Wednesday, July 31, 2013

National Trail System Expands

Just a skoch here and there.

It sneaks up on you. Take an extra nap one day, have a second dessert another, throw in a few rich snacks, and before you know it, your waistline has expanded. The same happens to our National Trail system.

Speaking from the very buckle of the Washington, D.C. beltway, U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jowel announced the change in girth. "We had a choice of either allowing modest expansion now, or having to watch the system's seams rip if we did nothing," Secretary Jowel observed from her upholstered office chair. "Plus, the additions offer a variety of outdoor flavor experiences while relieving that pressure. And we did this by adding only 650 miles to the system, which no one will hardly notice anyway, especially with the pleats."

One of the trails recently added was the Cold Smoothie Trail in Alabama, which is 11.5 miles in length, open to hikers, trail runners, and mountain bikers, and features a series of trailside stands selling a variety of fruit-loaded, high-calorie refreshments.

Similarly, California's 28-mile Noo-Tella Trail was recognized for its rich, nutlike flavor and compliant mouth feel, especially noticeable at its junction with the Sugar Bottom Mountain-Avoiding Trail. The latter received its own designation two seasons back after a years-long petition drive of the Suspender-Snappers Waddling Club was finally honored by federal officials.

Another newcomer to the system is New Mexico's Nacho Vista Trail – 29 miles of hiking and biking bliss noted for its tangy, spicy bean dips and roly-poly, peppery whoop de doos.

What might be next?

Well, recently Mexico overtook the U.S. as the world's most obese country. And although to date Mexico still has very few trails, they are expanding at a brisk rate. All this has government officials worried that the U.S. may be overtaken in yet another area once thought to be a defining marker of is uniqueness.

You going to finish that hike?

More:

US National Trail System Expands By 650 Miles

AMERICA'S GREAT OUTDOORS: Secretary Jewell Announces Designation of 28 National Recreation Trails in 18 States

Mexico Obesity Rate Higher Than U.S., Says U.N. Report

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Summer Meadow Week

Gentlemen, stuff your purses.

"I guess I just got tired of being dull," retorts Kande Feld, when asked about his new summer line of brightly colored backpacking tents. "I mean, how many shades of green are there, really?"

Feld, a graduate of the prestigious Andrew Gyn School of Design at Drainpipe Narrows, hasn't been backpacking long, but thinks he knows what his fellow hikers need. In a word, "Style".

"When you're out standing in a field, you should be outstanding in your field," says Feld, "and the best way I know of is with one of my Candy Wrapper Print tents. We have Berry Delicious, Pining for You, Nocturnal Exhibition, and Springtime in Iowa, plus others featuring butterflies and cute little animals.

Asked how he came up with the inspiration for his tents, Feld said simply, "I looked at what everyone else was doing and did the opposite, plus a large helping of precious. That never hurts when fashion is involved."

Price is $741.71 for a two-person, 6 kg ultralight tent. All tents are 100% polyester wash-and-wear, digitally printed in various fade-proof flavors, and come with a matching man-purse, for those occasional side trips out of camp.

Each tent, when shipped, is carefully packed in a layer of recyclable stage four treasure peanuts, and can be converted to gift wrap at the end of the season.

More:

Camping Tents for the Style-Obsessed

FieldCandy

Wrag Wrap to Turn Tents into Reusable Gift Wrap

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

This Is News, Right?

Light me up.

Ray Overhand used to have no trouble finding retirees willing to spend time rebuilding hiking trails. But now the does, and lots of them end up in jail to boot.

Overhand, 47, is director of Volunteer Recruitment in Oregon's Cascade National Forest. He's been at it for 17 years, and until recently has had very few problems.

"Used to be, we'd buy everybody a T-shirt, plunk down a box of sandwiches, and get three or four days of work out of them. We rebuilt a lot of trails that way. These days, it doesn't work so good."

One of Overhand's problems: money. Budgets have been drastically thinned, what with the politicians in D.C. spending all their time calling each other names.

"Even last year, we had close to 700 volunteers who managed to finish $26 million of work. Six hundred dollars worth of T-shirts and $2000 of PB&J will keep 50 volunteers going for a week. A paid crew, well there's no comparison, they cost at least 20 times as much," he said. "Geezers work harder too."

But there has been a sea change lately, with medical marijuana available in Oregon, and Washington State going and legalizing it altogether.

"Now I get these folks out on the trail, and they all grew up in the 60s and so on, and they've been toking all their lives, just waiting for the day when weed would be legal, and now it is, sort of, but not federally, and they keep getting arrested.

"Every time my crew takes a breather, somebody lights up a joint, and then the bushes explode – we got bunches of Dudley Do-Rights crawling around, talking into their lapels, and calling in the black helicopters," he said. "And there goes another trail crew."

Overhand has lost 36 volunteers this season alone. "Really screws up morale. Nationwide, we have a $314 million maintenance backlog for hiking trails, the Forest Service can't even afford T-shirts, but they're out there arresting grannies and bald guys with bad knees. I don't even get invited to birthday parties any more."

More:

Utah leads nation in convictions for drug possession on public lands

National Forest Trails Poorly Maintained

Friday, July 12, 2013

Legs Takes A Hike

On the trail with FlatHatJack.

Yeah, right. Close but not that close.

After spending the winter a bit over two and a half degrees south of the equator, at over 8000 feet (2440 m) and doing not much other than making a fool of myself while trying to learn Spanish and find a permanent residence, and eating lunch a lot, I'm suddenly not there any more.

I miss the sun. It's bright here, but there is no heat. I miss the heat. When the temperature ranges from mildly on the cool side of imperceptible to mildly the other way, and you can choose how hot or cool you wish to be by which side of the street you walk on, and where the shade is, you can regard the sun as a friend. A tool. A thermostat.

When you are a rich person in a poor country, life becomes both perilous and brainless. I never thought much about dropping $20 on fancy cheese and high-octane chocolate because I didn't have to, though I reveled in spending my $2.25 lunch money for the best food I've ever eaten. And aside from that I had nothing else to do. Other than to learn Spanish, find a permanent place to live, and then do something else, whatever that was, but when I thought about it I couldn't quite remember why I was there.

Oh, right. I walked a lot too. To lunch. Back from lunch. Up the six floors to my room at the "hostal". To kill time.

Now, back in the U.S., I'm in a different place. It's a little here like it was there, but cooler, and there's a breeze every day. I'm right on the ocean, where the mountains meet the sea, and by mid-morning when the slopes warm, ocean air gets sucked off the strait and up toward the sky. That gives us a stiff breeze most days.

But I don't have a car here either, and things are much more expensive. I'm no longer spending $28 on a week's food, if I splurge. It's a lot more. A couple who came through here in May said they'd spent $29 on breakfast. Two omelets. Out of my price range now.

But still lacking a car I still have to walk, and I do.

It's interesting to adapt to high-altitude life. I didn't have any specific problems, other than having to take it easy the first few weeks. By the time I left Ecuador I was able to take six flights two at a time and not sweat. By the time I hit Port Angeles I could walk up and down all the hills in town and never feel it.

The next step is putting my life back together. Between November of last year and June of this year, I could carry everything I owned in one trip. Now I have more. I'm headed back to backpacking.

In fact, that's the reason I'm here and not there. Being deaf in one ear helps. That happened May 15 of last year, during a four-hour period that morning. I've adapted, but I couldn't ever understand anything anyone ever said to me in Spanish, if I even heard it. Once in-country, and with a good teacher, I began to pick up the language quickly, after two years of studying it on my own, but I still could never hear any words when real people spoke to me. And that's a pisser.

And then I saw a blog post about a couple who had hiked the Pacific Crest Trail and were publishing a photo book about it. That was the beginning of the end of my life down south.

It took around two more months for me to unwrap my head and decide to quit. It's hard, after you've spent four years or so planning to do something, and then you've got most of it done, and you find that it isn't quite right. At the moment, and for the next couple of weeks, I'm still a legal resident of Ecuador, but during your first two years, you can't be out of the country for over ninety days in a twelve-month period without relinquishing residency. And I'm up against the limit. Too bad.

It'll have to be. I just got tired of fighting everything. I don't like fuss. Keeping it simple is better. It's better here.

I can go anywhere, at any time, and be completely safe, even at night. I can carry my wallet. The air is clean, and so is the water. And I have hot water in my apartment. My apartment – it's clean and quiet, everything works, and it's roughly as affordable. I can converse with people, and the system works. Canada is a half-hour ferry ride north. The open ocean is an hour west. The Olympic Mountains, well, I'm living right here on their toes.

I'm still putting things back together, but I have a minimum of equipment re-assembled. I kept my sleeping bag and hammock, though everything else went. I bought a North Face Verto 32-liter pack, last year's model, marked down from $100 to $72, but somehow they only charged me $53. It'll do to start with. Bought some hiking shoes – New Balance Minimus MT20 trail running shoes – crazy light, excellent. Got some other stuff scraped together. Time for a hike.

I live a mile and a half (2.4 km) from the headquarters of Olympic National Park. Last Saturday I hoofed it past there on my way home and got a trip permit. Had to tap dance a little about food storage, which they're touchy about but managed to slither through the process. We'll leave the exact details a secret for now.

My plan was to start hiking early, first from my apartment back to the visitor center and then onto the duffer's trail behind it. This heads straight south for three miles (4.8 km) before it dumps itself out onto Hurricane Ridge Road, after which it's another three miles of road walking to the trailhead.

But since it was Sunday, and I was on the pavement only between seven and eight a.m., things were not all that bad. Not great by any means, but not everything is sweet. Soon enough I was in the forest. Home again.

Forests here are thick. Dense. The ground in many places is covered with moss, or with a thick mat of low-growing plants. And beneath that may be many feet of accumulated duff. Some areas have not burned in over a thousand years. Much of Olympic National Park has not been logged either, so it isn't unusual to find trees that three our four people, together, could not encircle with their arms.

Some areas are strangely devoid of undergrowth. Whole swathes of mountainside are covered with more slender trees standing on ground that is paved with dry bark, if that. When lucky, I find a place or two like this near the end of the day, and they make great places to string up a hammock. But more usually the forest is thick and the brush is thicker.

I started hiking to Lake Angeles. I intended to camp there, and once there I realized why Park staff are so insistent on using bear canisters for food storage. It's like a playground. Too close to the road, too easy to get to, too flat, too lovely in a watery blue way. Everyone was there. And while some were leaving at the end of the weekend, others were coming in. Children shrieked. Adults jabbered. Food, no doubt, was scattered wildly here and there, on the ground.

All good reasons not to stay. But I did. For a while. Long enough to have lunch.

Two runners came up from below, then stripped off everything but shorts and swam to an island inside the lake's embrace. At least one of them should have drowned. Maybe both. The water was recently ice, and should have locked their limbs with cold, and sucked them down, but they reached the island and traipsed into the trees.

It was only eleven in the morning by then, and too tempting to keep hiking. So I kept hiking.

Altitude is addictive. The higher I went, the more I wanted to keep going. Eventually there was snow. A week earlier it would have been pointless to be so high, but with snow came more open terrain, and better views, and more melting, and things were not bad. Stopped at a small snowmelt stream for water, I heard a voice, then another. With only one (bad) ear working, I couldn't locate it. Or them. After some time I looked up to see a single hiker above me. Poor fellow.

He wanted to know if there were better views of the lake down lower, but I couldn't understand anything he said, so he came closer. Then closer again, and yet closer. No good.

Finally he descended enough to be at my level and I still couldn't catch on. Then I realized that he had a strong accent. Don't know what. Eastern European, maybe Russian. With only one ear I can make only a half guess. I walked over and apologized, but it seems that he'd already found the best vantage point farther up, which is where I stopped too, a few minutes later, and got my own shots of the lake. After having some water.

From there on up things were steep, and increasingly barren. A few goats searched the ground for human urine and poked the air with their horns. The trail rode off into the distance – over ridgetops, across valleys, around the sides of the mountain. This is Klahhane Ridge, a knife's edge. The air was cool but mostly calm, and the sun did its part to keep things reasonable.

But while enjoying a re-acquaintance with the goats, I remembered that only a couple years back a man was punctured by one hungry for salt, and without fear of humans, and he died, so I stayed to myself. The goats, these goats, returned the favor.

At the intersection of Klahhane Ridge and Hurricane Ridge, one finds cars, and tourists, and pavement. It's a shock. I always hustle through and no one there looks at a backpacker. They seem to deliberately not notice. Backpackers don't belong with day-tourists in parking lots, so they are ignored. It still makes me uneasy but to get from one side to the other requires a long trudge through the parking lot and down the west side of the hill until there is a small gap along the road where Wolf Creek Trail hides. I went there and hid.

For many people, hiking two miles (3.2 km) downhill to find water and a camp site would not be reasonable. Maybe it isn't. I did it anyway. I had been there before, several times, and it was a good place. It still is. Water sluices down the mountain and disappears into a culvert, and then continues in private, but before it vanishes there is a small flat, large enough for one to sit and eat. I sat and ate. Then I washed, and went back uphill a bit to an open stretch of forest with good hanging trees – both for a hammock and for food. The night was quiet. I slept well after 13 hours of hiking.

The next day I began the trip back, first going back up to Hurricane Ridge, but not all the way, and then west, toward Hurricane Hill, but not all the way there either. Just before, there is a trail to the right, the Little River Trail, and gravity owns it. It plunges strictly and far, down the mountainside, into tangles of growth. It has seen no trail crews or their shovels for years, and the upper half is badly overgrown, nearly reabsorbed into the landscape again. There are no views, other than of leaves.

Finally, far down the valley, there is a sudden bridge, a new bridge, and then a companion to it. Over the top of a finger of land there is a feeder stream and privacy. I camped there the second night, my hammock hanging over rocks and moss between the two streams, their cold breezes and their damp. It was quiet. It was good. It was home.

On the final day there was too much road walking, but it was unavoidable. A woman who lived by the exit trailhead, heading out for a walk, had two dogs along. Neither was pleased with me. I had to become a city person again and yell disagreeably. Later, the driver of a pickup truck slowed long enough to lean out the window and say that I had the nicest legs he'd ever seen, though his two companions kept their opinions to themselves.

Once again, after too many road miles, I was back on the tame nature trail behind the Park's visitor center, after lunch. Coming up out of a small dip in the trail, I saw brush moving as if in its own strange wind. I stopped. Then suddenly the brush began thrashing itself. It seemed prudent to wait. It was, because a mountain beaver came hustling from the midst of the action with a mouth full of stalks, dragging its leafy lunch past me to disappear under a bank. A treat. Genuinely.

More:

Mountain Beaver

The Pacific Northwest's elusive mountain beaver

Wandering The Wild

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Anti-Wet

Almost like a kick in the pants.

Frank and Martha didn't expect to end up in Wyoming, but it happened anyway.

"We were only going for a quick swim, and then Bang! – there we were in Wyoming, but we didn't know that at first," said Frank Flort, of Lynchburg, VA.

"It sure was a surprise," chimed in Martha Mort, his hiking companion. "It's a miracle we lived, considering that we went from Virginia to Wyoming in twelve seconds, including re-entry. I didn't singe my butt, or get a rash or anything. Pretty lucky, I guess."

The day began innocently with the couple heading out for a hike on the famous Appalachian Trail, which is near where they live, but which they had never previously visited. They were expecting rain, and so had treated their clothes with a new product called NeverWet that supposedly keeps anything and everything from, well, getting wet.

And it worked. Too well.

"Hey, it was a bad winter. Lots of rain and snow. I was sick of it. I wasn't gonna let my summer get spoiled, so I bought some of this stuff down at the Home Depot," said Frank. "I asked Martha if she wanted to try it too, so we treated all our clothes with it."

"I slathered that stuff on everything," Martha added. "My boots, my shorts, my shirt – pack, water bottle, sunglasses – you name it. I even rubbed some in my hair. I had enough of the wet stuff last winter."

The morning they started their hike, intending to go only a few miles, the sky was indeed overcast, but in no time the clouds vanished and the temperature soared. Hiking became a chore in the heat.

"Yep. That's about when things got strange," recounted Martha. "Right about then. When we decided to go for a little swim."

"Tucker Pond," said Frank. "A nice little place. Really inviting, and the heat was killing us, so we jumped in, and then there was Wyoming all of a sudden. Good thing we were holding hands or we'd have ended up on different continents."

"Crazy," added Martha. "Who'd think anything like that could happen? This waterproofing stuff hates water so much we just bounced off the pond and nearly clipped an airplane. People were snapping pictures from inside – we could see them. Then we splashed into this little tiny lake in the Rocky Mountains. Good thing our clothes were shredded by then or we might have ricocheted into the Pacific."

Another lucky break was a dozen or so helpful deputies investigating reports of a large grizzly bear in the area.

"That turned out to be Crazy Ed wandering around in his overcoat again, but you never know until you check," said Sheriff Jeremiah Johnson.

"But about then we got a bunch of calls about naked people falling from the sky. That's rare in Park County, Wyoming. Maybe you see that out east, but around here people keep their clothes on, so we had to follow up, and then there they were," the sheriff added. "Then Ed comes over for a look and gets excited and starts shooting off flares, so then people flood in from miles around to see what the fuss is all about."

"And then the funniest thing," said Martha. "Someone starts handing around sandwiches, and someone else pulls a birthday cake out of somewhere, and then a minister comes over and offers us counseling, but we just decided to get married instead."

"Right," said Frank. "We figured we might not have another chance, so we did it right then – you know – seize the moment. So here we are. We might stay. We just might," he said, smiling at his bride.

"Could be worse," said Martha. "And Ed gave us a bucket of honey as a wedding present. He's really kind of a sweet guy, you know? I think we could be happy here."

More:

You Can Finally Buy the Magical Spray That Waterproofs Everything

Missing Lynchburg hiking couple rescued after 4 days in Wyoming backcountry