Forest Cover in the US by State

Above: from Reddit user some_dawid_guy on r/MapPorn, and below from Google Maps to compare by naked eye. I was most surprised by the relative lowness of WA and OR (lower than Pennsylvania, but on reflection not as surprising due to high coastal mountains and strong seasonal rainfall patterns producing inland dry areas), and how high the Gulf Coast is. Difficult to log or intensively farm due to swamps?

The Longest Routes Ever Walked

Reader Ollie made an awesome graphic of the longest walks ever taken - around the world - and was kind enough to email me the link. These people proved that everywhere really is within walking distance if you have time. There are specific images for each journey but the overall one is below. Awesome Ollie, thanks!

Where People Run in Various Places

Images below compiled from actual running data for San Francisco, LA and Philly resp.; but nothing beats the global Strava database, which is TOTALLAY SWAYT.

Do These Places Feel Half Pac NW, Half SoCal?

Some pointless map geekery for you, if you find yourself driving on the 5. If you're cruising on the 5, stop in one of these places and see if they seem halfway. Because they are.

Metric	CAN to MEX	Seattle to San Diego	Along 101*
By Drive Time	Redding, CA	Red Bluff, CA	Klamath, CA
By Mileage	Cottonwood, CA	Artois, CA	Crescent City, CA

*Includes going around the Olympic Peninsula via Port Townsend ferry

As a bonus, the halfway point for I-5 in CA is Los Banos or Firebaugh by mileage and time resp.; for the 101 it's Morgan Hill and Palo Alto by mileage and time resp. Below: the West Coast "Heartland".

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.


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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

What's With The New Contra Costa Images on Google Maps

New Contra Costa County images. Go look. They appear 1) to have been taken during the winter, when the grass is green, thus decreasing contrast between grassland and forest, as well as decreasing visibility of topography, and 2) they appear somehow smoother or more artificial than the previous satellite photos.

I don't consider the new images an improvement. Go look - see what I mean? Am I alone in thinking these are worse?