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…
Monthly Archives: September 2009
Reviews wanted for “The National Parks”
by tom • September 29, 2009 • 8 Comments
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…
First hike: Stone Mountain State Park
by tom • September 29, 2009 • 7 Comments
Got this one right the first time (for once): There’s a parking lot at either end of the 4.5-mile Stone Mountain Loop. I started at the Upper Lot Trailhead and did what’s become instinctive: followed the arrows to the waterfalls.…
Setting my sights on Stone Mountain
by tom • September 27, 2009 • 7 Comments
Still waiting for the weather to clear so I can head up to Stone Mountain State Park, which is at the foot of the closest thing North Carolina has to a front range of the Great Smokies. Stone Mountain is…
Doing some site reorg
by tom • September 26, 2009 • 0 Comments
I’m going to organize all of my Bay Area-related content into its own section of this site, for the benefit of googlers who might stumble upon all my old posts (let’s pretend it’s for their benefit, OK?). This’ll keep me…
Three hours of hiking for one minute of skiing
by tom • September 26, 2009 • 0 Comments
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…
Devil’s Path, one mean-ass place to camp in the Catskills
by tom • September 24, 2009 • 3 Comments
Gear Junkie Stephen Regenold had much more fun writing this piece for the New York Times than he had hiking the 27 miles (and 14,000 feet of elevation gain) in the notorious Devil’s Path west of *West Saugerties, New York.…
That old gray GPS ain’t what it used to be
by tom • September 23, 2009 • 4 Comments
Posting GPS mash-ups of my hikes at EveryTrail has been an education in the law of unintended consequences. Consumer GPS units came to market to do for all Americans what they once did only for the military: help navigate unfamiliar…
New Guides feature at EveryTrail.com
by tom • September 22, 2009 • 0 Comments
I’m posting because, ahem, I wrote most of them (and Stuart of Trailspotting wrote the rest, on his favorite Hawaii hikes). It was an ambitious project: Joost Schreve, EveryTrail’s CEO, hired me to write 25 guides to Bay Area hikes…