Heel Drive

Poking around at the BAHIKER.com discussion boards the other day yielded a couple interesting links:

• North Bay Hikes: Rob Laddish built this site for his hiking group. Lots of pictures and hike write-ups from Marin, the coast and points northward. Bonus link: Condor close-ups on a page of pictures from a camp-out Pinnacles National Monument (scroll down about half way). The site runs a bit slow, but hey, if we wanted fast, we’d ride bikes.
• Baychic’s Xanga page: One of our most frequent commenters of late, she’s been posting a link to her page with her posts, but there’s one catch: you have to sign up with Xanga to view it. Curiosity finally overcame my ingrained laziness so I became a Xanga member just to see what she’s been posting: as expected, it’s many of the sites we’ve been visiting in the past few months.
• Hikin’ the Bay… but not quite like the Dharma Bums: Gotta like any blog with a Jack Kerouac reference in the title. It’s mostly hike write-ups and pictures of the kind we’ve become familiar with. The latest outing at Wildcat Canyon Regional Park looks most interesting.

Speaking of the BAHiker discussion board, I had never really noticed the Trip Reports section, which has bunches of dispatches from Two-Heel Drive regulars like Gambolin’ Man. For instance, you can check out Baychic’s Skyline-to-the-Sea adventure.

Get this: Yet another local hiker named Tom who has a hiking site. Weekly Walker is old-school, without many of the doo-dads some of us are prone to play with, but it has in-depth descriptions of hikes across the Bay Area, with category pages hikes according to interest (one for Grandads and Grandkids) and location (no Santa Clara County page just yet, but there are some South Bay hikes in the site.)

The Footnotes page has a ton of hiking-related info.

The entries are columns Tom Davids wrote for some newspapers on the Peninsula. I liked the ones I saw. (No new ones since spring of 2007, though).

Steve Sergeant interviews Captain Bligh, Nellie Bly and Scrambler, the family who hiked the Pacific Crest Trail in 2004, chronicled in the book “Zero Days” (since trail season is officially under way it’s OK to call ‘em by their trail names).

Mary, AKA Scrambler, was 10 when she hiked the trail with her mom and dad. Though she seems like an obvious role model, listening to the interview makes it plain she’s quite a remarkable individual — bright like the sun and wise far beyond her years — almost too exceptional to make the case “well, anybody can get their kids to do something like this.” She was the star of a presentation her mom and dad gave for folks at the Mercury News in the spring of 2005.

Try to avoid the urge to wish you had such great kids; they hate it when you do that.

He camped out at Mississippi Lake, saw much evidence of last year’s fire.

Tom offers a big wet kiss to Bay Area trails.

… here I remain, a quarter of a century later, no worse for wear (except for that nagging bum ankle). But I still often ask myself, “What am I doing here?” and the call of “Bay Area Wild” always answers.

Probably won’t be much fun out there this weekend … I have to go out of town for a couple days so I’ll be getting no hikes in, either. But if somebody feels brave and  mud-resistant, Sunday ought to be a good day to check out Murietta Falls, though I wonder if most of this weekend’s rain will get soaked up by ground dry as a sponge left out in the sun for a couple days. If so there might not be much runoff, so you’d be hiking 12 miles with 4,000 feet of elevation gain for … well, it wouldn’t be nothing.

The Ohlone Wilderness Trail can have fantastic views when stormy weather’s passing through — clouds breaking up and sun peeking through and all of it decorating the rough hills and valleys.

Tom stopped by that place of general, all-around wonderfulness in Utah.

Somehow, in the conditioned mind, you’re not supposed to see or associate water with an arid environment. And yet here! –and there! - and everywhere! - it exists, flowing (mostly) uninterrupted, from recondite and ancient sources, near and far, thanks to the age-old natural phenomena of rain and snow.

He was there in early summer; might be dryer now. Nevertheless, it’s the go-to locale in the Southwest.

Steve notes that if you become a member and donate $48, he’ll send you one of the following:

• Joy of Backpacking by Brian Beffort
• Wild Soundscapes by Bernie Krause
• Afoot & Afield San Francisco Bay Area by David Weintraub
• The Trinity Alps by Luther Linkhart & Mike White
• Best Snowshoe Trails of California by Mike White

For $250, you can have them all.

(For $1 million, Steve will come to your home and write down everything he knows about the outdoors on your living room walls).

Steve at the WildeBeat profiles Ranger Laurel Boyers, who is retiring from Yosemite National Park after 31 years at the beginning of October. Boyers’ specialty has been patrolling the backcountry (which constitutes 95 percent of Yosemite). From the script:

STEVE: So of all those places you were posted back there, if you were going to get to retire to one and live there, which one would you choose?

LAUREL BOYERS: I’d choose them all! I just did my swan song of a sort, and took a trip where I went from Wawona, all the way up through Tuolumne Meadows, taking some of my favorite routes, all the way to that furthest northeast part, and then back down to Hetchy, so rode the entire length of the park. It takes ten days to ride across this park, which is quite interesting. That’s not trying to make it longer, or whatever. And I think that’s quite an important part of the wildness of this park, to think that you do have to cross a road once, you’ve got to cross the Tioga Road. But, Aldo Leopold said that wilderness should be big enough to take a week long pack trip. And lo and behold, in Yosemite it takes ten days, at least, to cross it, which is pretty exciting to me.

Steve asked me to do some poking around online to find interesting tidbits on Boyers. One gem: She’s described as “the heart and soul” of Anna Pigeon, the protagonist of a series of spy novels by the author Nevada Barr, a former park ranger who sets all her novels in the national parks.

Not sure which is cooler, getting to hike and camp for a living or inspiring a series of detective yarns.

He turned 50 today.

The Greenbelt Alliance is a lobbying group for wild lands around the Bay Area. One of the reasons we have so many hiking options is that outfits like this one are working behind the scenes to make it happen. The organization’s calendar always seems to have interesting group hikes planned. Here’s one I like the looks of:

Sat Aug 18: Limantour Tour

Sonoma & Marin - Greenbelt Outing

18 miles long, nearly 2,000 feet uphill, and worth every strenuous minute. Enjoy a beach walk, the sounds of tule elk, and a hike around the Limantour burn area on this moderately paced hike in Point Reyes. Experienced hikers only. 10 AM-7 PM Point Reyes

RESERVATIONS NOT REQUIRED

Nine hours to walk 18 miles — that’s just about my pace (I’d walk faster if I hadn’t gotten people in the habit of seeing pictures from my hikes; whose idea was that, anyway?).

I haven’t actually gone along on one of these Greenbelt hikes; if you have, please chime in.