This Makes No Sense At All

We are out on a slightly rainy Sunday, hiking from Coyote Hills Regional Park to Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge. It is an absolutely perfect time to hike this area. Cool and pleasant, the bay waters steel gray, dotted with ducks. Dark and linear clouds overhead, with light streaks. A few ground squirrels around. An egret leaves a muddy track on the shallow bay bottom. The Coyote Hills end has a few cars. Not much water in the freshwater marsh, big irregular polygons in the mud, separated by deep cracks. Most now under two or three inches of water, so the last rains have put some water into Alameda Creek. As we move south towards Don Edwards, we see the Dumbarton Bridge off to the right, and in the distant foreground, the outlines of a dozen or so salt cars, ready for their load. An aside, we've been getting some unattributed taking of blog content so inserting © 2009 backpack45.com Nearing the highway, a massive crater comes into view, maybe 200 feet deep. We can't...

Thought it might aid some future trekker if I just list things as we learn them. It is now early Dec 2008, and we have reservations into Santiago, Chile for March, and back home from Buenos Aires. Now we have to fill in the in between. We got the start and end locations from a friend who visited Chile and Argentina last year, though he wasn't trekking Torres del Paine. Some other friends did do the trek about 15 years ago, so we started by borrowing all their old guide books and maps. Since then we got our own Lonely Planet Trekking in Patagonia , and a recent Torres del Paine Trekking Map . Since I'm going to keep updating this post, to keep all the Patagonia info in one spot, and try to keep a change log here: Change log: 12/14/16 *** very important*** all campsites now require advance reservations, for example at this date, all of January is already reserved. See Campsite Reservations post below for more details. 12/2014 *** important *** Any US citizen entering...

We went to the San Mateo Harvest Festival the other day . As we walked in, we noticed this Model A parked just outside, along with Candelaria and Herman selling books. That's Susan on the right, not Herman. It turns out that they have driven this car from Argentina to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, having a child during the trip. Somehow they found time to write a book about their trip: Spark Your Dream and now are planning to drive their car across Asia. I had a point when I started this, but Susan has been quizzing me from across the room "ou habite vous", "vous vous apelez, comment?", etc as we try to master phrases from our rudimentary French class, and my train of thought was derailed. On our last hiking trip in France, we were talking to our hostess in English, after she heard our attempts at French. She: "How many times have you been in France" Us: "Well, five times". She: "Isn't it about time you learned French?" So, we vowed to...

A cold and foggy Sunday morning, but we headed for Point Reyes, knowing the elk would be forming harems. About 50 fe et before we reached the Pierce Point Ranch parking lot, Susan spotted a skunk about 15 feet from the road, out foraging. We backed up to get a photo, and saw another skunk about 25 feet from the first one. Both were ignoring us, just walking around digging here and there. After a few shots, we park and start down the trail. A few others are braving the fog. A lot of elk are way off the trail, down towards the ocean on the right. The real surprise comes as we continue on towards the pond, where lots of elk usually hang out. Susan spots a movement almost at my feet, just off the trail. A little weasel is popping in and out of a burrow, and boldly just standing and checking us out. You can't really appreciate him until you checkout this movie Susan made, and posted on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBje2k4KNC4

When we backpack and hike, ants are ubiquitous, big, little, all black, red and black, etc. Today we were out walking along a road bordering an East Bay Regional Park, and noticed a cone shaped ant lion trap on the edge of the road. I also saw a few in early spring. However, the only ants we ever see locally are the tiny Argentine ants, not big enough for a respectable ant lion snack. Are the local ant lions just a remnant population, gradually starving to death? Why don't we see the variety of ants here that we see while hiking the remote regions of California and Oregon? My thought is that maybe the larger ants are an overlooked environmental indicator - not able to tolerate human disturbance.

I'm just finishing up a planning effort, both polishing up our GR 653 Arles to Toulouse info based on completing that trip, and doing the initial Toulouse to Puenta la Reina planning. In all cases, the key document is the spreadsheet in the bottom center of the image. Normally I will use a Google Documents spreadsheet, as I share the info with others. I gather the appropriate guidebooks, and from them build the spreadsheet with names of the stops, and distances between points. To this I add the elevation for each point. Sometimes this is in the guidebooks, other times I have to pull it off of a topo map, or my topo software, or worst case, zooming google maps in terrain mode. I add cumulative distances to my spreadsheet, and with the distances and elevation can do an elevation profile chart with Google charts. Its a little easier to chart if I clone my original spreadsheet, and delete all but the elevations and cumulative distance. An aside, we've been getting some unattribu...

For hours, and sometimes days, we see no one as we walk. In France, at least we see someone at our lodging place at the end of the day. This is not a bad thing. It helps the transformation to the simple demands of the trail - food, shelter and persuading our body that this is normal, this is to be expected. As we settle into the daily routine, a new voice, the passing of a pilgrim, become major events. Later, as we think back on our experiences, we find the trip defined by the people we meet. Good friends for the moment, and then usually gone forever. For a few hours on the Arles trip we walked a while with Robert, the Solitary Walker . A few days later we kept meeting Celine, a French-Canadian pilgrim who helped us with our daily phone calls for lodging. Then they are gone or we are gone, each walking our own path. This is a strangely compelling existence. If you are thinking of walking in Europe, I would recommend the Le Puy route to Santiago as a good first experience, but on...

We're still plugging away at the East Bay Regional Parks Trail Challenge, trying to stay in shape for our next trip. A week or so ago, we did the Dell Valle suggested 10 mile trip, from the dam up nearly to the marina and back. A long, hot, up and down, and mileage mislabeled trip, as they frequently are (closer to 12 miles). Anyway, near the end of the return trip, I noticed this stick in the road that sort of looked like a snake, so knowing Susan is not too fond of snakes, I call out "hey, check out that stick in the road, doesn't it look like a snake?" She agrees, and as we continue walking towards it, the stick begins moving off the trail. We get up to it, and it is a fair sized rattlesnake, about three feet long. We didn't have our cameras, so just continued on back to our car. The thing that prompted this post was that yesterday I asked her if she had told anyone about seeing the snake - no, she had completely forgotten it, and it was no big deal. Well, ...

We finished the California part of the Pacific Crest Trail with this trip. Nice hike, though the altitude starting at the high end gave me a reaction somewhat like mild hyperthermia - headache the 1st day and sluggish and slow thinking the second. At a PopTart break, I was so beat, I grabbed a 2 minute nap in the trail: The section south from the northernmost crossing of the Kern River could use some trail maintenance. I really hate having to crawl under a tree with my pack on, but it is not quite as bad as pushing or pulling it thru. One of the highlights of the trip was seeing a wolverine in the upper part of Cow Creek. Susan spotted it first, and asked if it was a bear cub. With that long bushy dark tail, it did not compute. We watched it run straight up the slope from the creek, about 60 feet away. Dark brown and golden brown with a fringe of sunlit hair on the sides. We weren't fast enough to get the cameras out, so another undocumented sighting. We tried the SticPic a ...

I've been busy getting our resupply box off to Crater Lake for our Oregon PCT segment in a few weeks. As long as I label it appropriately, I can include isobutane fuel. For the full story on mailing fuel, see Our pct page writeup . We've also learned a few more tricks on lightening our pack and reducing the volume. For weight, we have replaced dried fruit with tasty but pricey freeze dried freeze dried fruit. The original brand cut the serving size. We need at least 20 grams for a snack. An equivalent is Brothers 7 Variety freeze dried fruit . Pricey, but good.. You can get them at a discount at Amazon . We've gained space by repackaging the freeze dried dinners, the gorp and the jerky using Handi -Vac quart bags that we found in the supermarket. It is a hand sized vacuum sealer with special bags. About every seven bags or so, the seal fails due to some problem such as a sharp jerky point, or noodle point puncturing the bag, so check them a couple hours after...

My parents were in the National Park Service, so as part of their heritage they left us umpteen million photographs and a lot of home movies. The thing that struck me about the movies, some 60 years later, is how much I want so see images of people. I look at these unique movies of buffalo, bighorns, deer, moose, etc., but what I want to see is the faces of people I have known. In so many shots, the people are just an afterthought. The back of a head, a shoulder, distant views. Recently I've been scanning in old slides of Susan's old neighborhood from about 30 years ago. She has done a little better at capturing faces. The batter here is backpack45, but I what I appreciated was the shot of her in a Renaissance dress. Some of the others in that scanning are good examples of what I'd like to see: circa 1977 circa 1961