This Makes No Sense At All

This was a rare opportunity to once more see Green Valley Falls, tucked away in a Vallejo watershed,  gated, locked, signed and unavailable unless you can get into one of the seldom let Doris Klein hikes into the area;, through the auspices of Bay Area Ridge Trail. Doris is 84, and amazingly fit and spry, and at the present, the only person allowed to lead hikes in this area. It also requires reservations in advance, exact hiker names required, and when you get there, two signatures required, one on the Vallejo water district sheet and one on the Bay Area Ridge Trail sheet. If you are not on their reservation list, do not come. No one gets added. All that said, this is a low price opportunity to see two rarely seen Vallejo waterfalls, shrouded in mist, surrounded by ferns, and a wonderful riparian experience. It makes you feel like you  are in the rain forest area, a couple of hundred miles north. You meet beyond a normally locked gate and begin trekking up this green path,...

harsh or discordant sound : dissonance 2; specifically : harshness in the sound of words or phrases. A  week or so ago I saw it used in an article, and last night, when we had dinner with my niece and her husband, I heard it spoken for the first time ever, when she was describing time with their nine year old daughter and friends. Now I am having an absolute cacophonic experience as the old roof comes off right over my head - about three feet away to be exact. There is hammering, scraping, walking, thumping, chattering, shouting in Spanish.  If you can imagine black snow-like material sifting down, that is what is happening in the garage, which has the old style 1x6 board roof underlayerment, with about 1/4 inch gaps between the boards, and nothing further between the roof and the garage floor. The one little section of exposed beam ceiling in our house is right above my head - tongue and groove boards, so I didn't expect anything to come through, ...

At our gathering of friends last night, one happened to mention the Bay to Breakers race today, from the San Francisco Embarcadero to the ocean. Susan had Long Walk written on the calendar for today, and that sounded like a good fit. Only problem was that we should be at the start around 8:30, and the last guest left shortly before 11pm. We left it as a maybe, so this am I nudged Susan about 6:30 and proposed my plan - leave the house no later than 8, be at BART by 8:20, and at race start between 8:30 and 9. Agreed, provided I get up immediately and not wake her till 7:10. All connections worked out and we arrived in SF about 8:20. BART was jammed, streets were packed, tortillas flying all over like frisbees, and we joined the crowds inching towards the starting line, which we reached about twenty minutes later. Fun though. This is not a normal race. Some 100,000 people take part, many in some sort of wild costume, vast quantities of beer consumed, plenty of naked people, ...

Jon is a San Francisco columnist of some renown, and in the ancient past, (he is almost as old as I am), he wrote about those tasks you do that are necessary and important, in place of those tasks requiring immediate completion. i.e. you have company coming in two hours, and you decide that this is the perfect time to finally clean out the garage. Ever since that column, we have called such tasks "Jon Carroll Tasks", of which this post is one. I still have seven or eight hours till people arrive, so I am thinking about weed whipping the back slope, doing a blog post on my efforts to compare satellite phone rentals, catching up on the household budget ... more such tasks will come as I have less time remaining. We have a couple of major trips coming up, first wrapping up the GR 653 into Puenta la Reina, and then after a few weeks of intermission, wrapping up the Pacific Crest Trail through the State of Washington into Canada. Both of these trips have a lot of little details...

Yesterday I was feeling the pressure of planning, but this morning we dropped everything and went to Briones Regional Park to do one of their trail challenges - a short loop,  less than five miles, but for a couple of hours there was no computer, no distractions, just enjoying California spring, lush grass, cows and cow pies, poppies popping out everywhere. A coyote cruising through the tall grass, stopping for something in the distance. Probably one of the gophers, who are busy pushing dirt out of their holes this morning. I had a perfect shot of one about a foot away. Sun was at my back, he had no chance to see me, just light fighters out of the sun in those old world war II movies. But Susan had seized the camera a minute before, to capture a burst of orange up ahead, so I just settled for a moment enjoying a gopher's nose at close distance.  Hardly seems fair to call it training. Where's the pain and misery? Now this same route in  mid winter, pour...

This is a big year for us. Finally completed the Torres del Paine circuit in March, in June do the last segment of the Arles Route over the Pyrenees into Spain, and in Aug-Sept complete the 2600 mile Pacific Crest Trail, starting near the southern border of Washington state and reaching Manning Park in Canada about 40 days later. Along with that we are trying to keep up our connections with friends and relatives, and Susan needs to attend to the needs of her 99 year old and somewhat independently  living mother. Not to mention normal house maintenance. It is difficult to keep on top of everything. Yesterday looked at detailed daily mileage for the Pcific Crest Trail trip to get exact time for trip and location of resupplies. Today I checked the flight to France to see whether we arrived in time to go on to Oloron Sainte Marie the same day. Yes, barring delays so querying hotel in Oloron for reservations. Our calendar every day says "walk". Today there was a note: Carry bac...

Warning, totally unrelated to hiking, other than hikers are lovers of beauty. We just came back from a birthday party which we have been attending for at least fifteen years. Normally it is on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. Everyone brings potluck food, and we eat, the kids play, and everyone hikes all over the island to work off the food consumed. Today, rain, so we descended on the birthday honoree's house instead. Well, one of the on and off attendees of this event is a textile artist who came bearing her new book, which she had just received from the publisher. I spent quite a bit of time looking through it. This book has about twenty five years of research into it. The author comes from a family tradition of weaving, and when her husband got a teaching assignment in Saudi Arabia, she got introduced to bedouin weaving. Visiting the weavers, learning their customs and circumstances, became a full time obsession. The result is this gorgeous book, full of the author's ph...