They Pulled This Out of Delaware Bay

From Boing Boing

Hey. That's no good.

I guess nothing should surprise me after finding out that there are bull sharks in creeks in Minnesota. (Edit: turns out that was a hoax.)

Beers Most Implicated In Emergency Room Visits

Done at Johns Hopkins. They should've adjusted the list by per capita consumption, although I bet it still wouldn't change much.

Downtown San Diego Planning Survey - More Stadiums?

That would be a big "no", because we I don't think anyone wants our traffic more screwed up than it already is and parking downtown to be even worse - not to mention those new stadiums helping themslves to our tax dollars. The survey is here.

Mt. Laguna Burn Report

A good article with lots of photos at the OB Rag. In terms of forest damage, fortunately, not that bad. Thanks to Frank Gormlie for going up there and sharing this with the community.

Angeles Crest 100 2013

No I didn't run it. I thought about going up to pace but ended up not being able to leave San Diego that day due to other commitments (medicine sucks.) But I was very happy to run across this nice vid done by Chihping Fu, who I had met in the trail/ultra community when I was still up in SF. Super nice guy and glad to see him here. Enjoy! I should also add it seems like the post-race tradition is now to go to Din Tai Fung in Arcadia. Great, now when I hit that place one the way back from Angeles N.F. I'll feel guilty for not having just finished a 100-miler. Yeah, thanks guys! :)

Beware, as of this writing (9 August 2013) there is a fire burning in the northeastern part of Angeles N.F. (Lone Pine Canyon) that has caused some evacuations in Wrightwood, and may be changing this guy's plans for the weekend.

San Diego Cyclists Being Shot at by Loser Kids

San Diego cyclists are being targeted by jerks with a pellet gun. (From bikesd.org.) People have been shot at with pellets - the kind that can penetrate skin - in La Jolla, up on Mount Soledad, around Torrey Pines, and on Fiesta Island. This has happened over multiple days. Police are investigating. The report says that they were three teenagers driving a black Grand Am.

If you see them, GET THE PLATE NUMBER (always obvious in retrospect) and even better, get a picture, then call 911.

In My Opinion, Fennel Must Be Destroyed

Ceterum censeo...okay so maybe I'm not the great Roman senator and orator Cato (I have an extra N in my name) but you get the idea. The biggest foothold I see the highly-invasive non-native fennel gaining in Rose Canyon is out there at the west end, on the side (uphill) side of the canyon. If you see broken stalks out there that would be my handiwork. Chopping at this stuff was a lot more fun than it should have been. My sword ran with the blood of the fennel! That is, the stick I used now smells licorishy. I've pulled this stuff out before so I have no illusion that one such treatment will kill it, but repeated thrashings usually do the job.



If you're comfortable with your ability to identify this plant and you see more growing in open spaces, please feel free to join me in fennel genocide. (Fennecide?) And if you like it in salads, take some home! (I can't stand the stuff; plus it contains phytoestrogens, yikes!)

Why Doesn't the PAC-12 Want *Openly* For Profit Colleges in the League? Duh

Article from Sports Illustrated here. It's very strange that colleges are whining that Grand Canyon U. is doing this to make money. I guess all the Pac-12 schools have a loss every year from their football programs? No, they don't; they're massive money machines: and this is why in the large majority of U.S. states, the highest paid state employee is the football coach.

What's really going on here is a) ASU doesn't want to divide the college sports market in Phoenix, but they can't say that out loud; and b) the schools know that they're all running a business with the brand names of universities, and profiting from people's rabid allegiance from something they think of in tribal-colors terms rather than business terms. As soon as there's a for-profit school doing exactly the same thing, fans can't help but wonder if their own school isn't, as Steve Hsu perfectly described, "a tax-exempt sports-entertainment complex that is, for strange historical reasons, hosted by the higher education system". The article notes:

While it's true that non-profit universities reinvest their revenues from the major sports, they also rely heavily on outsiders' donations. Is it inherently more noble for Oregon to accept $68 million from mega-booster Phil Knight to build a new "Darth Vaderish Death Star" football complex than it is for Grand Canyon to spend its stockholder-generated capital on a "$300 million investment in state-of-the-art classrooms, laboratories, dormitories and athletic facilities?"

What I really want to see is Stanford twisting and turning to make an argument as to why a private school shouldn't be in the PAC-12. "But they're for-profit! They're for-profit!" Again, I don't think Stanford (or the rest) lose money on their sports programs. This is kind of like when one casino doesn't want another one starting down the road to compete with them, but they can't just come out and say that, so they somehow end up saying "2 casinos in this county would lead to immorality. But just one (us), that's okay." The talking-out-of-both-sides-of-their-mouth that goes on when people are defending their money, but can't be seen as defending money, is beyond hilarious and indeed, maybe into Orwellian territory!

And it bears repeating, big football schools are not notorious for being the most academically rigorous, although for what it's worth, there's no relationship in either direction between a school's football status and their academics (I ran the numbers myself). And lest you doubt that college football is, in fact, big business, then how about this piece showing that the many frustrating mysteries of the college football ranking system are all explained by one thing.

Cuyamaca in Winter

February 2013. I was there in regular running gear (shorts and running shoes and T-shirt). Very pretty and the cold was okay, in fact great! But it was right above freezing and running was just slippery and muddy and unpleasant. Short run that day. I went over to the bottom of Noble Canyon after this but it wasn't any better.

Canyon Cleanup Day 2013

(Cross posted to my blog the Lucky Atheist.)

I'd been meaning to post the pictures from the Canyon Cleanup back in April. A few of us came out from SDNA (thanks everyone!) and joined some other teams of people - if I remember, Qualcomm was well-represented - but the coolest thing was that Dorothy and Sara got to take a kayak out to get the trash along the water to complete the cleanup on the other side. This is Penasquitos Creek, which a bit further downstream opens up into the marsh at Torrey Pines State Beach. Fun day! Next one is 21 September 2013.

Severe greenery was in evidence
but the cleaner-uppers were not dissuaded.

Intrepid cleaner-uppers scour the other side of the river.

Sycamore Canyon/Santee/Scripps Ranch Valleys

These canyons are: a. the most beautiful springtime place I've ever seen in San Diego (pictures taken in March and April) and b. of questionable legality to access, possibly being part of Miramar MCAS. For that reason, I certainly didn't take these pictures, but rather a mysterious person who is not me, and who took them, after which miraculous event they magically appeared on this blog. If you run or ride a lot you probably know where this place is anyway. There are two sets, one in mid-day from the end of March, and one getting on toward dusk in early April. Restorative does not begin to describe the (much-needed) effect this green place had on me.

I'll start off with a coyote talking:

Finish up with a panoramic video from the top of a hill.

Baden-Powell and Throop

To see how fast SoCal's forests are burning away, scroll down.

Finally got up to the high peaks in the Angeles (besides Baldy). NICE. Baden-Powell is now easily my favorite peak. (BTW, good luck to the Angeles Crest 100 people this weekend!) I posted when I was up there before but didn't include any of my own pictures. Below are a couple.

There have been some fires recently and it kills me every time I hear how much acreage has been lost. I hate to be a negative Nellie but I just can't understand: our forests in SoCal are so precious, why do we let people have ANY kind of fire during fire season? Isn't a forest worth enduring the crippling inconvenience of not making s'mores between Easter and Halloween?

I started thinking about HOW precious. Since 2009, counting just the Station Fire, Mountain Fire, and Springs Fire, we have lost about 13% of our total forest. That works out to 3.3% of our forest per year. By that rate, all the forests will have burned by 2040.

How do I justify this number? The data I used is below. My assumptions are:

-Burnt areas were all forest (I know that's not true); but I also assume that ALL of SM, Angeles and SB are forest. Liberally speaking, not even half are. So the % destroyed is possibly worse than my estimate.

-Not counting Los Padres as SoCal. I also don't include Cleveland NF. If you've done much hiking in Cleveland, you know there are a couple spots with trees, but I'm overestimating the forest in SM+Angeles+SB a lot more than I'm underestimating Cleveland's contribution (which I estimate at 0).

-This neglects regeneration. I know fire-damaged areas recover, but over a human lifetime(s). (Cedar Fire-damaged areas in San Diego are still just bushes 10 years later - there's nothing like a forest there as yet.)

If you still think I'm being pessimistic, consider climate change. Will SoCal get hotter and drier over the next few decades, or cooler and wetter?


SoCal Forests Lost to Fire Since 2009 (all areas in acres)

Area	Forest Size	Fire size	% lost
Angeles NF	655,387	160,577	24.5
Santa Monica NRA	156,670	28,000	17.9
San Bernardino NF	823,816	27000	3.3
TOTAL	156,670	28,000	13.2

The total forest lost to fire in four years - actually, not even four total years - is 13.2%, or 3.3% lost per year, reflected in the graph above.

Growing Pot in California's National Forests

Jack Elliott has a great piece up about how marijuana cultivation - that is, marijuana prohibition - is causing damage to national forests, including pictures of what to look for. I imagine having people up there who don't give a damn about the national resource are also more likely to start fires too. and even for people who don't care about protecting national forests, then how about destroying Mexico's drug cartels? Another outcome of legalization is that the cartels' profits disappear overnight.

To this end it will be interesting to see what happens in Colorado's national forests in the next few years regarding illegal weed cultivation.

Nasty Plants From Around the World: Meet the Croton

There are croton shrubs in various places but there is one in southeast Asia that produces an oil which causes a rash similar to poison ivy and causes tumors in mice; presumably humans too. And you thought poison oak was bad!

I ran across this friendly fellow while doing some research. It seems the oil responsible for all this horror (PMA) is useful as a tool in immunology research, since it makes your "worker-bee" immune cells fire the poison nets they use to kill bad guys. The structure is below, compared to the urushiol family of compounds found in poison oak. Those long ugly greasy side chains are likely helpful in adsorbing the compound to cell membranes. You know sometimes I really hate nature.


Above: PMA





Above: Urushiol

Info On the Mountain Fire

Just wanted to link to Gary Valle's information on the Mountain Fire, from 2:54 PM local time Thursday 18 July. You might say "it's 2 days old even when you're posting it" but Valle's post is still the most up-to-date, complete, useful piece of reporting I've seen about the fire. As has been the case for big SoCal forest fires since I've moved here.

A Paleo *Cognitive* Regimen

This is cross-posted to Cognition and Evolution.

Paleo dieters avoid post-agricultural foods. The argument is that agriculture is a product of culture and so it introduced sources of nutrition that our genes haven't caught up with, especially grains, refined sugar, and other concentrated carbs. By eating vegetables and lean meats (so the argument goes) we are more in tune with paleolithic humans and therefore should be healthier.

There are any number of problems with that argument (not least of whic is that adherents often seem disinterested in empirical testing of it), but an interesting question is: couldn't we apply similar arguments to our cognition? The way we think about the world, or possibly even, that we think about the world, started undergoing profound changes about 40,000 years ago. Of note, this time corresponds with humans leaving Africa, developing specialized tools, hunting larger game that required team planning, and the spread of the current form of the FOXP2 gene and subsequent use of language and the cognitive modernization of humans; it marks the boundary between the upper and lower paleolithic. That is to say, until about 40,000 years ago, we solved problems in a primitive, isolated way, and knowledge could be shared only at a much more basic level. Suddenly we have language, reasoning, and mountains of cultural transmission in the form of tools and worldviews so that what we achieve in working memory can be expanded across a whole lifetime, or indeed indefinite lifetimes (i.e., among other things, the idea of an alphabet, hit upon by some clever Phoenician twenty-five centuries ago, allows us to more easily share these ideas right now). This has profoundly changed our physical environment in ways that have outrun our genes' ability to respond - including agriculture.

Therefore, shouldn't a person making the paleo argument for diet also make a similar argument for post-paleo (or at least post-lower paleo) cognition? That is to say, if you're really concerned that agriculture-based food is a threat to the fluorishing of H. sapiens because of its newness and alienness, aren't things like reasoning and systematic institutional research just as bad, if not profoundly more dangerous? Shouldn't we be approaching problems with blunt emotions and a vague memory of some chance association from last time we were in this part of the world with no way to obtain or share knowledge from others? Shouldn't the males of the species be getting in fights with people that look different from us or look at our woman for a second too long, with a resulting homicide rate of 30%? (The actual number for some hunter-gatherer groups.) This is what we're adapted for - our cognitive environment for thousands of centuries. How can the alien world we've built for ourselves in cognitive modernity not be hurting us?

In extension you could even make a Nagel-like argument here that paleo defeats itself, that if you think paleo is the way to go because profoundly biologically novel activities are threatening to an animal's well-being, then you should also eschew reasoning, and therefore eschew paleo, which was arrived at with a very un-paleo process (reasoning, communicating about it with large groups of people, and institutional research).

Live Feed of Alaskan Grizzlies Waiting for Salmon

Find it here.

Control Invasive Species By Eating Them

Article here. Akin to having a Phylum Feast on Darwin day, eat local by taking critters that shouldn't be around! My favorite new organization: the Institute for Applied Ecology.

Atlas ICBM Launch Pads in Scripps Ranch/Santee

The area south of Scripps Ranch and north of Santee has some awesome valleys and trails, as I am about to post. The area is of questionable legality, but is lightly (or not at all) patrolled. When I read up on the area, I found that the Atlas ICBM rocket was tested there in the 1950s, leashed to launch pads that are still there. Read this account of one explorer who actually drove down Sycamore Test Road to the site, something I wouldn't risk. (Good Poway and rocketry history in that piece too.) The area I'm talking about is here:


I'd originally entered from Via Santa Vienta and then gone all the way down to the lakes in Santee. (It's not signed except to say "LIVE FIRE AREA" to the west side of that trail in the valley, so if they want people to say out, they need to put up better signs.) But to go over to to Building 4, you'd have to go through at least one Do Not Enter sign. I really get no thrill from trespassing and at this time of year the land will be pretty parched and hot. Plus urban explorers have kindly already posted the fruits of their risk-taking, and there's gross stuff in the ruins (cadmium, etc.) - here are some excellent photos, and below is one of the videos of the blast shield.




Possible exhaust flumes.

Stay tuned for my March and April pics. For my money, those valleys are the prettiest place in San Diego County in the spring when they're green and lush.

Chariot Fire Damage at Mount Laguna

As of this writing (18:23 10 July 2013) there is no active fire anymore, just a lot of smouldering. The cooler overcast weather today helped the firefighters. But the damage is done, to both to the beautiful forest at Mt. Laguna and the campsites:


View California Fire Map in a larger map

As always, thanks to the firefighters who keep us safe. And no disrespect to the organizations that lost property and memories up there, but it's the loss of some of San Diego County's very rare forest that hurts the most.

Today I noticed the damage from the fire that happened a few weeks ago at 52 and Santo Road. Is your fire kit and evac plan ready?

Water Quality Data at San Diego Beaches

The Natural Resources Defense Council posted their report for 2012 water quality data. They said that Delaware had the best beaches and Avalon in Catalina has the worst.

I have to admit...I wonder how consistently collected the data is, and to what extent varying local standards influence it. I certainly do have many fond memories of Lewes and Rehoboth - the Delmarva Peninsula is a much cooler and more unique place than most people realize (where else can you eat corn and crabs that came from the same farm?) - but best in the country? Really? The northern half of the state is on Delaware Bay, which is the mouth of the Delaware River, that drains between Pennsylvania and New Jersey through Philadelphia. And that's cleaner than Catalina, an island in the Pacific with strong currents and no nearby rivers (not to mention probably a stronger commitment to their environment)?

Looking at local data, Imperial Beach is a sadly unsurprising 1 out of 5 quality, with Coronado 3 out of 5; Mexico and TJ are clearly the culprit here, but they are consistently unable or uncaring about this problem. (Or in active denial; see this clever study that proved what we all knew.) But La Jolla shores came in at only 2 out of 5. The best rated beach in San Diego County was Moonlight in Encinitas at 4/5.

But I really don't know what to make of these ratings. In particular they don't correspond well with the Heal the Bay ratings for San Diego County beaches. These gave an A or B to all of them along the ocean except for Torrey Pines State Beach, which to be fair, does have a naturally sediment- and microbiota-rich canyon-draining marshland outlet right there. I emailed both organizations; we'll see if they can make sense of the gaps.

Added later: the NRDC responded at length explaining their ratings. The response is below.

The Heal the Bay Beach Report Card (BRC) is based on actual beach bacteria monitoring data provided and compiled by SD County Environmental Health. Our methodology has been vetted and endorsed by the CA State Water Resources Control Board as an effective way to communicate beach water quality to the public.

In the links you provided, it looks like the blogger is comparing the NRDC's annual summary to our weekly website grades. The grades on our website are based on the last 30 days of available monitoring data per location.

We also release an annual report (each year just before memorial day) that is based on one year of actual beach bacterial monitoring data. We include a summary of beach closures due to sewage spills but the grades are based solely on the actual bacteria data.

you can find our most recent annual report here: http://www.healthebay.org/sites/default/files/pdf/beachreportcard/BRC_2013_WEB.pdf

The San Diego section is on page 16 and 17, and the grading methodology is on page 74+75.

It is important to remember that these annual reports, and even our website grades that are based on the most recent data, do not indicate 'real-time' water quality. I usually suggest looking at a location's grade history to see if a beach generally scores A grades throughout the year (or if water quality fluctuates wildly throughout the year) if you really want to dig into whether a location is safe to swim.

you can see this historical grade info on our website by clicking the 'historical data' tab on the map balloon on this page (for example) http://brc.healthebay.org/?id=309&lat=32.9337&lng=-1

we also report beach bacterial advisories and closures due to sewage spills in as close to real-time as possible on our twitter account @beachreportcard

San Diego Tri-Canyons: Shout Out to Veteran Volunteers John and Matt

Yesterday morning I was fortunate enough to get out in Marian Bear and Rose Canyon and walk the trails with veteran volunteer John, who's been keeping our canyons in excellent shape for years. By happenstance, we also happened to run into Matt the bridge-maker. We picked up a little trash and trimmed back some brush; that fallen tree in west Marian Bear is now off the trail. If you use these canyons, you benefit from the efforts of both these guys, and I'm glad to meet them and to help out!

Foxtails in California

Look familiar? Foxtails are the bane of many a trail runner, and they're an even bigger hazard for dogs. The topic came up because when I was volunteering in Marian Bear yesterday, the veteran I was following wondered if foxtails were native; I'd always understood they were not, so I resolved to look it up. Like many grasses, the a species can be hard to identify among many for amateurs like your blogger, but it seems obvious that our California foxtails are Hordeum murinum. These look just like the ones I find in my socks and shoes and sometimes elsewhere in my house, and it's listed as a state-wide invasive on CA flora, which come in to disturbed grasslands, especially those disturbed by drought.

To answer the question, they are indeed invasives (from the Mediterranean), not that this makes them any more annoying or dangerous to animals. (Poison oak is native and somehow I don't like it one whit better because of that.) Some of the native grasses include bunchgrass (below), which is discussed here at the California Native Plant Society; you can often see it planted at public buildings in California (there's some around UCSD) and also in my experience, at higher altitudes where the invasive European grasses can't survive, above nine or ten thousand feet. (If you really want to know about California native grasses, here's a whole book on it!)

Detect Black Mountain Lions Through Genetics of Tawny Mountain Lions

The existence of black (melanistic) has been a controversial topic for decades. They have never been documented; it's a misconception that Florida's panthers are black, but this is not the case. But there are black great cats in the Americas - jaguars. And reputable people have claimed to see them in California for many years. An unnamed source told me that in the 1960s there were credible reports from multiple sources of one living in Tecolote Canyon in San Diego in the 1960s; Point Reyes near San Francisco produces regular reports today. Despite this no one has produced a single good photograph of a black mountain lion, and the longer they go undocumented, the stronger the evidence should be to make us believe it. To make my point: it's up to the reader to decide if this black feline is a mountain lion or a house cat (scale is difficult) and this was the most viable photo that can be found on Google.

From michigancougar.com
But here's a trick. It turns out humans are the outgroup in terms of fur coloration. That is to say, in us, black is a phenotypically dominant trait. This is not the case in most mammals, where it's actually recessive - you have to get a gene from both parents to have black fur. This possibly explains why it's a relatively rare trait, but certainly not why it's never been clearly documented. A quick search does not reveal that the mountain lion genome has been completely sequenced; however we do have extensive samples, and coat color genes should not be difficult to pick out based on our knowledge of other cats. So, now we can see if among our samples there are variants, especially ones similar to the melanistic gene in jaguars. Those melanistic genes, if they exist and dark coat color is recessive, must also be hiding in the genomes of tawny heterozygous cats. In fact, given population genetics, you should expect MORE tawny cats to have those genes than black ones! (Unless your claimed mechanism of melanism is that all black mountain lions have fallen Pepe Le Pew-style into black paint, and much to their chagrin have to constantly refuse the unwanted advances of hot-to-trot melanistic jaguars.)


Here's a mom jaguar and her cub. To really illustrate the recessiveness of melanism I should have posted two spotted jaguars with a black cub, but this is damn cute, so look at it anyway.

The strength of this approach is that once you detect a variant or especially a similar gene to the melanistic jaguar gene, you can put together male and female heterozygotes in captivity and wait for 25% of their offspring to be black, and there's your proof. On the other hand, if no such variant exists, based on the number of animals you've analyzed, we'll be able to say "If melanism exists, it's less than 1 in x cats". (Probably some people wouldn't be satisfied until every mountain lion is sequenced, and after that they'll find another reason to keep believing.) I expect we must have hundreds or even thousands of cats' DNA at this point. My suspicion is that there are no black mountain lions, but of course it would be more interesting if I were wrong.

As a reminder, I have a wager offer to anyone that wants to take it about my home state of Pennsylvania, where mountain lions were extirpated by the 1870s. To be blunt, most of the claims of mountain lions in PA are urban-myth-type photos which have been circulating for years and can be found on Snopes, or excitable people not used to seeing wildlife. That said, because there are no lions there now, does not mean there won't be lions there again soon, since the PA Appalachians offer outstanding mountain lion habitat. My prediction is that by 2025, lions will be re-established in the state, as documented by physical evidence of *TWO* separate non-sibling or parent-offspring-related animals. Physical evidence can be DNA-verified tissue, spoor or fur, or of course the animal itself. (This helps keep smartasses from bringing their own.) In the last few years, lions are verified in Indiana and now Connecticut.

Volunteering with the Rangers in the Tri-Canyon Area

Today I had the privilege of volunteering for the morning to patrol the Tri-Canyon parks with Ranger Andrew Quinn of San Diego Parks and Recreation. We spent the morning in the San Diego River/Mission Valley Area, as well as Tecolote, Marian Bear and Rose Canyons. I use these great resources all the time for running and general sanity-maintenance so I want to do whatever I can to help maintain these great open spaces.


View Larger Map

What I learned (and saw) was not what I expected. In fact, in the time Quinn has been a ranger, he doesn't recall a single call for a rattlesnake bite or other wildlife related injury - despite the coyotes in Tecolote and elsewhere, despite years-ago reports of a melanistic mountain lion in Tecolote, and current reports of a mountain lion at the east end of Marian Bear near the 805. It's not the wildlife that's the problem.

What the rangers do deal with, all the time every day, are people living in the canyons who litter, particularly in Mission Valley. The staff told me they would love to spend more time doing interpretive programs, or trail maintenance and pulling out invasive flora. But unfortunately, most of the day is taken up dealing with transients. What complicates the issue is that very often, the people who are most concerned with preserving natural resources (which includes me, and most likely you if you're reading this blog post) sometimes don't understand the direct connection between transients living in the canyons, and the resulting degradation of the resource. The staff estimates that 90% of the trash results from this. (Trash which is collected on a daily basis, not just during the canyon cleanups, helpful though they are.) In general the canyons are quite safe, but what safety issues there are come (again) from the transient population. Many of the people who live in the canyons have stay-away orders for various reasons.


The San Diego River in Mission Valley. From KPBS

But things are definitely looking better in the canyons over the last few years, in part due to the efforts of the rangers and in part due to us citizens who care about our parks. So how can we help? Easy. Be the parks' eyes and ears - they only have a limited staff and they can't be everywhere and see everything! So if you see trash or tagging or an obvious place where someone was sleeping, make that call to (858)581-9961; this number is on signs in the parks too. Let your councilperson and the mayor know the parks matter to you (if they don't hear from you, they assume they don't!) Best of all you can volunteer - to patrol with the rangers, or to maintain trails.


Tecolote Canyon. From Yelp

Pronation Doesn't Matter For Injuries

A Danish study just published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine investigated the received wisdom that under- or over-pronating runners are more subject to injury than "neutral" runners. They found that this was not the case. (The study is well-summarized in the New York Times.)

Study design: 927 male and female runners from 18 to 65, prospectively evaluated as under- or over-pronator or neutral, given light-weight NON-motion-controlling shoes, and left alone to run as they please for a year.


From 5k Fashionista.

So what happened? There was no difference between the under/over-pronators and the neutral runners overall; but in fact among higher-mileage runners the over-pronators had a slightly but significantly lower chance of injury than neutral runners. Higher-mileage here is >600 miles a year, which isn't even 12 miles a week, so not very high mileage; "injuries" here were any medically-confirmed back or leg complaint that caused the subject to stop running for at least a week.

The lead author concluded that runners are better off paying attention to "things like body mass, training, behavior, age and previous injury in order to prevent running-related injuries." Admittedly, I'm posting this because what I don't want to hear from the super-paleo "all shoes are bad" crowd is that this study supports their conclusion; it just leans us further toward "follow your natural stride type". And to that end, some of us, your blogger included, are obligate 21st century runners whose build, foot shape and size, stride length, and running habits requires us to wear a well-cushioned (if not motion-controlling) shoe. And I've never had a use injury in 22 years of running with no warm-ups, or stretching, or proper build-ups to big events. And this paper is telling us all that our natural stride/strike is a-okay!

Mt. Baden-Powell, Angeles National Forest

Well I have a new favorite summit in Angeles National Forest, namely Baden-Powell. It's in that cluster of a few summits north and east of (and above) Crystal Lake, accessible from the eastern half of Angeles Crest Highway; they also include Throop and Dawson. The PCT runs right along these peaks. Pine forests up there, amazing. Views of the desert and the rest of the range, amazing. And then the little ridge at the very end beats Devil's Backbone on Baldy hands-down. Words can't possibly do it justice so here are a few images:


From localhikes.com
From highsierratopix.com
I've never been so bummed I didn't bring a camera, but I'll be back. (For great info about the hike, check out the Nobody Hikes in LA entry.) The elevation goes from 6800' at the trailhead to 9400' at the summit. At that elevation there's no turricula (an irritating poisonous plant) but the fire-damaged areas to the west of this part of the Forest are overrun with it, as expected in a recovery community. Much to my pleasant surprise I did see two snow plants right along the trail, which I've never observed in the Angeles before (mostly in Sequoia):


From Cherith.net.

This stunning forest also made me wonder - why do we allow fire of any kind in this forest, ever? Okay fine, prescribed burns if ever indicated by the appropriate agency, but I mine, why do we need to allow people to cook things, ever? I think the need to protect the forest and the lives of the people who defend it overrides our need to make s'mores or warm up our coffee for one night if we're camping. Just eat power bars for 18 hours, you'll live, I promise.

Mt. Palomar: Way to Get Across Barker Valley?

So I made the drive up the Palomar Divide Truck Trail a few days ago from Warner Springs, and ran down Barker Valley Spur. A nice trail, which gets down into the valley in the southern part of Palomar.

Some nice folks have posted Jerry Schad's hike directions along with a map and pics here, and a map here. According to one commenter less than a year ago, a ranger said you can't get to the falls anymore (?); not sure since I didn't try.

My question is: is there a way to get across the valley and up to the telescope or Mendenhall Road? Or is the only way to go around the top (northwest end) of the valley, where the Palomar Divide Ridge joins with the west-facing ridge?


View Larger Map

This trail also made me wonder why SoCal national forests don't just say "no fires, period" during the high fire-danger times, like right now. Seriously, do we really have to make an allowance for grills? It seems pretty clear that we can resist the need to build a fire for a certain period for safety. People's desire for s'mores is outweighed by preserving the forest and protecting the lives and property of fire fighters and nearby residents.

Mission Trails Closed 6/17/13 Due to Fire

This was at 52 and Santo Road in Tierra Santa. Thanks to the professionals of the SDPD for knocking this one down. There was just one two weeks ago in Rose Canyon.

Fire season starts in June now! Is your kit and evac plan ready?



The Witch Fire near Scripps Ranch, 2007. From the San Diego Wildfires Education Project.

Sierras and Central Coast Range: Still Awesome

If you get a kick out of these little trip reports, here's one from the San Juans in Colorado, August 2012.

From time to time, I get this anxiety that various American mountain ranges might suddenly become not awesome. So from time to time, I go there to make sure they still are. Good news! They still are!

The trip was from San Diego, up 395, to the John Muir/Ansel Adams Wilderness near Mammoth, side trip to Mono Lake, through Yosemite, then the barest skimming of The Bay Area(tm) on the way to Big Sur, and finally to Santa Barbara and home. What a terrible, no good state we live in, with no natural beauty, and nothing to do or see. Awful!

First we headed up 395 and watched the Sierras grow to our left, stopping in Lone Pine for a steak and a beer in the shadow of Mt. Whitney as it blocked the setting sun behind it. Sorry to subject you to the inside joke in this picture, but the next day was Mother's Day, so I had to order MGD, her favorite beer. She is if nothing else a classy broad.

Lone Pine and Mt. Whitney, from Tripadvisor. No I didn't take this awesome picture, I was too busy drinking beer dummy!



Manzanar internment camp is still nearby, maintained by the National Park Service just north of Lone Pine, and the grave sites for the people who died in the camp are a bit lonely at night:



It's good that they preserve this but for my money, a visit to the ruins of the Tule Lake facility up at the Oregon border is somehow more sobering, because there's no intervening veneer of restoration as a resort. It's just you standing in front of jumbled concrete blocks and barbed wire and iron frames that once held Americans prisoner for years.

That night we camped at the edge of John Muir wilderness, then hit Mono Pass the next morning. It was a pretty light snow year so on a normal year, we wouldn't have gone very far on this hike at this date, and as it was there was solid snow from about 11,500' up. Since it was warm enough to be up there in T-shirt and shorts I got a nice ankle and calf sunburn from all the UV coming back up at me from every direction. Certain other non-north-European-descended members of this expedition did not have the same problems.








Above: I'm too lazy to figure out the html to put this in some kind of panaroma sliding frame, so just click on it will ya. If it's relatively easy and this annoys you enough, don't hesitate to leave a comment.





Arriving at Mono Pass.



Looking west through the pass to the divide. Note to self - future trip from here to Tuolumne Meadows.



Back down at the lake.

Next day I went back to the ranger in Mammoth to close the loop about snow conditions up at Mono Pass, then it was a hike from Convict Lake up to Dorothy Lake. Or so we thought. The start was much lower than the day before, I think around 6,500', so we didn't expect to run into snow. But high enough up (where the old bridge is out) the trail either ended or disappeared under snow and rockfall, and the creek was a little steep and fast and spooky, so we just had lunch and then turned around. Still a pretty good day.








Above: here it turned into a scramble, the creek was kind of spooky (in places, slips would have consequences) and the snow wasn't all melted out, so this is about as high as we got that day. Crossing below:




Above: you can see the White Mountains on the other side of the valley. That's where some 4,000 year old trees are. And a UCSD altitude research station.


Above: relaxing in canvas chairs with our feet in the lake, we watched a bald eagle, and ate salted seaweed. Fermi problem: a bit of salt fell off the seaweed into the lake. How much did we change the sodium concentration of the water? We estimated by about 2.75 picomolar. Before you get too excited: that's about the same as a deer peeing.

After that we went out to the hot springs dotting the high desert between the Sierras and White Mountains, which had stood guard to the east the whole time. You know that whole thing is a big caldera right? (Look at it.)


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And it moves, that is, is swelling up year after year. No wonder there are hot springs there.






Above: There are multiple springs out there in the caldera, with pipes running between them that the locals have set up to make sure none of them are intolerably hot. As you can see it wasn't crowded that day. You can also see a dead spot in the grasses where the roots are probably cooking underneath.

After that we hit Mono Lake, which is gradually refilling, but still nowhere near the levels it was at before the poisonous writhing evil serpent water-stealing octopus that is Los Angeles, shrieking with darkness, tried to suck it dry, after having already turned Owens Lake into America's own Aral Sea. (Note: I don't like Los Angeles.) But Mono Lake is cool.








Same applies as above for this panorama, just click, or tell me how to fix it. :)




The rock formations are kind of like...reverse stalactites? They're created by mineral deposits as gas bubbles up through the bizarre alkaline water of this endorrheic lake. (This was where the supposed arsenic life was from. It turned out to be a false alarm but if it would be anywhere on Earth, it would be here.) When the lake recedes as the water is taken, the formations collapse. That is, you should never see them out on dry land like that - the top is where the lake level used to be. And even if you don't care about rocks, the lake is also a massively important migration stop for California seagulls and other birds. And finally, help me convince myself I'm not seeing things and tell me that Mono Lake isn't the place Max Ernst was always trying to paint (below). (Still don't believe me? Please view Napoleon in the Wilderness and Forest and Dove.(I admit an unhealthy obsession with Ernst. But some parts of the world really do look like they were designed by certain artists.)


I just totally went off on a tangent hard dude.

Then when you're seeing crystal clear lakes and granite monoliths, you can only be in...Yosemite! That night we stayed in Tuolumne Meadows. The road had just opened a few days ago and I expected the road through Tioga pass to be a deep snow-canyon but there were occasional piles of snow 2-3 feet high along side the road. At sunset the meadows were beautiful and the bugs not so bad. Pitching a tent I heard a snap and turned the headlamp to see two eyes in the forest, which blinked - twice - and then it turned and I saw it was a deer. The bears were up early this year, in some places a couple months ahead of their normal schedule.





In the morning we went to the sequoia grove (as you can see above) and then despite ourselves down into Yosemite Valley. Still not overrun with tourists. From there it was out the park by an unfamiliar (to me) southern route on Route 41, and through Merced. We were curious about the UC there. There is a hospital quite nearby. Future medical school? One wonders. From there it was a blast across the Central Valley with the requisite stop for fresh fruit (cherries) until the central valley farms gave way to the ranch and scrub forest of coastal hills. We stopped in the beautiful and little-known San Juan Bautista.











An old rural plaza mayor, a couple little beer saloons on the main street, and a neat little trail along the actual San Andreas fault. The plaque you see above with vineyards behind it is on the old Mission grounds and it explains this, with the plaza mayor at your back as you're reading it. Our picture-taking was compromised at this point due to the aforementioned saloons. Already in the time I've lived in California I've seen this town go from a forgotten backwater (in the best sense) to somewhere inside the boundaries of tourist maps, not to mention the plans of Silicon Valley developers. I actually thought about whether I wanted to further advertise this place on my super high readership blog but I think the cat's out of the bag with or without me.

That night we stayed in Gilroy but went up to Cupertino for some Korean buffet at Palace. It wasn't until after I was driving back on 101 that I thought: here I was in the actual Bay Area, and all I did was have dinner and leave. What's happening to me!?!? Ih. Next morning we headed up to the inexplicably little-known Mt. Madonna, and then on over past Elkhorn Slough to Monterey and finally Big Sur. At the beach where the Big Sur River meets the Pacific, my travel buddy commented that I was touching the grass the same way the Gladiator did in the movie as he was dying. I think after the third year of medical school I was surprised to find that I was a) still alive and b) still capable of contentment in nature. The cold Pacific breeze in Big Sur is not far off from the one in San Francisco so I don't know if it was that, or the green, or the ocean. But it was something. The second picture is standing on the beach, looking back up the river. The video shows you how windy it was, but it was a good wind.











Since we were in Big Sur, a visit to the Maiden Public House was in order, as well as the Henry Miller Library. By this point in the trip I was already taking profound greenery as a given. The next day we headed up the Pine Ridge Trail in Ventana Wilderness, one of my favorite in the world, but didn't get all the way to the hot springs. Until next time...but the drive down the central coast afterward is always sublime. See if you can find the waterfall in the second picture - it's not that hard.









That night we stayed in San Luis Obispo but not before stopping at Taco Temple in Morro Bay. Please do be advised of their mesozoic portion sizes. They tried to warn us, but we were enthusiastic to make up for having missed them Christmas 2011 our last time up the Central Coast because they were closed for some reason. Then heading south again the next day, we took a detour on Route 166 (it looks like New Mexico back there on the way to the Carrizo Plain) then stopped for a short hike in the San Rafael Wilderness, the flora of which kind of reminded me of some of the drier East and South Bay preserves, like Henry Coe.





Yeah. That's right Stillman, I've been reading your blog, and now I'm in your hood! What are you gonna do about it? Actually to go on one of the hikes you describe I would've had to start at 4am and go 20 miles off-trail so maybe you're safe for now...

And what visit is complete without stopping for dinner at noted anthropologist and space cadet Michael Gurven's house in Santa Barbara. His lovely lady Lisa recently made the mistake of bearing his issue. Oddly she seems glowingly happy as if she hasn't realized this. And I'll tell you something surprising, the child looked normal. Like, really a healthy normal human baby. It's a medical mystery that can only be explained by the mother's robust genetic constitution.

And after that, straight home to ol' SD. And you know what? I was happy to get back. (Don't tell anyone.)

Possible future plans for further 'sploring:

- Tuolumne Meadows and a nice hike up to Vogelsang Peak
- Or maybe all the way up to and over Mono Pass from Yosemite to Tuolumne Meadows
- White Mountains and the Bristlecones (too much snow up there two weeks ago)
- Heading back for a Saturday night stay at the hot springs in Ventana Wilderness
- I had been obsessed with central Los Padres above Santa Maria and Santa Barbara, since areas of this were only recently (last few decades) properly mapped
- Finally getting out to the Channel Islands

NOTE: people could not do these kinds of trips without the time and efforts of a number of volunteer groups who, out of the goodness of their hearts, pick up where government agencies don't have money or interest to provide information for free online. Two in particular who I couldn't have done this trip without are Ventana Wilderness Alliance and the Southern Los Padres Writers Association blog, both outstanding resources for the massive Los Padres National Forest that stretches from Monterey to Los Angeles and which contains multiple wilderness areas. Their maps and trail descriptions are in many cases the only way I know of to get reliable recent information to plan hikes; not only that, they do a lot to ensure the conservation of the natural and cultural resources in the Wildernesses.