Memorably Good Runs

Recently I was thinking about memorably good runs, where I was very happy during and after. No doubt it's not just the trail, it's the weather and frame of mind I was in that day too. But that's okay. Here they are. If any are interesting to you, good chance I blogged it - but you'll have to use the search box as I'm too lazy to link to all of them.


NORCAL

• The Anti Ranger Run in Muir Woods - multiple times including this year (so I've heard) - Marin
• Marin Reservoir - Yolanda Trail around Phoenix Lake and back via Eldridge Grade
• Point Reyes Estero Trail, Marin Coast
• Point Reyes to Mt. Vision, Marin Coast
• Point Reyes Red Barn to Mt. Wittenberg to the old Arch and back, Marin Coast
• Point Reyes Palomarin to Red Barn (that was in the rain), Marin Coast
• From the Clayton side of Diablo to the top, East Bay Mountains
• Tilden along the ridge to Redwood Preserve - anything including French Trail, East Bay Mountains
• Soda springs in Purisima (didn't they re-name this? I'm old and can't learn the new name), Santa Cruz Mountains
• Pomo Canyon, Sonoma Coast
• Big Basin - to Wadell Beach, Coast
• Yosemite - Half Dome (duh), Sierras
• Yosemite - Curry Village past Half Dome, past Vogelsang Peak, to Tuolumne Meadows, Sierras
• The K2 Loop at the North-Middle Fork of the American River Confluence area near Auburn at the end of the Western States Trail, Sierra Foothills
• Red Star Ridge and Lyons Ridge on the Western States Trail, Sierras
• Pioneer Trail in Auburn (from China Bar to Folsom), Sierra Foothills
• Darrington Trail in the spring along the South Fork of the American River/east end of Lake Folsom, Sierra Foothills
• Up Mt. Lassen from forested lower forested area of park - Cascades
• Feather Falls, Northern Sierra
• Desolation Wilderness - from Echo Lake past Lake Aloha to Emerald Bay

SOCAL

• Big Sur - the one that goes back to the hot springs
• Pismo Dunes
• Up and over Santa Barbara front range to Gibraltar Reservoir
• Santa Monica Mountains, ie Boney Mountain
• Up San Gorgonio, most under-rated hike in Socal
• Cactus to Clouds (up Mt. San Jacinto)
• Crystal Cove, Orange County Coast
• Around Trabuco Ridges above Silverado (inland O.C.)
• "The Secret Valleys" - east side of Miramar Marine Air Station in San Diego, unfortunately now much better patrolled
• Rancho Penasquitos - to the falls, connecting to an adjacent canyon (eg McGonigal) or all the way to the coast

NON-PACIFIC, WEST OF MISSISSIPPI

• Bryce Canyon (not big but unbelievable)
• Grand Canyon South Rim
• Canyonlands - crossing/scrambling up and down several canyons to get to the Colorado River, through the Needles unit of the park. This is actually the run that started me thinking about this.
• Glacier Natl Park - including the Garden Well (twice!)
• Grand Tetons (to the west/above the lakes)
• South Sister, Oregon
• Bandera, Texas Hill Country

EAST COAST

• New Jersey Pine Barrens
• State College - the only road run on this list, all the way from downtown to Shingletown Gap

INTERNATIONAL

• La Palma - up along the original caldera toward the summit
• High Tatras in Poland/Slovakia
• Ermei Shan in Sichuan Province, China
• The road at the top of the island in Hong Kong. I will be back to hike from HKK up to the Buddha on Lantau Island.
• Routeburn Track, New Zealand. IMO blows the rest of the (also awesome) treks out of the water.

I am fortunate to be able to say that I am certainly missing some, and will add them as I think of them.

The Tesla Ultramarathon

Some joker in New York ran a 74-mile route, passing historical locations where Nikola Tesla worked. Normally I make fun of my fellow running project comrades but since I got all excited when I stumbled on the Faraday Monument (an actual Faraday Cage in a roundabout in London, on my Run Between the Hemispheres) I guess I can't say anything.

Pennsylvania Trail and Outdoors Resources

There's so much cool stuff around southeast and central PA that I'm always surprised there's not more of an outdoor culture, although it's definitely getting more prominent (along with the microbrew scene - coincidence?) One possible reason is that people just don't know all the cool stuff that's around. I live on the West Coast now but I get back fairly frequently and I keep a list of places I want to check out during my visits home, and like many traily types, I suffer from two problems.

1. Fear that I will run out of trails.
2. Frustration that I keep adding new trails to explore, faster than I can explore them.

I would like you too to share this completely irrational conundrum, so here are some great resources for trails and outdoor activities around Pennsylvania.

• Down Hex Highway Youtube channel (I am using this to plan a hike right now)
• The Wandering Woodsman (I have already used this to plan a trail run)
• Gone Hikin - FANTASTIC mid-Atlantic resource by a very prolific hiker.
• Mid-Atlantic Hikes - Another fantastic resource with multiple contributors.
• Susquehanna Appalachian Trail Club
• Berks nature resources
• My own list of cool stuff in Berks County, including outdoors

Running and Depression or Anxiety

A patch of eucalyptus above Rodeo Beach in the Marin Headlands on an August afternoon

Great Runners World article on the benefits of running on depression and anxiety here; also see this article on forest bathing, or shinrin-yoku. I've been staying inside due to the forest fire smoke hanging over the northern half of the state, and no wonder I feel like I'm in withdrawal!


Above: picture of current air quality in northern California

Spring in Northern California Remains Underrated

Just out on the last few miles of the Western States Trail near the confluence in Auburn on a fantastic spring day.


Compare - above, April and below, October.

Exercise More Important Than Obesity or Age as a Risk Factor for Knee Osteoarthritis

Osteoarthritis (OA) is the wear-and-tear kind. A recent study discussed in JAMA looked at skeletal remains and found that even after controlling for weight and age, if you were born in a developed country after WWII, you're more than twice as likely to have OA of the knee.

That is to say: a two hundred pound man born in 1945 and who died at 70 is twice as likely to have OA of the knee than a two hundred pound man born in 1900 and who died at 70.

What changed since WWII? Wealth plus automation = less exercise. This is quite consistent with the work done already showing that runners are slightly LESS likely to have knee problems than non-runners. (This should shut up those annoying people telling you you're going to mess up your knees.) As the JAMA editorial states, it's also consistent with evolutionary medicine - that if we behave as evolution designed us to behave - i.e., running around all the time doing stuff and not sitting at home in front of glowing screens - that we're more likely to be healthy.

New Projects: 1) Circumnavigate the Tahoe Rim Trail 2) Climb Shastina

Last year I finished running across California. As part of~ that project, I completed the northern ~quarter of the Tahoe Rim Trail. Of course I can't just leave that alone. So yesterday I started the rest of it, just going from Tunnel Creek Cafe up to Rose Summit on this segment. I will definitely not finish it before the arrival of snow and baby

This run at altitude was part of my effort to get back into mountain climbing shape for my attempt on Shastina, the subsidiary cone of Shasta. At about 12,000', on its own it would be the third biggest Cascade, but it's mostly a walk-up, with optional glacier travel. Years ago I climbed the main summit and was always curious about Shastina and the lakes visible in the crater. I'm aiming for September, and at this time of year it's going to be a nasty scree slog. It looks like most people start at Bunny Flat, go up to Horse Camp, then turn leftish and head over the bottom end of Casaval Ridge, crossing through Hidden Valley and then heading up the saddle. I've read good things about Diller Canyon just in terms of scenery and I'm trying to find out from the few people online who seem to know it why that isn't a preferred route. Either way it'll be a nasty scree slog this late in the season.

Running Cross Country; or Rather, Around Country

This fellow ran a lap around the entire country of Nauru, a tiny single-island country in the Pacific. The post is half travelog, half an account of his run, but I found it interesting. Travel in the developing world often sounds adventurous and horizon-expanding, but then you smack head-first into the reality of health risks and incompetent hospitality industry employees and you wonder why you're doing it. All captured here. I ran across a good chunk of Andorra years ago and it was much more pleasant than this!

Trails and Trail News from Old Berks County

Since there's more kayaking than trail running in California these days, AND as the premier blog for outdoor activities in California and Berks County Pennsylvania, I'd just like to draw attention to the following articles, whether or not the amount of Pennsylvania content is disturbing Jeremy.

• Mountain biking group replaces 3 bridges on Neversink Mountain - I only found out about the trails from Klapperthal Junction to south Reading after I moved away, oddly enough from a friend visiting the area from New York. Not only do you feel like you're in Oregon or something when you're back there, it also has some history associated with it (was a route used by slaves escaping via the Underground Railroad.) 


• Hopewell Furnace in Union township receives national recognition - for a disabled-accessible area of the park. 


• Berks County awards contracts to inspect pedestrian bridge over Schuylkill River - looks like they're going to let it go. I just ran across it for the first time when I was in Berks in December and it really affords a unique view of the city, the river, and nearby 422. Too bad if this disappears, AND the Thun Trail will be worse off when you have to use the Bingaman Street Bridge to get across.

Above:  view of the Schuykill from Neversink, from Berks Nature.  Below, French Creek near Hopewell Village, by Mike Roush at Berks Awhile.  Below that, the pedestrian bridge near RACC from my Schuylkill River Trail run in December.

Talk to Your Kids About Running

Glen Onoko Falls and the Lehigh River Gorge

I went there a few days after Christmas, when the leaden skies kept threatening snow, and at first I wished I'd been there during summer. But the rhododendrons were green as ever and the falls were partly frozen, which made this about as good a day as any to go. For all the warnings about the dangers of the falls, if you're not a knucklehead and don't actually go out on the flat slippery rock platforms at the top of the falls, you can stay safe pretty easily. I was actually more worried about falling icicles (you can see piles in some of the pictures.) I was pressed for time so I didn't go far along the trail at the top of the ridge but honestly I think the view from within the gorge is at least as cool.

While we were there we also took in the Jim Thorpe Monument. Thorpe had nothing to do with the town that bears his name, but when he died, bottom line, his wife needed money, and the town was willing to rename itself from Mauch Chunk if they could rename themselves after a famous but down-on-his-luck recently passed athlete, and get tourists coming to see his monument. (Remember 15 years ago when people were offering to name their kids after dot coms? And one town did rename itself Half Dot Com? And for that matter Truth or Consequences, New Mexico renamed itself after a game show? Like that.) Pretty ridiculous that this all-around mega-athlete was stripped of his wins because he made a few dollars as a young man. It's some consolation that this story has kept him better known than he otherwise would have been.

The Jersey Pine Barrens and South Jersey

I'd been wanting to get to this area for some time. Though South Jersey seems like an unlikely tourist destination, it's one of several unique spots on the East Coast that are a little isolated from the megalopolis by virtue of being east of the main routes (much like the Delmarva Peninsula). The Barrens themselves struck me as a colder version of the coastal Carolina pine forests and indeed that's how biologists think of it. Even that far from the coast the tides still affect the river although I didn't see any crabs in the water that far inland. The soil was even sandier than I expected. I'm impressed at how well the most densely-populated state in the U.S. has preserved this area; I saw a couple trail markers that pointed to another state forest 25 miles away. Nice! While I didn't see any Jersey devils, I thought Batsto Village was both interesting and a bit Adams-Family (look at the pictures, you'll see what I mean.)

While I was driving through South Jersey I visited a number of other off-the-beaten track sites: the Matthew Henson statue in Camden commemorating the first human ever to stand at the geographic North Pole (forgotten maybe because he was black); the discovery site of the first relatively complete dinosaur (in Haddonfield) where the discoverer actually knew what it was; two robot gardens, one in Hammonton and one in Buena; the Palace of Depression (economic, not psychiatric); and a Futuro House on the Jersey side of Delaware Bay. If you're interested in any of these they're not particularly hard to find online.

THE PINE BARRENS, WHARTON STATE FOREST

[Added later: as sea levels rise, salt water is moving further inland and the trees in the barrens are dying off completely, changing to marshlands.]










BATSTO VILLAGE, which contains some of the creepiest buildings I've ever seen






See what I mean? Of the ones above and below, I'm sure at least one of them was built to cure human meat. In actuality, the one below is a corn crib.



Inexplicably, as if remembering something long forgotten, I was drawn into the house...




ROBOT GARDEN #1: HAMMONTON








ROBOT GARDEN #2: BUENA






This guy reminds me of the Mechanical Hound from Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, except he seemed a little friendlier. A little.












There were many unexpected things in rural South Jersey. (Near Buena. Photo taken from Mapio.)




PALACE OF DEPRESSION, VINELAND



FUTURO HOUSE, GREENWICH (COHANSEY RIVER/DELAWARE BAY ESTUARY)














BLUEBERRY FIELDS, HAMMONTON)








MATTHEW HENSON, FIRST MAN AT THE NORTH POLE (STATUE AT MARITIME MUSEUM, CAMDEN)




HADROSAUR DISCOVERY SITE, HADDONFIELD