Russ Whitney of hikingideas.com introduces Wilderness Trailcraft. He dropped me an e-mail yesterday saying Dan Mitchell and I had inspired him to join the blogging masses. Mind you we’ll be the ones to blame when his trail buddies have to drag him away from his keyboard to enjoy the Idaho countryside he calls home. But until a 12-step program for bloggers is introduced, we say c’mon in, the water’s fine (and if it isn’t, we can recommend many fine filters).

Russ, like so many hikers and campers, has a coffee jones. I’m not one of these people, which absolves me of “first one up has to make the coffee” responsibilities, which gives me more time to take cool pictures of sunrises and find pretty, secluded spots to do one’s morning business, if you get my drift. But back to Russ and his coffee: His latest post offers four ways not to make it. The highlights:

• Cowboy coffee: If you put enough grounds in the water to make decent coffee then you’ll be picking grounds out from between your teeth for days.
• Instant: this coffee sucks worse than cowboy coffee. The good news is that most people know it sucks before they actually try it so no time is wasted here.
• Espresso: Recently outdoor stores started carrying these little expresso makers for the trail. These things have multiple problems. They are not all that light – about 1/2 pound. Secondly, they make a teeny-tiny bit of coffee. And as soon as you get the few drops of coffee out of the thing they are way too hot to open to make a second cup.
• Java Juice: It’s basically a little envelope of highly concentrated coffee. The idea is that you just add hot water and you have great coffee. The dream ends there, unfortunately, because the coffee is bad, really bad.

So, five billion years of evolution gave humans the ability to harness fire and flavor receptors to discourage the consumption of bitter-tasting things. So what do we do when we return to the wilderness which produced these evolutionary breakthroughs? Heat up a cup of coffee. When the Vulcans show up to bring peace, love and alien pathogens from other solar systems, this is all they’ll need to be told about our species.

With my anti-coffee rant out of the way, I can encourage you to stop by Russ’s site and share some coffee tips. And maybe start your own blog — he’s got his site set up so you, too, can spend precious hours away from the wilderness writing about being in the wilderness (Look, I’ve never gotten a single callous, mosquito bite or sunburn while blogging. Just sayin’.)