This Makes No Sense At All

I have been watching with dismay as our local newspapers consolidate and/or vanish, local news disappearing with each change. I am seeing all too many last columns from favorite columnists. One of the hiking blogs I follow is Tom Mangan's Two Heel Drive , a local newspaperman, he gives some insider's views of the industry. His travails have prompted some thoughts of my own. Our local papers are the Oakland Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle. At one time we subscribed to both, but the Tribune stopped coming months ago, and their customer service - entirely online and devoid of human contact of course, says we are not subscribers. ok, my favorite columnist there, Brenda Payton, was gone, so we said forget the Tribune, the Chronicle will be enough. Now the Trib sends us a renewal notice?! Anyway, our budget is getting a little tight, and the Chron is now more than $30 per month, and the Trib is $24 per year, so we are thinking of switching just to the Trib, even though w...

I'm sitting here thwarted because once again nature has cancelled our attempt to finish the one 50 mile piece of the Pacific Crest Trail that we have yet to complete in California. It's just a short segment from Kennedy Meadows to Cottonwood Pass, and when we finished our 250 mile segment from Agua Dulce to Kennedy Meadows on May 19th, our plan was to come back and do the Cottonwood Pass stretch on June 6, after the snow level had dropped sufficiently. Well, several days after we got home there was a big storm, and the Cottonwood Pass area got several feet of fresh snow instead of melting off. So, we rescheduled once again for June 22. We were all packed up and ready to leave, but checked to see if firefighters were still letting pct hikers go thru the small fire just north of Kennedy Meadows. That fire became a monster overnight and has gone from about 300 acres to 3000+. Wildfire Today: Clover fire approaches Hwy. 395 Hikers are barred from the pct, though they can detou...