Interesting quote I just stumbled upon:

“Few residents and fewer visitors realize that no other major metropolitan center holds such an extensive system of natural areas. The extraordinary total of wild greenbelts in the Bay Area exceeds Yosemite National Park in size, biodiversity, and visitation.” — Galen Rowell (source here)

My feet can attest to the miles of trails; my brain can’t even process all I’ve experienced just within a two-hour drive of San Jose (good reason to have a blog is to preserve a record, thus leaving room in the brain for essential details like the injustices of having my favorites voted off American Idol. )

Any second now I’m going to get to the point. OK, this is it: For all our boundless outdoor opportunities, there really isn’t a single site where folks around here can go to get the latest news, links, commentary that might nurture our interest and validate our experiences.

That other newspaper in San Francisco has an outdoors page that will last till the day Tom Stienstra either a) retires; or b) gets laid off. Gorp has a San Francisco page of timeless ditties, but no real news.

I’m fine with writing about hiking, but I’m not exactly a font of knowledge on water sports, wheeled sports, fishing, hunting or anything that happens on snow (which I moved to California to avoid). I guess it would be amusing to try these things out to see how long it would take to be come a) drowned; b) run over; c) barbed; d) shot; or e) buried in an avalanche.

Those jokesters at GoBlog tried to make a go of an “outdoors portal” during the dot-com boom; they still have a few cool refrigerator magnets and bumper stickers to show for it. Maybe Climb_CA will stop in and explain why it’s so hard to get any traction with such a site.

It seems self-evident that with so many people doing the same kinds of things, there ought to be a Web site that’s part of their online diet. Then again, somebody would have to create it and keep it up and running, and they’d probably rather be having fun on all those trails.