This Makes No Sense At All

Went to a benefit the other day. I'm just a hiker. Pretty selfish - get a lot of pleasure from using the wilderness but don't participate in it's preservation other than paying dues to some environmental organizations. Anyway, good friends were sponsoring this event for earthlight.org , so we went to hear Drew Dellinger read his environmental poetry. There was an opening act by Mary Ellen Hill "History of the Universe in Fifteen Minutes", which I recommend anyone to see if they get the opportunity. Her website is mehstories.com , but the reason I'm blogging about this event is that one of Drew's poems has been sticking with me, even though I try to ignore it: hieroglyphic stairway it's 3:23 in the morning and I'm awake because my great great grandchildren won't let me sleep my great great grandchildren ask me in dreams what did you do while the planet was plundered? what did you do when the earth was unraveling? surely you did something w...

Subtitle: The Meltdown Mechanism. After seeing a granddaughter thru the terrible twos, and now in the grownup fours, and currently seeing my grandson thru the not so terrible twos, not to mention some of my workplace experiences, I've got some experience with meltdowns. For a child the meltdown comes in a flash, gone in a flash, triggered by trivia to our minds but catastrophe to theirs. As they learn the ways of the world, these incidents usually diminish, perhaps due to the realization that there is a scale to incidents, and if a full response is invoked by a lesser incident, they have nothing left to show the impact of a larger incident. Since this is common to all children, maybe it's just a developmental change in brain chemistry: the first sign of the fight or flee triggering enzyme, and the young brain is shocked into instant response. What about those adults who have difficulty scaling responses? Some succeed - you only have to listen to talk radio to know it, but w...

No doubt about it. Consider your normal recreational backpack - hike six hours, find a beautiful campsite, hangout, bag a peak, read, swim, photograph, etc. Definitely a vacation. Active, yes, but if asked what you did for vacation, you answer "went backpacking" with no hesitation. Now, our recent 300 mile section hike on the PCT. Up at dawn - roughly 5:30. On the trail by 7. Gorp break at 9, PopTart break at 10:30, jerky, powerbar, dried fruit & cracker for lunch, Gorp breaks thru the afternoon & finally finding a suitable camp spot at 7pm. A dry camp of course. You only hit water once or twice a day, and rarely is it when you want to camp. So, on the last water, pump about 3 liters extra for supper and breakfast at the dry camp. Some days we might stop at five pm. On those days the thru-hikers will be going by, sometimes saying "stopping early?" as they go on to complete their 30+ mile day. So why do we do it? Because it feels so good to stop? Possibly ...

As our backpacking miles approach 500 miles per year and our ages continue to advance (I'm 71, Susan 66), things hurt. Each trip has it's moments of splendor, but the number of days to become trail hardened keeps increasing. Eventually we get to the point where few people pass us while we are hiking, though they do pass us after we have stopped for the day around five or six pm. At that point we are usually talking about food at the last trail town, food at the next, etc. But, a question we think about, but don't discuss much anymore, is: Are we using up a scarce resource, or toughening up and extending the life of our joints. Well, it turns out that question has been answered, by some physicians writing in the Journal of Sports Medicine in 1997. Kaiser Permanente has summarized that article and some related ones in: https://xnet.kp.org/permanentejournal/Fall00/Osteoarthritis.pdf The short answer is no, you are not wearing out your joints, or doing much to them at all,...