When I posted the outtakes of 2006 last week I knew I was going to have to do some kind of “best of” round-up. Rather than zero in on the exclusively on the most stunning images of the year, I plucked one scene from each month that represented something memorable to me. Without further ado:

January

Kathy Wimble, one half of the FOMFOK brain trust, prepares to uncork a bottle of bubbly for First Hike 2006.

February

A brimming water trough at Sunol Regional Wilderness, where the winter rains had the creeks gushing and the trails oozing.

March

Impressive rock, gorgeous sky on FOMFOK’s annual Pinnacles National Monument hike.

April

A llama’s hindquarters at Henry Coe State Park, where I hiked 12 tortuous miles to Mississippi Lake, spent the night and wished I was the llama’s owner.

May

Breakfast along a fork of the Coyote Creek in Henry Coe State Park, where I camped out as part of a Sierra Club lightweight-backpacking course.

June

Campers watching the fire at Penner Lake, Tahoe National Forest, where I camped out with some kindly backpacking enthusiasts.

July

Snow melts into Y Meadow Lake at Emigrant Wilderness, site of an overnight campout.

August

Pinot something or other (or not, wine dims the memory) at Sterling Vineyards in the California wine country on another FOMFOK outing.

September

A peak called The Watchman at Zion National Park, down the road from a small inn where we shacked up for a week. We have an enlargement of this shot framed in our living room.

October

Alpine Lake at Skyline Ridge Open Space Preserve in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

November

A shed full of park signs at Castle Rock State Park.

December

Rain traveling through the Bay Area creates interesting cloud formations at Mission Peak.

Many thanks to all who helped make this another excellent year. Your suffering will be redeemed in the afterlife.

In a little cottage overlooking the sprawling metropolis, we opened gifts.

Melissa’s mom went first.

She’s quite like her daughter: all gifts of jewelry are welcome. (Melissa bought her a pinkie ring from a local antiques shop. I told her now she’s free to be in the Mafia because all the wise guys have pinkie rings).

One of Mary’s gifts to me (in addition to many color pairs of socks she knitted) was this lovely Detroit Tigers ballcap, which I can wear with the smug reassurance of a Cards fan whose boys crushed ’em in last fall’s World Series .

Melissa greatly appreciates a DVD full of M.A.S.H. reruns from the show’s first season.

My dad & stepmom sent this way-cool lighthouse from their wintering grounds in Florida.

Now there’s nothing to do but appreciate all of our Christmas gifts.

Gifts next to the tree, originally uploaded by busybeingborn.

The best thing you can give won’t have any bows or ribbons.

Christmas reminds me that I could be a more giving person, that I could spend more time with the aged, the young, the hungry, the suffering. Not in my nature to be that kind of person.

Yet if you were to ask me “So Tom, how do I start me a blog,” I could give till you’re blue in the face. If you were to ask how to hike off a few extra pounds, how to pick the best of 100 shots from your vacation, how to get a newspaper section to the press on time, you might find me generous to a fault.

I take a lot from the world … I use more fossil fuels than I have any hope of replacing. I eat food irrigated from precious natural water sources; I use products manufactured in distant nations where forests and rivers are being fouled so somebody can turn a buck selling me this stuff at “affordable” prices (which are merely a discount against the cost of repairing the damage down the road).

None of us give back as much as we could, or even what we should. But we should be giving back something. And just as the weight of everything you put in a backpack adds up, the weight of everything we do adds up too.

I don’t think I’m entirely self-deluded to believe that I’ve been doing at least a little bit of good in the world by posting pictures from the outdoors and writing about walking in the woods. At the very least I’m distracting people from further degrading the earth, and at best I’m encouraging them to get out in their own woods and maybe come to realize why we need these wild places.

Want to give something worth having? How about a down payment on giving your great-great-great-great granddaughter a planet as good as the one we’ve got now? You don’t need to be a tree-spiking enviro-terrorist to believe future generations have as much right to a livable planet as we do.

Call that my Christmas wish: that folks wake up and realize we’re not merely taking what’s here today for ourselves, we’re stealing it from those who come after us.

Here’s ours:

And here’s ours when I do a little flick of the wrist while clicking on the shutter.

(I don’t need no holiday for an excuse to play with my toys!)

Everybody please be happy, be safe, kiss those who should be kissed, hug those who should be hugged, and take 10 deep breaths in the name of the Giving, Generous and Forgiving Spirit of Christmas.

Anybody can do a Greatest Hits of 2006 post; I’m doing a Greatest Misses of 2006. That is, pictures that were almost good enough to post in the past year but for some reason didn’t make the final cut. Let’s check ’em out, month by month:

January

Along the trial to Murietta Falls on the Ohlone Wilderness Trail from Lake Del Valle in Livermore. This is a section near the top of the Big Burn where many impressive old oaks decorate the hillside.

February

A self-portrait taken after a night spent camping on the snow at Carson Pass in the Sierra. I was in desperate need of a haircut at the time, as the chilly mountain breezes attested.

March

Snow coats the hilltops in our neighborhood after a nasty cold front came through. This is Monument Peak at Ed Levin County Park.

April

A foggy morning at Henry Coe State Park, where I had just spent the night sleeping on the ground as part of a lightweight-backpacking course.

May

Melissa’s mom was in town so we took a drive down to the coast. This is a pile of driftwood on the beach next to California Highway One between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz.

June

The sky turns interesting colors as night falls near Penner Lake during an overnight backpacking trip to Tahoe National Forest.

July

Rebecca of calipidder.com and backpackgeartest.org, next to a blazing fire her husband built using wood he chopped with a very large knife, during an overnight backpacking trip to Emigrant Wilderness.

August

A stop near Carson Pass in the Sierra, where Melissa and I went for a road trip to warm up for the big miles ahead in our southern Utah vacation.

September

A rocky mount near the entrance to Zion Canyon at Zion National Park, just down the road from a bed & breakfast where we slept for a week between day trips to see all the scenic splendor of the region.

October

Pacific Crest Trail in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, where a bunch of outdoor bloggers got together for a long weekend.

November

Leaves turn at Castle Rock State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

December

Mission Peak along the Horse Heaven Trail, looking out over the San Francisco Bay.

Pretty good year if I do say so.

Something different this week: post-worthy pictures that’ve been taking up hard drive space unseen, some of them for several years.

To wit, this picture of my brother’s daughter Hannah, at my Mom’s place on Christmas Day 1998:

I had just bought my first digital camera a few months before so this counts as one of the first digital pictures I ever took. Kids this cute can overcome extraordinary expressions of photographic ineptitude.

The rest of this week’s pictures are quite a bit newer: late 2003 to late 2005. I think a large number of the pictures I took with my old camera got either erased or misplaced, an error for which ensuing generations of humans will be genuinely thankful.

Here’s a picture of one of our late great cats, Eldridge, who thoughtfully posed with a pumpkin for Halloween in October of 2003.

I’ve got about a dozen other shots of him not posing. He does have the expression which says we oughta be damn grateful for his cooperation.

Next up, a tail light from an early ’50s Cadillac, seen at an antique-car show in Pleasanton in March 2004.

Caddy tail fins got to be so much more expressive as the decade wore on.

Here’s a shot from one of my first walks on dirt, at Ed Levin County Park in the summer of 2004:

I wouldn’t have much of a portfolio if it weren’t for California’s golden hills and blue skies.

If you ever walk through downtown San Jose, this is a sight you’ll see every 20 minutes or so:

These jets fly incredibly close to the buildings downtown. I’m guessing the people flying in on the jets wave to their co-workers in their cubicles. This one’s from September of 2004.

Falling water at Uvas Canyon County Park in January 2005.

Uvas Canyon is the best place in Santa Clara County to see waterfalls.

Something I’m also thankful for: expressive, though expired, trees.

This one’s at Del Valle Regional Park in Livermore, early spring 2005.

Here’s a shot along the trail at Pinnacles National Monument later in the spring of 2005:

The Pinnacles are an impressive rock formation, but there’s quite a bit of non-rock things to see. The wildflowers go crazy every spring.

Next up: The beach at Andrew Molera State Park in Big Sur, south of Carmel, where I camped out in the summer of 2005.

The ocean’s blue is sublime down this way.

Speaking of sublime, it’s an apt adjective for the view of San Francisco Bay from Angel Island State Park, seen here in the summer of 2005.

While we’re on the subject of San Francisco, here’s a shot of the downtown as seen through a chain-link fence on a crystal-clear late-autumn day in the fall of 2005.

I couldn’t help thinking this must be what the Financial District always looks like to the homeless who sleep on the city’s sidewalks.

Plucking these pix from the archives was no small task — I had to give myself credit for having already posted most of the good ones.

A writer and an editor are out camping. A large pot of stew is cooking over the fire. Writer comes up to campfire and is distressed to find the editor peeing in the stew.

“Making it better,” the editor replies.

A priceless quote:

“I deplore the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity and the mendacious spirit of those who write them.”

Thomas Jefferson, 1807

I think I can say I have officially joined the Wave of the Future, which means:

• We had a swell union contract in which the company paid all our health insurance premiums. The new one which we’ll be voting on soon obliges us to pay 20 percent of these premiums.
• Our new contract also changes the way vacation pay is accrued in a way that will cost me $5,000 if I stay at the paper beyond the next couple years.
• Our new contract freezes our pension and switches to a 401k. If I reduce my takehome pay by 6 percent, the company will match half of it. So instead of the company contributing to my pension fund — managed by financial professionals — I reduce my standard of living by another 6 percent and become wholly dependent on my ability to play the financial markets for the next 30 years. Good thing I majored in journalism.

Somebody at work mentioned a theory on why my employer decided to tell everybody we were subject to layoff rather than just those whose jobs were actually at risk: to ensure everybody felt the anxiety, to increase the likelihood that our union would accept these concessions. A hard-nosed tactic, for sure.

A lot of this sounds like a kick in the teeth — and I’ll definitely be buying fewer camping toys in the near future — but I’m working in a troubled industry: we know there will always be a demand for news, but these days we’re deeply unsure how to turn a buck tapping that demand. Until we figure that out there will probably be more demands for concessions, more anxiety over lost jobs, more of the bosses playing hardball. And more newsies sucking it up. Not like we’ve got much choice: The paper going broke is not useful to any of us.

Sometimes I wonder how much good a union is doing me, personally. Unions do help slackers keep their jobs and make it harder for the bosses to reward the workhorses. But I learned one thing on this latest contract negotiation: in tough times people have to band together to protect their interests.

Our company had a laundry list of far harsher concessions it could have imposed at will on a non-union shop. Management abandoned those ideas in the interest of getting what it needed most: us to pony up more of the cost of health care. Frankly, this was only fair.

Perhaps the greatest concession on the company’s part was accepting our union’s right to have a say in who does what jobs. Companies don’t hate unions because they demand better wages and benefits: they hate unions because unions challenge their power to do as they damn well please. Perfectly understandable from a manager’s standpoint.

In the current environment there is simply no way that I could’ve negotiated a better deal than the one our union negotiated. One copy editor has one copy editor’s sway. Which ain’t much.

Sure, unions are a pain in the ass, but sometimes they save your ass.