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,...

I've been thinking about this for a couple of days now, and wondering what it is about email forums that seems accentuate controversy. My philosophy of life is to expect good intentions from any individual I meet. I rarely have been disappointed. Particularly in the community of pilgrims and of long distance hikers, we have depended greatly on the kindness of strangers. I participate in email forums in the pilgrim and hiking community, and find them subject to waves of strident controversy. These people who are universally friendly and helpful on the trail revert to some evil twin when they are home and at the keyboard. Is there something different about people that participate in physically demanding high risk activities? Or is it that long distance hiking generates some calming sedative that pulses through our body on the trail, and the email forums are just revealing our normal nature?

Don't intend to do this daily, just update as random thoughts prompt. My wife and I are chronic long distance hikers, but have limited time, so we are always trying to cram in as much hiking as possible in the two to three week segments of time we have available. As we get older, it takes longer and longer to hit the hiking "zone" where the miles go by in an altered state of mind. Usually three or four days into a backpack, it is still hard. On this last trip on Pacific Crest Trail Californ ia section D, it was hot, water available only every other day, so we were carrying about two gallons. Campgrounds we went thru were closed, with the water turned off, and we had this discussion to the effect of " this makes no sense at al l". A week or so later while finishing up the section, we were already busy planning the next PCT trip from Burney Falls to Ashland, Oregon this fall.