{"id":1575,"date":"2007-11-08T07:25:18","date_gmt":"2007-11-08T12:25:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/?p=1575"},"modified":"2007-12-03T10:09:35","modified_gmt":"2007-12-03T18:09:35","slug":"book-review-zero-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/2007\/11\/08\/book-review-zero-days\/","title":{"rendered":"Book review: “Zero Days”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Mercury News has posted my review <\/a> of Barbara Egbert’s “Zero Days,” which recounts her 2004 Pacific Crest Trail through-hike with her husband and 10-year-old daughter. Excerpt:<\/p>\n

Egbert and Chambers, who live in Sunol, started taking their daughter on backpacking trips before she was old enough to walk. By the time Mary started out on the 2,650-mile PCT trek, she had already hiked all 165 miles of the Tahoe Rim Trail. Chambers also is a veteran rock climber and mountaineer.<\/p>\n

Egbert’s first-person prose is plain-spoken and unpretentious. It’s not the equal of, say, Bill Bryson’s, whose “A Walk in the Woods” is a classic, antic tale of failing to through-hike the Appalachian Trail. But Egbert, a Mercury News copy editor, has success on her side, having hiked all but a couple hundred miles of the PCT (medical issues forced her off the trail for a few weeks) and finishing the trek in Canada with husband and child.<\/p>\n

Between 200 and 300 hardy backpackers try to through-hike the PCT every year. Most start in April or early May at Campo, on the U.S-Mexico border, and head north toward Manning Provincial Park in British<\/p>\n

Columbia (they rest on “zero” days, when they log no miles). Around 50 to 60 finish.<\/p>\n

Along the way they, usually adopt descriptive trail names: Chambers became “Captain Bligh,” leader and navigator; Egbert was “Nelly Bly,” the famed 19th-century true-life storyteller; and Mary was “Scrambler,” adept at crawling over rocks and other trail-side attractions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wilderness Press page for the book is here<\/a>. Barb & family have a site here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Mercury News has posted my review of Barbara Egbert’s “Zero Days,” which recounts her 2004 Pacific Crest Trail through-hike with her husband and 10-year-old daughter. Excerpt: Egbert and Chambers, who live in Sunol, started taking their daughter on backpacking…<\/p>\n

Read the whole thing<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[67,153],"tags":[150,512,157],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1575"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1575\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tommangan.net\/twoheeldrive\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}