If you hike the trails around the Bay Area you’re bound to see people hiking with their dogs, who always seem to be having about 19 times more fun than their human companions (people don’t own their dogs out here,…
Author Archive for tmangan
Everything’s heavy at Henry Coe
by tmangan • June 20, 2005 • 5 Comments
I proved yesterday that I can walk five miles uphill with 40 pounds of camping gear strapped on. Actually, I sorta knew I could because I’d done it with a bit less weight last month, but I hadn’t done it…
Call me a galley slave
by tmangan • June 12, 2005 • 0 Comments
No hikes or camp-outs of note this weekend. For the past month or so I’ve been doing a couple training hikes a week with 40 pounds in the backpack and I keep thinking there’ll be some time when it doesn’t…
Touched by an Angel
by tmangan • June 5, 2005 • 1 Comment
Angel Island is this hunk of rock poking up out of the middle of San Francisco Bay. The island’s a state park now, but over the years it’s been home to an anti-aircraft missile base, a prisoner of war camp…
Backpacking at long last
by tmangan • May 30, 2005 • 2 Comments
Every week it’s a new class of Outdoors 101 in the University of the Great Outdoors. Hiking is the land-grant college — economical, close to home, plenty to offer to motivated students, just tough enough to weed out the slackers.…
Among the giant trees
by tmangan • May 22, 2005 • 0 Comments
Big Basin Redwoods State Park is one of those places where you walk into the woods thinking of trees as expendable implements of human intent like any right-thinking Republican but you walk out of the woods a confirmed tree-hugger. The…
A-camping we have gone
by tmangan • May 2, 2005 • 1 Comment
The storyline could’ve been "city slickers go camping, hilarity ensues," but there are no disasters to report — primarily because Melissa had our camp-out worked out to the tiniest detail. If an earthquake had ravaged the region, we’d have been…
Good day at Alum Rock
by tmangan • April 18, 2005 • 0 Comments
I’m on vacation for the next two weeks, so the first order of business on Day One had to be a hike. I chose Alum Rock Park, which is run by the city of San Jose. It used to be…
Sunol after the rain
by tmangan • April 10, 2005 • 0 Comments
Saturday dawned gray and bleak, a gloomy reminder of the storm that drenched the Bay Area on Friday (and hailed all over Melissa’s freshly planted garden. She’s still a little miffed). Within a couple hours, though, the skies were back…