Two-Heel Drive

A section of Angel Island caught fire Sunday night. There are tons of great pictures on Flickr.

I never watch TV on Sundays; otherwise I would’ve known about it (possibly; my potential for cluelessness is boundless).

Cal Fire’s page here. 75 percent contained at last report; The park is closed for now.

S.F. Chron story here. Lots more pictures here. It’s a major moonscape out there in some sections. Looks like it burned across the interior but spared the historic buildings.

I wonder: How else could this fire have started except errant sparks from somebody’s campfire? It was windy as as all get-out on Sunday and the terrain was super dry.

It’s a shame it had to hit Angel Island, it’s one of my favorite places in the Bay Area.

Here’s a chilling photo album from just one section of the Ventana Wilderness:

It’s in the Tassajara area. Fedak tells me the whole area remains closed because of this year’s fires. This page notes that the Basin Fire burned over 160,000 acres by the time it was declared contained in late July.

About time I got some actual hiking done around here. After a four-week break (the longest in four years) I decided Sunol Regional Wilderness would be an excellent re-entry point. Sunol is my default venue if I’m too lazy to come up with a new place to go. Mind you, all the trails at Sunol go either straight up or straight down, so lassitude is promptly punished.

I decided to take it easy after such a long break and did what must qualify as one of one of the best 4.5-mile hikes in the East Bay: Indian Joe Trail to the Cave Rocks Road to Flag Hill Trail and back where I started from. Just enough climb to get in a bit of a workout, shady on the first third, sunny and exposed the rest of the way, excellent scenery throughout.

If you’ve never taken this route, be advised: the descent on Flag Hill Trail is steep and rocky in places; if your knees hate downhills, you might want to go the opposite way, starting up Flag Hill Trail and returning via Indian Joe Trail.

Have to recount one wildlife moment that happened far too fast to catch on camera: I’m heading up to Flag Hill and I hear the distinctive “cheep cheep cheep” alarm of ground squirrels. Big dark wings come tearing down like a fighter pilot on a strafing run. Seconds later the raptor is soaring into the sun, fighting off a stiff breeze. Couldn’t tell if it caught anything, but it sure got the rodents in an uproar.

Must’ve been been an adult golden eagle — it had huge wingspan, but was missing the white spots on the underside of its wings that young golden eagles have. I thought it was a turkey vulture at first, but vultures never swoop in like that, except perhaps when there’s fresh roadkill.

Back at the Sunol visitors center, it was feeding time for a California king snake, which was trying to get its jaws around a mouse about four times the snake’s circumference. “He’ll take care of that in no time,” the guy minding the center said. Tendons in the snake’s jaws are like rubber bands, he explained. I left before much of the mouse was in the snake. I was willing to take his word for it.

With those wildlife moments out of the way, please check out this week’s video:

Sunol links for your clicking pleasure:

• My Sunol park profile
• My previous Sunol hikes
  
• Bay Area Hiker’s Sunol page.
• East Bay Regional Park District page.
• Pictures at Flickr.

Google map to get you there.

View Larger Map

A kindly commenter named Gus left this link with a bunch of pictures and maps from last week’s Steve Fossett crash discovery.

My Google maps of the crash site proved to be fairly accurate.

What mystifies me: if the plane burned when it crashed, why didn’t it start a fire big enough for people to notice? After all it was Labor Day weekend and the ground should’ve been tinder-dry.

Bob R., who took the pictures linked above, posted a wrap-up at the Whitney Portal Message Board.

The standard advice we all ignore is: Never hike alone. It seems that since backpacking is a more highly complex kind of hiking, the directive to never go solo should be even more of an imperative.

If this were true, however, there’d be precious few soloists schlepping overnight kits down trail. As Philip at Section Hiker notes, the logistics of taking several people camping for several days makes it borderline impossible to find anybody go backpack with, even if you wanted to. Going it alone is the option that remains because so many our pals prefer not to sleep on the ground.

In a lot of ways, day hiking is far more hazardous than backpacking. You take far fewer supplies, you pay less attention to details like footing because you’re not carrying a load, you take on more distance than you might be able to handle because you’re forced to come back to where you started, vs. just finding someplace to bed down for the night when you tire out.

Backpackers implicitly take survival supplies along and have at least a few days’ worth of calories and some vestige of shelter if they get too terribly lost. That’s a nice margin of safety.

The main limit on solo backpacking is that you really should leave a detailed route plan and itinerary with somebody back home, and then stick to it.

The real measure of soloing should be: how alone will you really be? Two weeks on the John Muir Trail in mid-August will seem like Highway 101 at rush hour compared to a weekend on the same trail in the middle of October. I read about one guy this summer who plotted an early JMT thru-hike and found himself alone in the High Sierra for days on end and decided to call off his hike because he didn’t feel comfortable out there all by himself.

Amy Racina, author of Angels in the Wilderness, fell down a cliff in a very remote section of the Sierra where almost nobody goes; it was a millimeter shy of a miracle that some hikers found her and she survived (note: her backpacking supplies kept her alive for several days till she was rescued).

As long as you won’t be truly alone, there’s not that much risk to solo backpacking, beyond getting sick of having only yourself for company. Which brings us to a nice question for the crowd: what do you do to avoid boredom on camp-outs in the downtime between, say, dinner and your ultimate sack-out time?

Scary rock slides crashed into Curry Village in Yosemite Valley yesterday and the day before. Rick of Hike Half Dome sent me a link yesterday after I went to work so I’m playing catch-up this morning. The latest from the Associated Press:

Chunks of granite crashed to the Yosemite Valley floor in a cloud of dust Wednesday, injuring at least three people, destroying several cabins and knocking down trees, officials said.
The rock slide was the second in two days in that area of the famed park defined by dramatic sheer cliffs.

“We were awakened at 7 to what sounded like thunder and what felt like the earth crumbling apart,” said Deanne Maschmeyer, 41, of Monterey, who was staying in a nearby cabin with her two children. “People were stampeding everywhere and running, running like crazy. I felt like I was running ahead of a tsunami.”

The slide in a lodging and retail area called Curry Village destroyed five cabins and partially damaged at least three others, according to a park statement. The accident left three visitors with minor injuries including scrapes. They were treated and released.

The volume of rocks cascading from the granite face was estimated at about 1,800 cubic yards, or about 180 truck loads, said Vickie Mates, a park spokeswoman.

There was another, smaller rock slide in the same area Tuesday afternoon. No one was injured.

Yosemite Blog is on the case, as expected.

Lots of damage to tents–heard a story of some restoration contract workers being moved from their tents last night; They refused because they didn’t feel safe. The tents they’d been assigned to were completely destroyed this morning. They had been re-reassigned to tents further away.

Pictures of the scenes at the Little Red Tent blog.

KCRA TV also has some nice shots at this photo gallery.

Fresno Bee has Google maps showing where the slide occurred.

The first comment after the S.F. Chron’s story is choice:

Falling rocks in Yosemite? First thing, everybody must wear hardhats from now on. Second, we need to form a committee to explore the options for anti-rock falling barricades to be constructed throughout the park. Finally, we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that this was a terrorist attack and we need to be afraid, very very afraid. In fact, it might have been the work of one of Obama’s pals. I think he visited the park once when he was eight and may have laid the groundwork for this reprehensible act.

Yosemite’s “Daily Report” is two days out of date at the moment but it may have Curry Village status available at some point. This L.A. Times story says the area of Camp Curry near the slide was closed but the rest has been reopened.

Cool hiking-related stuff I did in summers past:

• 2007: Tagged along on 4WheelBob’s White Mountain conquest
• 2006: Vacationed at Zion/Bryce/Grand Canyon in Southern Utah.

  Went on overnighters to Tahoe National Forest and Emigrant Wilderness.

  Took Steve Sergeant’s lightweight backpacking course.

• 2005: Vacationed at Yosemite.

I slept on an actual bed every every night in the summer of 2008 and barely got out of the Bay Area. I had four weeks of vacation and couldn’t find time to squeeze in a single camp-out. Upside: nobody had to pretend they were impressed with tales of my outdoor exploits. Didn’t have any.

Lessons/memories/conclusions now that it’s all over:

• Hearing the distant train whistle from the Roaring Camp Railroads from deep in the eastern half of Wilder Ranch State Park is just plain cool.
• Also just plain cool: Walking through groves of essentially newborn redwoods already towering skyward at Pescadero Creek County Park.
• Making little movies of your hikes is not that hard — the video function on your digital camera and some video editing software is all you really need. String together a bunch of short clips, edit out the boring/too-shaky parts and whammo: you’re in showbiz.
• If you find people you like hiking with, find a way to do it. Life keeps intervening on me and preventing this from happening.
• If you’re thinking, “by God I need to spend a week backpacking in the High Sierra,” find a way to commit yourself to doing it. I spent this year thinking maybe I’d get around to it and never did.

What about the rest of you? Any insights to be gleaned from your summer adventures?

One of my bad habits on days when I’m not hiking is watching the gyrations of the stock market. Hey, it’s very interactive. I suspect after this week there will be lots of people thinking of walking off into the woods, and perhaps never returning.

Hiking is about as cheap as it gets, considering you really don’t need much more than a pair of comfy shoes, though backpacking, geocaching and other variants can chew through a lot of coin. Then there’s the issue of long drives to trailheads, which do not mix well with $4 a gallon gas.

I’m curious as to how the rest of y’all are weathering the current econo-turmoil and if it’s taking any toll on your hiking. Are you seeing more or less people on the trails?

Your contributions welcome, as always.

Don’t expect me to lead the world to the remains of any globe-trotting adventurers. I tend to stay on the trail, whereas the guy who triggered the Fossett plane discovery was hiking way, way off the main trails leading out of Devil’s Postpile National Monument and into the Minarets country of the High Sierra. (By the way, the picture above is not from the Sierra; it’s the trail up to Mount Shasta; I’ve still never made it up to the trails around Mammoth Lakes).

There’s a certain itchy discipline about staying on trail in the Bay Area: all temptations to bushwhack are tempered by the tangles of poison oak standing between us and more enticing terrain. And there’s always the charming prospect of fleeing somebody’s marijuana plantation in a hail of gunfire. Plus, it’s kinder to the roughed-up near-urban environment to just stay on the path and give the rest of woods a chance to be, well, woods.

But I can see how things would be different in vast open country like the High Sierra. Ecosystems that recover from punishing storms every winter can no doubt recover from the depredations of the occasional hiker.

I like trails because they get me back where I came from — I’m not even sure I’d be able to enjoy myself off-trail because I’d be devoting too much attention to avoiding getting lost. I’d like to hear from the more adventurous among you: how do you stay found? What are the major pitfalls to avoid? What are the benefits compared to the risks?

Chime in via the comments form.

Steve Fossett would have had a hard time picking a more dramatic backdrop for his final adventure. From the road leading up to the eastern Yosemite gate, the Minarets loom dark, jaggy and dangerous
on a far-off ridge in the High Sierra. Up close they are simply spectacular.

This Google map shows approximately where Fossett’s plane crashed. The last I heard, a small bone about 2 inches long had been found there and presumed to be human, and therefore, Fossett’s. I’ll wait till the DNA report comes in, thank you.

View Larger Map

I read in several reports that Fossett left the small Nevada airport on Labor Day 2007 with little more than a water bottle, and no parachute. Searchers in fixed-wing planes scanned the site more than a dozen times, but it took a helicopter at around 200 feet to get in close enough to spot what was left of the aircraft after it rammed into a mountainside.

I’ll close with links from this morning’s paper:

San Francisco Chronicle: Tom Stienstra on the hikers’ paradise near Devil’s Post Pile.

The region is called the Ansel Adams Wilderness, and it is the heart of the John Muir Trail country. It features some of California’s most pristine, beautiful and popular backpacking destinations.

From the main Chron new story:

The investigation will take months, if not years, but Fossett’s friend and fellow aviator, John “Bumper” Morgan, doesn’t have to see the crash site in the Inyo National Forest to know what probably happened.

Morgan has flown gliders and airplanes for decades throughout the Eastern Sierra, where the pieces of Fossett’s borrowed plane were found this week, and he’s come to fear the downdraft of wind coming off the slopes and the sudden thermals whipping up from the ground.

“One of those two things got Steve, I’m pretty sure,” said Morgan, 63, of Gardnerville, Nev. “Even if you have your head screwed on straight and are a very good flier like he was, downdrafts and thermals can leap up and get you. Mother Nature just knows how to dish out more than you can handle.”

From the Reno Gazette-Journal:

Meanwhile, California National Guard troops also were scheduled to head to the rugged spot in the Inyo National Forest where searchers located the wreckage of the single-engine plane Fossett was flying when he disappeared more than a year ago. They planned to airlift out the surviving portions of the plane in Blackhawk helicopters so they could be reassembled and examined at a nearby hangar.

NTSB investigators went high into the mountains Thursday to figure out what caused the plane to go down. Most of the fuselage disintegrated on impact, and the engine was found several hundred feet away at an elevation of 9,700 feet, authorities said.

Here’s an MP3 of an interview with the guy who owns the sporting goods store managed by Preston Morrow, who found Fossett’s pilot’s license.

Los Angeles Times:

MAMMOTH LAKES, CALIF. — After an exhaustive search by the Civil Air Patrol, sophisticated analysis of satellite images and a year of uncertainty, it finally came down to this: A lone hiker and his dog.

On Thursday, 43-year-old Preston Morrow was weary. He had done more than 30 interviews with reporters from around the world, all eager to know how he stumbled on the clues that led searchers to the wreckage of adventurer Steve Fossett’s single-engine plane as well as a bone fragment that might be human.

Ol’ Preston says he’s ready for a vacation now that his 15 minutes of fame are up.

I think the lesson of Fossett’s life is simple: if you want to do something, stop wanting and start doing.