Two-Heel Drive

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.

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.

Steve Sergeant’s podcast on getting into the wilderness is pretty much the standard against which outdoor podcasts should be measured. He leads hikes year-round with the Loma Prieta Chapter of the Sierra Club. Knows his way around a camp stove, too.