The San Juan Mountains Are Neat-O

So I survived the three months of my surgery rotation only by imagining the promise of the San Juan Mountains in my future, and what a promise it was. Somehow all my wanderings around the Western U.S. had not taken me to them, and last week with trusty pal Dorothy I finally set off to correct this. Interestingly, my neglect of the San Juans and CO Rockies generally seems to be shared by my fellow Californians - we noticed a dearth of CA plates, but no shortage of TX, OK and KS. The route, which was every bit as awesome as it looks:



(Geek point: to figure out the best trip, I prioritized what I wanted to do, then used an online Traveling Salesman solver and added nodes sequentially, seeing where there were significant jumps in travel time. Not surprisingly, there was a jump in travel time for paying my respects to Caballo Blanco by going for a run in Gila Natl Forest or going to the Oklahoma Panhandle just because.  I will definitely be planning future roadtrips this way.)

You will notice on that route a visit to Flagstaff, a cool town that people are unfortunately finally discovering; Wupatki Ruins (including the ball court and wind cave that I forgot about) and finally entered the Navajo Nation, which I seem unable to permanently escape. There we saw easily the most amazing rainbow of our lives. We stopped for the obligatory fry bread and passed through Monument Valley and Mexican Hat. Notes: don't eat fry bread with honey while driving. Monument Valley is oddly unsettling at dusk. Mexican Hat has a little restaurant (the Olde Bridge Grill) with great lamb dishes overlooking the San Juan River near the famous goosenecks. And finally: the Four Corners area does in fact close at night. But eff 'em because it's not really the Four Corners anyway.

Wupatki Ruins, north of Flagstaff.   A ball-court at Wupatki.   A double-rainbow in Navajo Nation.  We seemed to be driving into the base of it for 30 minutes.  I didn't ask what does it mean.   From there we passed through Cortez on the way to Durango. We decided not to go back to Mesa Verde and Hovenweep Natl Monument. Cool though they are, especially the coded steps, my travel companion told me that where she's from there are thousand-year-old dwellings all over the place so she wasn't so impressed anyway. Durango bills itself as a Four Corners-area town but SW Colorado is the outgroup of the four states that come together in that region. Because it's higher it's greener; Durango just looks different. Once arriving in Durango we recognized that it apparently has a law that only awesome things are allowed to be there. The mountains and trails around it are of course spectacular, plus there are brewpubs and fun restaurants, plus there's a hiking train (!) plus just randomly one day there was a plane taking off with a glider in tow right next to town.  Even the flea market is awesome (see the scorpion-lamp below):

Scorpion Lamp by Ron Howell.  Check out bracelets, lamps and more here.  He's a cool guy and he only makes dragon and scorpion stuff.  Ron doesn't screw around.
The only downside is that my Jeep Liberty kicked the bucket in February and there were a number of trails we couldn't get to without a 4WD.  It's not like California dirt roads (i.e. getting to Holy Jim Falls and Santiago Peak in the Trabuco Unit of Cleveland NF) - when Coloradans say 4WD-only, they're serious.  The first day: Engineer Peak, starting at Coal Bank Pass. Every day we got chased by thunder. In California we don't usually have this problem, but in Colorado every year people are killed by lightning. Lesson from this trip: when hiking Colorado peaks in the summer, start early. Early early early!

Famous image of a woman on a mountain observation deck.  Lightning struck within minutes of this picture being taken, badly injuring her. Don't put yourself in this position in CO in the summer, start early!  Here's one guy who got off easy.
Post-glacial kettle-pond On the way to Engineer Peak.

A rock glacier on the north side of Engineer.


Landscape with sasquatch.



 

The area north of Durango, around Silverton where we did most of our San Juan explorage.
Afterward we headed into Silverton, a town which I absolutely fell in love with.  Why am I so smitten by this struggling mining town full of eccentrics?

- It's full of eccentrics.
- At over 9,000', only Leadville is higher.
- It has its own 100 miler (the Hardrock 100), most recently won by Hal Koerner. (Go there for photos if for no other reason.)
- Of course it's surrounded by amazing hikes and climbs.
- As if to lure me in, the first business I walked into (an old Victorian Hotel) was showing Blade Runner, my favorite movie of all time.  (Actually it kind of spooked me.  Reminds me of that one bit from Bradbury's Martian Chronicles.)
- Finally, this tiny town has not one by two restaurants that serve Rocky Mountain Oysters. (More later.)  One such establishment helped me trick my travel companion with a Jackalope, while serving us Durango Brewing Company's excellent blueberry beer.  (Does anyone know where we can get this in CA?!?!)



Rocky Mountain Oysters, which we euphemistically called "nuts".  Someone (not me) insisted on coming back a second night in a row for these, so delicious did she find them the first time - which led to me on subsequent evenings to sleep uneasily in a protective position.
The next day, still in the San Juans, we headed up to Ice Lake, which may have been my favorite of the trip.

 If you told me the world was created starting from this place, I might not be surprised.

It was during this hike that my companion advanced her controversial theory that people of Germanic descent enjoy and are better at trail-running and hiking in temperate or boreal forest because we are after all a post-glacial forest people. My counterargument to her: say no to drugs.

This fellow was insultingly relaxed.  As in, he actually relaxed at us seemingly to prove a point. 

The lake was pretty cool, so we took some video, although we dared not dawdle due to the hail and thunder.  Don't ask me what those people were doing camping up there.




We also took video of a less-relaxed marmot who lived by the lake and who was telling us what's what.


The next day we went up to Ouray (pronounced by locals "yeRAY" - people in Denver, take it up with them, not with me), where we hiked to the Bridge of Heaven.  Not as high as the area around Silverton and a little drier - this was actually in Uncompahgre National Forest.  Ouray is where much of the original True Grit was filmed.  It was also the inspiration for Galt's Gulch in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, although there was no solid gold dollar sign hanging over the valley.  (I did once see one near Cholame, CA once, but that's another story.)   A great brewpub, real live cowboys, and of course more trails.  Ouray seems to have developed better than Silverton.

I was sure glad to get above the gritty urban hustle and bustle of Ouray.  (Above, lower right.)   

 The camera didn't believe how green these trees were.
I took a couple videos getting up near the top. When I was coming back down I decided to record a little bit of the run (sorry for the Blair Witch motion-sickness-prone among you). I had to stop and tie my shoe so as not to take the fast way back down to Ouray.



After we came back down we chillaxed by the car at the stream and looked at trees and clouds, after which time we headed up to Montrose.

Before leaving the San Juans, a geography note: Shotgun Peak in Rio Grande Natl Forest in the southeastern side of the San Juans looks very strange geologically.   See all those valleys east-southeast of the msa?  If you run across this article searching or by a news alert, and you have some clue, drop a comment - I'm curious as heck what's going on there.


Things change when you get north of Ridgway. You're out of the San Juans, and it gets very dry and flat and you feel like you're in New Mexico or Utah. Black Canyon of the Gunnison is there, and it is, as one hotelier put it, "Well...it's a big canyon." If you're in the area see it, but I wouldn't go out of my way.



It is at this point you will notice a dearth of (good quality) pictures - because Dorothy lost her phone at the Mt. Elbert Trailhead (if you see it email me! LOL!).  The upside is that there are few pictures of me with a beard, which she made me grow.  The only record is me at the summit, which a nice fellow on top took and sent to me.

So I've bagged the #1 and #2 peaks in the lower 48.  SWEET.  I also saw a pika during the climb, way above the tree or even the grass-line.  We ended up racing back down as dark clouds gathered.  Why?  Thunder.  Start early!

From there, we headed to Boulder to see friends Dave and Jacqui. It was really good to catch up with them (thanks guys) and good to experience some actual heat. On the way from Elbert to Boulder we realized we'd never hike all the NFs in Colorado. For that matter I still haven't been to Rocky Mountain Natl Park! But Dave took me on a nice run up the Flatirons right next to Boulder.


This is the knife that cut Joe Simpson's rope - i.e. the guy from Touching the Void. In Neptune Mountaineering in Boulder.
From there, someone was too good to drive back to San Diego, so I took the Princess to DIA, leaving poor me all by my lonesome. Actually there was cool stuff on the way back. I finally got to drive up to Pike's Peak (wanted to see how the car did at 14,000'; would've run but no time); checked out the Garden of the Gods (red rocks below); and then drove the amazingly empty strentch of I-25 from the Springs to Santa Fe. There are two things out there, Jack and Sh*t, and a whole lot of 'em at that.

A special note on Santa Fe:  what a cool little town.  Again, somehow I'd passed by or quickly through this place in the past, in retrospect to my detriment.  The old town and Plaza Mayor are gorgeous and Maria's New Mexico Kitchen is in the coolest little-big adobe with the tastiest food ever.

A church door in Santa Fe's old town.

It was damn hot south of Albuquerque even at night, so I shouldn't have been so surprised to see that sidewinder crawling across the highway in my headlights. Sorry guy.

At daybreak I got off the highway at Socorro to head over to the Very Large Array (VLA), a radiotelescope installation I've been obsessed with for a while.  If you've seen Contact or 2010 or Terminator Salvation, you've seen the VLA.

This was a wall of post-it notes from visitors who wanted to leave messages for the astronomers who run the place.  Below:  this was my own helpful note, after having seen Terminator Salvation. But I think I was too late because the place was completely unmanned. I didn't see a single person the whole time I was there, even in the (open) visitor center.

Originally after the VLA I was going to head down to Gila NF to pay my respects to the late Caballo Blanco, but there had just been a fire there and it's out of the way anyway; I'll get there some other time. I'm not sad since I ended up being amazed by the greenness of western NM/eastern AZ at this time of year. This is probably the most surprised I've ever been by the way a part of the U.S. looks. They also have cool (weird) names for towns. Right after this one, I went through Omega also.

After that I paid a visit to the Mogollon Rim in Sitgreaves Natl Forest, Arizona. It was so green that there was a fern-filled valley in one place (sorry, no pics) and plenty of awesome trails; I got in one last run on my last day.



Above:  the Mogollon Rim is that green stripe. It's the southwestern edge of the Colorado Plateau. The running was fantastic but pretty hot (90 F) even at 7500'; then again, let's not get carried away complaining since after all it was Arizona in August.

During the run I saw a fire starting on a distant peak, which by the time I was getting out of the Natl Forest toward Mesa had blossomed into a full-on fire. There was dry lightning all around. The way back included normal Phoenix traffic, the endless emptiness of I-8 west of Phoenix, a sandstorm in Yuma, the fires in the mountains here, and almost hitting a flying owl on I-8. It was like a fantasy novel or something. I fought the demon horde, then crossed the Empty Quarter, survived the smothering sands, then braved the land of fire and darkness. One does not simply drive into Mordor.)


Yuma. It might actually look better when you can't see it.  Imagine all that grit in your teeth, which is what happens when you have to get out to pump gas.


Coming up the east side of the Peninsular Range on I-8.  The fires to the left (from my vantage point, south in the range, in Mexico) were much bigger than what remained of the San Diego County fires at that point, although they were less reported here.  The sunset they produced was spectacular.

This trip was a blast and was exactly what I needed to unwind after surgery.  Thanks to Dave and Jacqui for putting us up/putting up with us on Friday night, Jason for hiking tips, and Dorothy for being the best road trip buddy EVAR!


[Added later for your enjoyment if you travel in the area as well as my own later consultation:

- Dave Casler's blog, which has a huge amount of SW Colorado information.
- The Excellent 4 Corners Hikes of the Ancients.
- An amazing gallery by Matt Trappe from the 2012 Hardrock 100 Miler around Silverton.
- Hal Koerner's race report from his victory in that same race.

Thanks to those of you who put this information online to help the rest of us enjoy the area!]

Fires Here and in Mexico

Thanks to the firefighters who keep us safe. In case you missed it somehow, this week we've been having fires in East San Diego County. Take this opportunity to thank a fire fighter or buy him/her* a beer, and to make sure your family knows your evacation plan. What, you don't have one? (Seriously, this takes 5-10 minutes and could make all the difference.)
Like this but from further away. From jeffwarnerphoto.blogspot.com

I mentioned the fires in Mexico because yesterday (Sunday 12 August) as I was coming back from my trip, as I climbed the backside of our piece of the Peninsular Range (i.e. the Descanso unit of Cleveland NF) I could see a little smoke to the right (north) and a lot billowing from the left (south). The northern fire must have been the remnants of the Chihuahua fire, and the southern one must have been in Mexico - because it was huge. At sunset it was spectacular, eating up the side of a mountain down in baja. Of course, there's essentially an information black hole south of the border. Consequently we hear nothing about that, even though fire doesn't respect borders and threatens property on this side of the line too.

San Diego Climber Dies in Andes

Ben Horne was a graduate student in the economics program at UCSD, and he was lost along with his partner in the Andes last week. A lot of people at the med school knew him, although I am not one. My heart goes out to family and friends. I realize that it may seem inappropriate to say this now, but here goes. People absolutely love doing things like mountain climbing, but it's dangerous - that's part of the addiction - but the question is always the risk-benefit ratio. What do we get, really, by risking our lives doing it? Whatever the percentage chance of disaster, is it a good trade? I'm willing to risk offending people if someone reads this and decides not to do something risky, and in so doing fewer hearts break in the future. By all accounts Ben was a great guy with a fantastic life ahead of him, a life which I'm sure his loved ones would say was too dear a price to pay. Read more about him here.

Sunrise Powerlink Goes Online

It's a tradeoff: we have a better power grid and a way to get solar energy from Imperial County to San Diego, but at the expense of big powerlines cutting across the backcountry and increased fire danger. They were dedicated today and have been in service since last month.

Are We Done Breaking Records?

World records for athletic events over time follow logarithmic curves (see here for the marathon record by decade, and an extrapolation that we'll see our first sub-2 hour marathon in 2038.)  Conversely, Peter Keating at ESPN points out the recent lack of broken records, and argues that just maybe, our top athletes are as good as humans can get.

Turns Out the State Parks Department Does Have Some Money

$54 million more than they've been reporting, as it turns out.  Disappointing to say the least, especially for those people and organizations who've been working their tails off to preserve the state's parks.  Further reinforcement that the state of California is not all that serious about maintaining these parks and open spaces, which is one of the main reasons many of us put up with the rest of the problems in California and continue living here.

Oh You Ran A Marathon?

Power Plant Next to University City AND Mission Trails?

Not long ago I posted about a new power plant that's been proposed near University City. The San Diego Planning Commission is voting July 19th on whether to allow a power plant being built next to Mission Trails. Unless there are two different groups, this is likely the same one.

What do you think this plant, if it gets built, will do to property values in UTC and Tierra Santa? What do you think it will do to the open space and that open space's ability to protect plants and animals?

Where the Trees Are

More here. Man, those people in Nebraska could base a currency on wood instead of gold.

The Run Is Ended, and The Antler, Won

Congrats to Mark, who won the antler after a nice run this morning with various other unsavory characters. The route started in the unnamed canyon near Camino Del Sur off the 56, then going over to McGonigle Canyon Open Space (you know there's a pond back there?), then crossing Del Mar Mesa, coming down to Los Penasquitos at the waterfall, and then through the 5-805 junction and up La Jolla Canyon and back to UTC. As for the antler, I found it on a gnawed-on deer skeleton, on a real backcountry trail run with even more distasteful types up in the Bay Area in EBMUD and Las Trampas. Future ideas for these same miscreants to discuss:

- The TriCanyon Crown: from Fiesta Island, up through Tecolote, down into Marian Bear and back to UTC in Rose Canyon. (See, I wasn't kidding.) This might be fun to invite more and more people along and make an annual deal, to get more people interested in preserving those canyons. Rose in particular has now survived four attempts to erode its status by building roads across or new trains through it.

- Sycamore Canyon to Santee and then back to San Diego on the 52. End in UTC.

- The La Jolla Half TRAIL Marathon. Stay in canyons, including Crest and that little disconnected piece of Torrey Pines in Del Mar. End in UTC.


Once winter rolls around:

- Noble Canyon bottom-to-top plus Garnet Peak.

- El Capitan de San Diego.

- Anza Borrego to the Salton Sea, in the washes.

- A dune crossing. You know those sand dunes you see north of the 8 not far west of Yuma? Run from 8 to 78 across those bad boys. But that's 22 miles of utter wastes so that might be too stupid even for me.


Click here to see this idiocy on a larger scale
The San Diego Awesome Relay - Perhaps the most harebrained scheme rattling in my head is to do an informal relay run of the whole coast of SD county. Get 8 people. Split into two teams of four each (so you can fit in a regular car). Each person does 3 legs of 6-7 miles each (76 mile total route, 19 miles per person). Of course we would use it to raise awareness for something, in order to justify adults behaving in this manner. Beer waiting at the border. You start at 9 in the morning, you're done by 8pm easily.

How to Figure Out Where You Are - IN TIME

Pennsylvania hikers and urban explorers, take heed:

While investigating reports of strange gases in an abandoned coal mine in Pennsylvania, you fall into a kind of suspended animation for 492 years, waking to find America under the iron heel of the Air Lords of Han. While chasing down an armed perp (again in Pennsylvania), you’re accidentally swept up into someone’s sideways-in-time vehicle and land in a Keystone State full of pagan Aryans in desperate need of a new source of gunpowder.

These two PA examples are from a post about the dangers of suddenly traveling through time and refer (if my science fiction remains strong) to the original Flash Gordon, and hell if I know.

But I think a lot of us have played this game:  if we suddenly found ourselves in a strange place, how could we figure out where we are?  I usually expressed mine in terms of the old Prisoner TV show.  I often thought that you could get a pretty good approximation of latitude by observing the weather, looking at stars, and building a sun dial, though of course you'd have to do it surrepetitiously, and have uninterrupted consciousness for 6 months (if they drug you for a month at a time without telling you, that would screw things up).  And beyond that, you could even make a pretty strong guess at longitude - I'm at 51 N?  Okay, I'm obviously on an island so I'm not in Canada or Russia, I must be somewhere in the North Atlantic. 

Yes it's a weird example, but it's generally useful for outdoors types to have an array of techniques to figure out where we are.  And let's be honest:  I've thought about weirder things.

Power Plant Proposed in University City

Between the 805, Nobel and Miramar - basically, right across from the Miramar MCAS cemetery and right south of Miramar Road.  It will be an 850 megawatt natural gas plant.  Article here.

Cuyamaca Rancho - Harvey Moore Trail Overgrown

Pretty, but overgrown.  With poison oak.  I tried another narrow single-track but when an equestrian came through and said there was a snake about 200 yards on, I called it a day.  There's enough moisture up there on the west-facing slopes that it doesn't have to hug the creek beds like it does down here near the coast.  Not a good run in general but I must warn the others!


 The park.  From heshone.com.

SoCal Triple Crown 3/3

I done hiked up San Jacinto.  Because I've also hiked up San Gorgonio and Baldy, I got that thar triple crown.  The mountains did not give up without a fight:  I came down with nice flu-like symptoms and a bad cough and sore throat while I was on the actual hike, which made the altitude even more fun.  (I barely noticed Baldy, at the same altitude.)  Taking the illness as a positive omen, I pressed on.  The view from the top is definitely the best of all three, not surprising given Jacinto's prominence.


View to the northeast from San Jacinto, NOT taken by me (there is no snow on trails up there as of Memorial Day 2012) but by awesome Aussie photographer Dianne Kennett.

I took the Humber Park/Devil's Slide route.  After my hike up Baldy I decided I would only do hikes or runs that had the word devil in them somewhere.  One note if you're going to do the Devil's Slide route:  there are various mileages posted around the web for this.  Take my word, it's 16 miles round trip.  Sixteen.  The rest can't read their GPS or took a different route or something.

Now I can focus on some of the 9s or 10s on Nobody Hikes in LA.

Rattlesnake Encounter Map - Add Your Own

There are probably certain spots in certain parks and trails around San Diego where rattlesnake encounters happen frequently. Why don't we share?  This is a public map and you can add your own encounters.   It takes 2 seconds and helps everyone out - maybe not just trail users but wildlife biologists as well.  To go to the map and add one click here.


View Rattlesnake Encounters in San Diego County in a larger map

SoCal Triple Crown 2 of 3: Baldy

2 of 3 SoCal Triple Crown complete! Apparently the day before there was some kind of thing with bicycles there today too (I seriously didn't realize Stage 7 of the Tour of California ended here until after I got there; glad I didn't run into it by accident).

Devil's Backbone. Image credit 2wav on Panoramio.
NICE up there today with a cooling breeze above about 8,000', although I didn't hang out for the eclipse. There wasn't any snow at all on the trails, with little strips on the north side at the very highest elevations that probably won't survive the next few days. Although it's further east, the hike up Gorgonio is greener and prettier, but there's nothing quite as dramatic as the Devil's Backbone up there.

And speaking of that - the Backbone was the highlight of this hike for me. I went up via the Hut, and came back on the Devil's Backbone and by the road. This (again for me) is the way to do it for many reasons. I would warn you though, the apparently exposed portion of the Devil's Backbone above the treeline, i.e. the part you can see as you're ascending the steep bit above the hut, is not the most precipitious part - that's once you're back below treeline. Nobody Hikes in LA has a good description of the possible routes. I didn't realize the restaurant would be open at the top of the ski lift so when I stumbled in and it was quite busy I was a little surprised.

Special thanks to Tom the scout leader who shared some water with me, and Shelley the nice woman from San Dimas who gave me a piece of watermelon above the chairlift. Watermelon never tasted so good as it did today!

The eclipse in Culver City. Image credit MMarke on Twitter.

Holy Jim Trail; Plus, Terroir and Beer

1) Finally got up to Holy Jim Trail and falls.  Falls aren't huge but definitely special and purty.  It was late so I didn't have time to get all the way up to Santiago Peak.  One thing I will say:  the road wasn't as bad as some of the hike descriptions said.  From the paved road to the parking area it's about five miles, the last two of which are rougher (Natl Forest road).  As long as you take your time on the Natl Forest section, at the time of this writing (May 2012) it was doable in  a Honda Accord.


2) The differences between beer and wine - not only the culture that surrounds each, but the actual genetics and economics of their production - has always been interesting to me. Here, one connosieur argues that the egalitarianism of brewing comes from the fact that unlike in wine, terroir hardly matters, and this means that the quality of the resulting beverage depends much more on the skill of the maker in beer-making than in wine-making.

Also, I think that a bunch of European wine snobs should form a renegade group that calls itself terroirists, and use phylloxera against New World wineries that name their products after the varietals rather than the region. Although to be fair to the terroirists, if you pay more for the same grape from a Sonoma vineyard vs. San Diego, either you're stupid, or you think it makes a difference...even the New World winemakers defend their appellations.

Running Extends Life

Sorry anti-runner-jihadists, it was a very long-term study.  5-6 years more!

Trees in Cypress-Family Tell the Tale of Plate Tectonics

Redwoods, cypress, cedars and hemlocks (among others) are all members of family Cupressaceae - and their distribution around the world and genetic relatedness match up quite clearly with the separation of Pangea into our more familiar continents during the mesozoic, the age of the dinosaurs. Pretty cool.

A dawn redwood, an Asian relative of the North American species.  From the Victoria Gardens website.

SDPD: If A Car Hits You on Your Bike and You Don't Die, It's Just a Traffic Violation

Article here.

The Good and Bad of San Diego, 28 April 2012

The good: the Creek to Bay Clean-up drew a real crowd, especially down along the river in Fashion Valley where it was sorely needed. Among the things I or my neighboring cleaner-uppers pulled out: tennis balls, spray bottles, shoes, shopping carts, lots of styrofoam (that's a real pain) and, of all things, a stroller. By noon at the end of the day the river looked great. If you weren't there, how about next year? Or how about going to an event sooner than that? Here's the website.

The bad: had a great run afterwards along the coast from Solana Beach to La Jolla; beautiful warm day here in San Diego. Del Mar runners, are the water fountains at the community center always just kind of dripping? Seems like if you're going to have water fountains, can't Del Mar City Council make sure they have enough pressure so they're not a public health hazard? I certainly appreciate that they're there, but as they were today, they're barely useable.

Cold After Long Runs

Recently I've noticed that I've been very cold after long runs, and it's happening more and more.  Anyone else?  Various sources on forums I've search have cited several possible contributing factors:

- Poor hydration
- Hypoglycemia (and I'm switching to a lower-carb diet currently)

- Activity at tissue level to get rid of heat as a result of prolonged overheating, even though you're no longer active (note, this is not the same as hypothalamus re-set that happens during fever)

I'm going to to pay more attention to hydration but if it's #2 and/or 3 on that list, I don't know if there's anything I'm willing and able to do to fix it.  Otherwise I feel great not eating carbs all day long (normally in the form of bad food anyway) and I'm not going to cut back the intensity of my workouts just for a little discomfort at the end.  Any readers who've had this experience and/or have further information, please comment!

San Diego Creek to Bay Clean-up, Saturday 28 April (tomorrow!)

Got a free Saturday morning? How about meet some people who care about the canyons and beaches and parks of San Diego? The Creek to Bay Cleanup is tomorrow and has sites all over San Diego. The one last year was a blast. Learn more here.

Support This Awesome Team in The Relay

The Relay is a 200 mile running race where teams of 12 relay-run from Calistoga at the north end of Napa Valley, all the way to Santa Cruz. (For you East Coast types, that's running from New York to Baltimore.) It's every bit as fun as it sounds but you shouldn't plan on getting anything done that weekend...and that weekend is 5-6 May. Coming right up! Even better, the event raises money for organ donation, and here's how you can help: go to the website for the relay team with the best name, ...And You Shall Know Us By the Trail of Drugs, and help out one of the runners, Mathew Lomas. (In the interest of full disclosure, Matt is awesome, but then again so is this cause). Link is here.

North Carolina Govt Tries to Shut Down Diet and Exercise Blog

This has dirty guild politics written all over it. The NC Board of Dietetics/Nutrition is trying to shut down John Durant's blog. Apparently we can't discuss the health of what we eat without permission from the NC state goverment! (Not in NC? If someone in NC ever reads something you write about that, you're on the hook. This is how governments prosecute people whose "offensive" content isn't illegal in their own state or country.) I've spent my fair share of time complaining about the paleo movement here, but this is just a plain old free speech issue. However much I don't like paleo, I do like that we (supposedly) live in a country where people can publicly discuss their dissenting opinions. Support John!

Kittatinny Ridge to Be Protected

Appalachian Trail above Port Clinton, Rockylvania. From Gone Hikin.

Kittatinny Ridge, which forms the northern boundary of Berks County, Pennsylvania, is set to be protected, partly because it's in important bird migration route. You Appalachian Trail thru-hikers or aspirers there-to might recognize it as the stretch which is bisected by the Schuylkill River where it emerges from Pennsylvania's Coal Regions. This is great news. I posted a picture from this very spot just a year and a half ago.


View Larger Map

So on the East Coast they're protecting their open space, while here in California we're closing down state parks and beaches? Something's not adding up there.

Insane Diver is Insane

Emphasis mine: "Sometimes if you run into em, and they're a little bit aggressive and you"re trying to get some work done, then you, you try and swim at em, and sometimes it'll spook em away where they don't come back, and sometimes they'll loop back around from behind and then they'll come back and check you out again." So says Ron Elliott, a sea urchin diver in the Farallons, in the documentary above.

Apparently he also considered becoming a North Australian river-swimmer, or an African-savannah run-around-naked-smearing-meat-on-yourself-and-shouting-"EAT ME" guy.

I have trouble concentrating on work if someone is talking nearby. Great whites circling would be at a different level I think.

Berry Creek Falls, Big Basin

(from BayerCruz Youtube channel)

Ran up there from Waddell Beach, after a quick visit to Pescadero Marsh (was that little trail there before?) I posted a video because still frames of waterfalls miss a lot. The sound is part of it but the whole reason a waterfall attracts our attention is the motion. Animals (and babies) look for longer at things that surprise them (this is used in experiments) and I always wonder if that's why we find waterfalls interesting. Do other primates? Do dogs?

I'm very glad I went. With all the recent weather it was roaring, much higher volume than this, and I wasn't even thinking about the falls specifically, I just wanted to hit this trail before I left the Bay Area. There were two crossings out but it was still fun, picking my way across make-shift bridges - there would be no fording this stream. But when I first saw the white roar up ahead through the green I remembered why this trail was so great.

I've been pretty stressed recently and the immediate sense of relief that came from looking at these falls for a few minutes - just looking at them and enjoying the summed splatter of all this water - was overwhelming. It's like forced mindfulness, looking at the trails the water takes down the rocks, and the way it's atomized to vague mist at the bottom but crisp and clear at the top as the first streams clear the ledge; looking back and forth at the two is like a contrast bath for your eyes. The ecozones on the rock face next to waterfalls are also cool - watching how the plant community changes in just a few feet, showing us a temperature-and-humidity time average over months and years. But mostly it's the black rocks and the white water and the green moss, and the rush of the falls after the rain that's the best. It was a good day.

RIP Caballo Blanco

AKA Micah True, AKA Michael Randall Hickman, adopted by the Raramuri, AKA the Tarahumara, found in Gila National Forest in New Mexico two weeks ago, cause of death unknown at the time of writing of this obituary. If you read Born to Run you know who this is, if not, never mind.

Exercise Increases Potential for Addiction in Mice

It's apparently science week here at MDK10 Outside. There have just been lots of interesting articles. This one looked at the effects on the reward system of mice from running, using cocaine as a model for addiction, and what they found: after withdrawal from cocaine, "Those that had been runners when they first tried cocaine, however, lost their [addiction] slowly, if at all. Many, in fact, never stopped hanging out in the drug-associated locale, a rather poignant reminder of the power of addiction." That second sentence I emphasized for the hashers in the room. See you at Triple Rock tonight?

In all seriousness, from a decision-making standpoint, does this information mean that people should stop exercising? No. Duh. It just means you shouldn't use addictive drugs, which I think you probably knew already. But now at least we have an excuse for chocolate and beer addictions. Full lay press article here.


The mice in the experiment also learned to fly and wore little suities.

Pennsylvania: Are You in California?

(California readers: I occasionally post stuff about outdoors-type stuff going on in Pennsylvania where I grew up.) I just read about the French Creek wildfire, with air drops and everything. What business does PA have with having this kind of fire? Where do you think you are, SoCal?

In all seriousness, big wildfires are scary, and I'm glad that there were firefighters ready to go on this, and that no one was hurt. French Creek and the Iron Horse Trail are the greatest Berks County resources no one uses, and it will be interesting to see how the regrowth in mid-Atlantic woodland differs from SoCal mountains.

The Chemistry of Runners High

Most interesting, there's an anandamide spike - to simplify, a pleasure chemical that is the endogenous compound for the receptor that THC stimulates. Chocolate has anandamide in it, which has been advanced as one reason for people's strange behavior around it. Include me on that list.

I originally found this at io9, which questions the evolutionary value of runner's high (or if it's just noise in an overtaxed system); one possible explanation is obvious in io9's link to a great Youtube video of an African persistence hunter. One of the reasons I started writing this blog was to puncture the Just-So stories of paleo enthusiasts who often claim that running is "unnatural" and bad for you. Yet here we have our species' remaining hunter-gatherers doing exactly that! (Apaches are reported to have done the same thing.)

Dualists Make Worse Choices About Exercise

I'm not talking about this kind of duelist, I'm talking about this kind of dualist, i.e. the philosophical kind, not the gun kind. (Although the gun kind can certain have negative health implications as well.) Article here.

Best Pacing for 400 and 800m Races

Modeled by physcists: "Here a toy model is used to understand a puzzling phenomenon from the sport of track and field. Races are almost always won, and records set, in 400 m and 800 m running events by people who run the first half of the race faster than the second half, which is not true of shorter races, nor of longer."

What's the Farthest You've Been From a Road?

Not with an engine getting you there. (So off-roading, airplanes 7 miles up, cruise ships don't count. Muscle power. Fine, you can use horses. But YOU know what I mean.)

As mentioned previously, this is an interesting question, and unless you're a traily/naturey runner or hiker or outdoorsperson, chances are you haven't been very far at all from a road. Now look at this map below (the one on the right - from Wired.) The color codes are for how much land is more than a half mile from a road.



When I did my little run around the Bay, I found it sobering that there are places you can drive to (on a highway) but for safety reasons, really can't get to on foot.

Wildcat Peak in Tilden

View to the northeast from Wildcat Peak. By Harold Davis. To the west you're exactly across from the Golden Gate, but I'm sure you've already seen that damn thing before, and any direction you look in is fantastic.

Not a long one but a nice fast one straight up Wildcat Peak in North Tilden. At the visitor center you will find redwoods grown from seeds that went to the moon and back, and a little animal farm with cute baby sheep (tiny) and a rooster that I had to pick up and put back in his pen with his buddies because the dummy had escaped and clearly didn't know what to do with his freedom, and there was no one there but me. My good deed for the day! Behind the pens were two deer and a big old flock of turkeys who were hanging out eating and were, frankly, insultingly unafraid of me.

You know how if you run a lot of trails you end up making up your own name for features? At the top of Wildcat you will find what I term the Circular Ruins (and if you're a Borges fan and you've read that, I'm the real one. I think. No fire or dreaming was involved at least. If you haven't read it you're wondering how much ayahuasca I'm on. Answer: not nearly enough.)

Redwood Cloning Attempt #1

ABSTRACT: I tried to clone a redwood from a branch instead of a root and it didn't work. Also, I'm a big dummy.

INTRODUCTION: Redwoods are cool, so I wanted to grow one in a cup, and I know you can because you can buy them like that.

METHOD: I found a redwood branch on a trail in Ventana Wilderness (Los Padres NF near Big Sur). I took it home. After two weeks of letting it lay on the floor I put it in the bottom half of a 1 L plastic soda bottle with soil, gave it some water and a *little* light, and put a plastic bag around it (with plenty of holes) to seal in the moisture. I watered it once a week, despite a certain person (let's just call her "A.R.") who is a nasty person and wanted this to fail from the beginning.

RESULTS: Dead tree branch sticking out of soil in the bottom half of a 1 L plastic soda bottle. Well aren't you happy A.R. Now go steal pennies out of wishing wells too.

DISCUSSION: The hell with it. I'm just going to buy one at Muir Woods or somewhere else.

REFERENCES: Your mom (personal correspondence).

Tattooed by Lightning

This is a Lichtenberg figure: the characteristic tissue trace of a lightning strike. Via geardiary.com.



If lightning strikes you, you probably won't get off as easy as this guy (a few nasty blisters? I mean come on.) More on lightning safety here. For those of us in California, lightning isn't generally too much of a concern, unless you're in the Sierras - which can get struck by lightning any month of the year. Electric fields strengthen on high points, so keep this in mind when hiking up anything pointy! (The very Doctor Seuss-looking Mt. Thielsen below, in the central Cascades, is covered with glassy tracks in the stone where lightning has struck it.)

Chocolate Associated with Lower BMI

This is not one of my usual "ha ha, I'm in medical school and have a crappy diet and generally abuse myself" posts. This is a link to a real paper that just came out in the Archives of Internal Medicine: Association Between More Frequent Chocolate Consumption and Lower Body Mass Index, by Beatrice Golomb et al.


Above: Stay away. Toxic sludge.

To be clear, the above is a serious, peer-reviewed paper, Dr. Golomb is a real professor and these are real results. The following is not, but it's very funny: Goading crocodiles every day 'makes you thinner'. Says one crocodile-goader: "'Either I'd had a bad day at work or had been dumped by some bastard and my immediate response would be to put on my PJs, grab a stick and poke a crocodile in the face.'"

Claremont Canyon, Strawberry Canyon Fire Trail

It seemed today that the North Pacific wanted me not to run. Which of course meant that I went two miles further. At the top of the ridge the rain actually hurt; maybe it was hailing up there in the wind and the fog and the mud, who knows. Despite nature's best attempts, I felt great! Read the paper tomorrow for my obituary (cause of death, pneumonia).

And now a word from Sam Eagle.

Mud-Skiing in Briones; and, a Revelation

San Diego friends, savor this post. Because I'm going to put it in print:

I miss San Diego.

After two years of whining down there, suddenly I realize the Bay Area is not the answer to all life's problems. And the clouds, and the crap coming out of them up here, have been looking amazingly Seattle-like - even when there are breaks in the clouds, the thin bands of blue sky between them look somehow at once pale and deep blue and far away and cold. And it has been cold. And I've been sick. Yesterday I went to Briones, which is a great park that yesterday featured many coyotes and an owl and young brazen calves, but on most of those fantastic green hills running was just absolutely out of the question. I was feeling so irritated that when I spotted one coyote watching me un-shyly from just off the trail, I decided to take the opportunity to stop and pee at it. For his or her part, the coyote seemed unfazed by my display of bellicose micturition. (And yes, I did feel better after that, thank you very much.)

The Marin Hash Saturday, set by one Dr. K. up at College of Marin, was not as stupid-muddy because it was in forest instead of open scrub oak country. But it was cold and raining. Still no fun when you're sick.

Where's the sun? Where's the dry sage and cactus and 70 degrees! San Diego, take me back!

Of course I'll deny all this later, or just start pining away for the other side of the pasture once I'm down there, so you'll have to get to it through the wayback machine and remind me.


Pic from enlightphoto.com. Okay, Briones is damn pretty, but that still didn't stop it from sucking really bad yesterday.

Is Silence Going Extinct?

Via The Browser: a documentarian went "to a remote region of Denali national park in Alaska and recorded the sounds. The result? In five years of continuous recording, there were only 36 days free from the sound of an internal combustion engine."

I used to ask non-runner/hiker/traily types what the furthest they've ever been from a road is, and the answer is usually when they were on a plane or sometimes cruise ship. But furthest from a motor is probably a better question.


Some river with a lot of n's and t's and k's and l's in it (thanks phonemically-constrained Athabaskans!) in Denali National Park, August 1999.

Have Online Petitions Ever Helped Anything?

A post at Frogloop gives examples of online petitions that actually made a difference - take this with a grain of salt because it was written by the founder of a petition site - but the facts are verifiable. For us traily types, the relevant case: "Obama Administration Protects Roadless Forests. In just two weeks, more than 8,000 Care2 members sent letters to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, urging him to take action to stop a Bush-era plan to open up old-growth forests in Oregon to clearcutting. The Obama administration listened and agreed!"

Rain and Fog: NorCal in March

It doesn't rain all winter, and then right after I come back up from San Diego to the Bay, the normal winter weather returns. The weather is a d*ck. This hasn't stopped me from the usual ridge trail in Tilden (whatever that thing is called) and Tenessee Valley and Muir Beach, and Annadel State Park today. (Annadel State Park, which is still on the closure list.) Muir Beach was particularly fun. Every trail was a river and the little creek that flows out into the ocean was a full-on torrent.



Tilden in the fog. World, please come back when I get back to the trailhead. From schaufensterbabe.blogspot.com.

I should add that both my right upper IT band and now my right ankle are bothering me. But hey. When you have a sudden increase in mileage that leads to injury, you know what the treatment is? More mileage!

This training regimen is known as the reverse taper. The Oakland Marathon is this coming weekend, and once again, I'm doing the training regimen of champions.

How Wise is the Crowd In Basketball Predictions?

Bottom line: a crowd with mostly non-fans did better than two out of three major sports prediction sites, and didn't lose by much to the third. For more, read on.

Pundit Tracker, an awesome blog which holds "experts" accountable to their predictions after the results come in instead of letting them slink off to hide, rounds up March Madness picks so far.

Thanks to everyone who participated, including the folks I met over at McGee's in Alameda. By the way, some of your friends over there are a little too intense. One guy was about to run me out of the place. (I think he had trouble understanding that I wasn't trying to get people to bet on anything.) After taking out wise-guy outlier data, I had 38 responses - not as many as I would've liked, but it might still be interesting. I post this stuff on the internet for people to discuss so if you like it, hate it, think I'm full of it, please comment below!

Now that the game is played, here's how the crowd as a whole did. And there are some interesting differences between groups of people in the survey, not all what I predicted they would be.


1. Score Prediction.

1.1 All Respondents (Minus Outliers) Against Experts

Numbers for the crowd are given in the format mean/median. TE is Total Error (sum of absolute values of point prediction errors for each team.)

Rank	Source	Cal	USF	TE
N/A	Actual	54	65	-
1.	sports-ratings.com	56	55	12
2.	Crowd (38)	69/69	67/63	16/16
3.	collegehoops.net	50	44	25
4.	CBS Sports	72	58	25

Of course with N=1 the crowd's performance could be a fluke and we should do it for multiple games - but I leave this to the statisticians and psychologists of the world who have time and funding to do this. Note, I put CBS Sports 4th because they had the same total error but one of the individual scores was more egregiously off.

Outliers: I took out two sets of score outliers for each, probably from the same wisguy since they came in sequentially, who gave predictions of 500 and 1 for Cal, and 219 and 1 for USF. This left a scoring range 40-116 for Cal, and 30-114 for USF. (At first I thought the 30 was an outlier but left it in because a score that low actually has precedent in recent tournament history - Mississippi Valley State lost 70-29 to UCLA in the first round of the 2008 tournament. Yikes.)


1.2 Score performance by level of basketball fandom:

Category	Cal	USF	TE
Actual score	54	65	-
Serious fan (7)	53/54	54/50	12/15
Casual fan (11)	64/66	61/62	14/15
Not a fan (20)	78/77	74/69	33/27

Note that the more serious a fan you are, the lower and more accurately you guessed. Expertise made a difference. And when I started looking up predictions to compare to, I noticed there was a lot of talk about both teams' defensive play, especially USF.


1.3 Score performance by method of prediction

Category	Cal	USF	TE
Actual	54	65	-
Own knowledge (12)	54/52	58/54	7/11
Ask friends (1)	(70)	(64)	(17)
Guessed (23)	75/75	70/68	26/24
Researched (2)	93/93	88/88	62/62

It looks like if you had some knowledge, or asked someone personally who did, you did better. It seems our two researchers were looking at the wrong numbers. Most of the guessers were not fans of basketball (17 of 22); of the rest, 5 were casual fans and 1 was serious. Of those that used their own knowledge, 6 of 12 were serious fans, 4 of 12 were casual, and 2 of 12 were not.


1.4 Score performance relative to caring about these particular teams

Category	Cal	USF	TE
Actual	54	65	-
Care	52/48	54/51	13/20
Don't Care	75/74	71/66	27/21

Again we see that the less important the game is to you, the higher your score estimate (as in 1.2 above, where the more serious of a fan you are, the lower the score you predict.) This is possibly because of lack of knowledge of USF's defense.

I asked this because I wanted to see how fans of the teams stacked up against those who had no interest. My prediction was that they would do worse, but obviously they did not. (I entered an office pool in 2008 and won, based entirely on averaging points scored and allowed by each team during the regular season, and won! Ironically that year Kansas State took it, and that's what I predicted, by the method I used for this little experiment to predict 72-62 Cal. Back in 2008 at the start of the tournament an otherwise loyal Kansas State fan told me I was nuts - the whole point is that I had no emotional attachment to any team, and I was just looking at numbers. While I was collecting my money I asked someone to explain what a 3-point shot was because I didn't know. The system didn't work as well when I tried again in 2009.)

As I was sorting data I most regretted not asking whether people were Cal OR USF fans, because such a bias could run in opposite directions depending on who your teams are, and it could cancel out. However, it's probably a safe assumption that more of the 9 people who cared about these teams cared about Cal than USF, considering I work about 5 miles from Cal's basketball court, and some of the people I initially sent this to actually work at the university. So most influence that we see here is probably the result of Cal fans.

As would be expected, everyone who said they cared about these teams were casual or serious fans.


2. The Future of March Madness

The Atlantic just posted an article about the growing pile of dollars involved in the NCAA tournament. This blog is no stranger to posts about the distorting effect of money on college sports,
but there's nothing special about college athletics: in 1997, a Kenyan runner accepted money to run under the banner of Oman. Why? Because they paid him, quite above board, that's why! Because there's prestige that comes from associating with a winning sports figure or team, and as long as that's the case, these things are going to happen. At the time this was considered shocking (I wish I could find a link), and though I've read no coverage of similar events in the international marathon world since then, I would be surprised if it hadn't happened more. And to be honest, is it any different than any other athletic endorsement? "Eat Wheaties and Qatar is great." And in the end, none of us has a legitimate complaint against a committed professional's making a move that will benefit them and their family.

What will be interesting is if all this money flowing into March Madness ends up making the championship process more drawn out and opaque - because what's being maximized is profit, not fair and exciting athletic competition. Fans would like to believe those two mostly overlap, but that's not how it works. Just ask anyone who watches college football. Previous posts about that particular conflict of interest here.

Of course the people making money in college athletics aren't evil athletic robber barons. The statistic that has been thrown around for Penn State football for years is that the first home team paid for the entire athletic program, and the rest was profit for the school at large. But these windfalls still have to be considered against the attention that college-branded entertainers divert from the true mission of their colleges. The heroes at these institutions are the researchers pushing knowledge forward. Find me a fan at one of these games who can name a single prominent scientist or scholar there. I bet you can, but it's in the single digits. That's another prediction that's probably more worthwhile to follow up.

Help Us Predict the USF-Cal Game

***SURVEY CLOSED*** - I'm working on the results and will post them shortly.

Check out this little experiment. I want to see if the wisdom of crowds can accurately predict sports scores as well as experts. Note: you don't have to be a basketball fan to help. The USF-Cal basketball game is coming up this Wednesday 14 March, and people are adding their own predictions. Before the game I'll close the survey, say the average, and then analyze the effect of the respondents' backgrounds. E.g., were fans of these specific teams vs general basketball fans more or less accurate? How about people who said they were serious fans vs not fans?

5-question Surveymonkey here, or just get there via the pop-up - and please forward. Thanks, this should be interesting.

Oakland Sports Teams Shake Down Broke City

First, in case you think this screed is against sports in general, check out this cool article, which did a statistical analysis of where on the court players score from. This is for all shots taken in the NBA from the 2006 through the 2011 seaons.


This post is a screed against taxpayers getting fleeced to support private sports teams. "Oakland lawmakers approved $3.5 million toward efforts to redevelop the Coliseum complex along with adjacent land west off Interstate 880. The A's, Raiders and Warriors are all being courted away from the complex they have called home for more than four decades. The A's have for years sought to move to San Jose, the Warriors are considering a proposed arena in San Francisco, and the Raiders are potential tenants in stadiums proposed in both Santa Clara and Los Angeles." Story here.

Why is this happening? Sports team redevelopment does not create jobs, period, and we might want to look at what's happened in other cities. The bottom line for these teams is that it's a losing battle, they've been threatening to leave for years, and they're going to leave, and they're just trying to get some cash out of Oakland before they do. This is a stupid decision. The City Council has a lot of nerve spending $3,500,000 of our money when, as Councilwoman Nancy Nadel says, "I hope everybody realizes that we have no money...As much as you might love the teams when you have no money, it's a very different game."

Outdoors Round-up

1) Observant rock climbers on a rocky island off Australia found a species that was thought to be extinct. Now bred in captivity, they're about to be released back into their native environment to re-populate it. Without those climbers, they would've remained confined to that one rock and probably died out. (There were only *30* of them.) More here. No, it's not cute, but it makes a point. A trail ultra also saved a part of a national forest in Wyoming from development. You can make this stuff count!

2) For hashers: research on the effect of drinking alcohol on exercise. Limited results suggest that it improves women's performance and decreases men's, but these are to be taken with a big grain of salt so far (and some peanuts too). Note that personal experience with drinking and running shows that muscle soreness is not the result of lactic acid build-up; it's the result of micro-trauma to muscle tissue. If it were lactic acid, alcohol would make you (i.e., me) much sorer, and it does not. Further (frustrating) personal experience is that this hooey is still being taught in American medical schools.

3) Went for a four-hour (no idea about mileage) on Mt. Tam and around Phoenix Lake, Lagunitas, Bon Tempe and Alpine. When I lived up here before I didn't spend nearly enough time running on the Marin reservoir district trails and I'm fixing that now. I wish I could bottle the smell of mixed oak and redwood forest, there's nothing like it. Didn't see much wildlife, although on one board there wa a report of a bald eagle - which I was sure I saw before, but other visitors were quick to tell me it was an osprey. (I've seen both before and know what they look like, thank you. Now I feel vindicated.)

Gertrude Ord Trail, from bahiker.com.

4) Latest random cool-looking part of my own country that I never heard of before, also latest evidence I spend too much time on Google Maps: the wooded Tug Hill plateau in upstate New York, west of the Adirondacks and famous for their heavy snowstorms. There are fewer Panoramino photos in there than some other pretty untouched places. Did we ever really colonize that part of the state? Reminds me of how white settlers didn't find the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania until well after the revolution ended.


View Larger Map

NorCal Round-up

1) Registered for the Oakland Running Festival? Several races on 25 March, check it out here.

2) I finally went and saw my albino redwood, in Henry Cowell State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The albinism is of course the result of a low or near-zero cholorplast count, which means the trees only survive by getting nutrients from the root systems of their non-albino clone brethren. They still can't grow very tall. Interestingly, unlike the "solid" albino below, the one I saw at Henry Cowell had albino branches, or even some branches that weren't all albino, and even some twigs where not all the needles on the same twig were albino! This being the case, I was trying to be a tree pathologist and diagnose the process going on in the plant to produce this non-continuous pattern. It seems more likely that all parts of the plant had chloroplasts as they were growing, but that early in the growth of the branches they die for some reason. Cytoskeleton problem maybe?


From Arleen Olson Photography.

3) Ventana Wilderness, where the southernmost redwoods are, remains outstanding. I decided to play a game and see if there were flowers of every color of the rainbow on the exposed parts of the trail, and "won" in the first mile (plus some nice big white-purple daturas and some pink I don't even know, but the shore was purty.) In this dry winter, it's drawn crowds like I've never seen, particarly on Pine Ridge Trail on the way to Sykes Hot Springs. This is partly owing to morons like me who go around shouting how awesome Ventana is. But once you go there you really can't help it.


One of those exposed sections of Pine Ridge. From xasauantoday.

4) Instead of trying to grow redwoods from seed, I brought back a branch (one that had already been broken off a tree and was laying on the trail) to see if I can clone one that way.

5) Over 50% done putting together clickable maps for Nobody Hikes in LA. Driving through Whittier or Irvine and want to know where to find a trail? This is for you! Note: as I write this post, all the hikes are not yet included on here since I'm not finished, although by the time you read this post they may be.


View Master Map - Nobody Hikes in LA in a larger map

Daniel Richards and the Mountain Lion: Is What He Did Wrong?

California Fish and Game Commission President Daniel Richards is under fire, and may be forced to resign, because he (successfully) hunted a mountain lion in Idaho, where it's legal. (For the record, it was a wild mountain lion, and he did eat it afterward.)

This kind of politics is really troubling, not least because it divides an already sundered outdoor community - on one hand you have hunters and fisherman, on the other hand you have the hikers and climbers and trailrunners, and they view each other as different species. But both are interested in conserving wilderness and preserving open space, and when the Sierra Club and hunters' groups come together on an issue, no politician can withstand them. This pseudo-scandal reminds you of a company demanding someone give a surprise blood test during their off-work hours, and then firing them when it comes back positive for alcohol. ("Yes, it was Saturday night, I wasn't in the office!") Oddly, one of Richards's detractors in the CA legislature, Ted Lieu, asked something similar: "Imagine if the (national) drug czar went to a jurisdiction where marijuana was legal and then posted an Internet picture showing him smoking marijuana." Oddly, because this is possibly the best argument in favor of Richards! Yes, of course that hypothetical drug czar's political opponents would use his wild-times-in-Amsterdam photo against him. But was his action wrong? If that drug czar's job is enforcing the laws of his jurisdiction, in his jurisdiction (and not on the whole rest of the world!) then he obviously didn't do anything wrong legally, and unless the issue bears some moral context that differs from place to place, he didn't do anything immoral either. Are mountain lions endangered? Not even in California, and especially not in Idaho - "Least Concern" on IUCN's index.

While Ted Lieu is dragging the details of people's personal lives into their public service, let's mention a NorCal favorite, to show how the argument falls apart. I like Gavin Newsom. I think he was a great mayor of San Francisco, and I would definitely consider voting for him for governor eventually. Also, Gavin Newsom had an affair with his campaign manager's wife while he was at the head of a city government solemnizing same-sex marriages. I wholeheartedly support legalizing gay marriage and I'm proud of what Newsom did. I don't see his personal mis-step having anything to do with what he was trying accomplish. Tellingly, even Newsom's most vicious opponents in this fight never saw fit to drag this tidbit into the debate. And that act is more obviously immoral in a context-free way than the game hunt that Richards went on.

People have every right to be morally outraged, but our outrage doesn't give us a right to interpret the law however we want to, on either side of any issue. SF Chron article here.