A SierraTopix thread on people you meet on the trail. The first page of the first chapter of Hiking for Dummies, if such a book exists, you’re apt to find the standard advice: Don’t walk alone. And yet: everybody does…
Author Archive for tmangan
Mud season looms
by tmangan • November 4, 2005 • 0 Comments
The Bay Area of California gets six months of dry weather, and six months of rainy weather. It’s nothing like Seattle — I think our average rainfall at peak is about half of what it is up there. But still:…
The Wikipedia’s entry on hiking
by tmangan • November 3, 2005 • 0 Comments
Lots of nifty details in this entry at Wikipedia.org, the online encyclopedia. Hiking’s the main thing I do outdoors — keeps the gear/complication costs down (what’s with bikes and all those sprockets, chain links and tires that go flat, anyway?)…
Don’t look down
by tmangan • November 2, 2005 • 1 Comment
Here’s an interesting thread on fear of heights at TrailForums. One extract: I had a hiking accident in November 2003, falling down a very steep section of trail on the AT in the Whites while solo hiking. I spent two…
If it ain’t Scottish it’s crap
by tmangan • November 2, 2005 • 0 Comments
Found this link to a fine blog called Outdoors Scotland. It’s fine because, you guessed, it contains a link to Two-Heel Drive. And because it has all these Scottishisms — what we call “fanny packs” they call “bumbags,” a term…
Just when you thought coyotes were cute and harmless…
by tmangan • November 2, 2005 • 0 Comments
… Comes this tale of a grandfather attacked by a rabid coyote on a trail near the burbs of Boston. On Oct. 5, the 76-year-old grandfather had been walking a trail behind his home at the Birchwood Community Development with…
Ma, it’s not a circle jerk, I swear
by tmangan • November 2, 2005 • 2 Comments
So three of the folks on my list of blogs have linked to posts of mine from the past couple days. This, ladies and gentlemen, is how stuff gets started. Just think: If each of them — plus me —…
On stillness
by tmangan • November 1, 2005 • 0 Comments
The only way to truly experience the wilderness is to stand still and start paying attention. Once you get moving you start missing stuff. No matter how much we imagine ourselves as being outdoors people, as long as we’re hiking…
Don’t tell the Sierra Club
by tmangan • November 1, 2005 • 0 Comments
But there are people who take their wheeled, engined, gasoline-burning vehicles into the wilderness (I know, they get crazy ideas from all those ads on TV). Yes, I’m appalled that anybody who spends $35,000 for such a vehicle would want…