Those of you not chained to the local trails by a Newspaper column about nearby hikes may actually experience the thrill of sacrificing 50 percent of your lung capacity because the view’s so much better up there in the Real…
Hiking
State of the blog update
by tom • July 1, 2008 • 8 Comments
The first half of ’08 is over, so what the heck, let’s look at how things are going around here. I shifted to Bay Area coverage around this time last year and installed a Google Analytics counter to measure our…
Book review: “The Cactus Eaters”
by tom • June 30, 2008 • 7 Comments
I took a day off from hiking yesterday to read Dan White’s “The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost My Mind — and Almost Found Myself — on the Pacific Crest Trail.” Oddly enough, my summation before reading the first sentence…
MSR Reactor camp stove reviews: raves mostly
by tom • June 26, 2008 • 1 Comment
For fun this morning I went looking for reviews of the MSR Reactor backpacking stove, Mountain Safety Research’s response to getting its butt kicked, innovation-wise, by those JetBoil upstarts. GoBlog touted its arrival in October 2006, Backpacker magazine made it…
Five-day Bay Area Ridge Trail hike
by tom • June 25, 2008 • 4 Comments
Reservations apparently are still available for this nifty fund-raiser for the Bay Area Ridge Trail for 45 miles over five days from Castro Valley to Martinez — somebody else will haul all your camping gear and food. It’s $225 (or…
Ruins along Bay Area trails
by tom • June 24, 2008 • 11 Comments
No matter how much we crave trees, flowers, meadows, mountain peaks, etc., we still like seeing human stuff along the trail — provided it’s suitably old and existing in a state of advanced disrepair. Last week’s water bottlers and PowerBar…
All new map of Two Heel Drive hikes
by tom • June 20, 2008 • 1 Comment
I built this with Google maps this morning; it’s built around the park profiles I’ve written for the Mercury News. View Larger Map
About those SPOT rescue beacons
by tom • June 19, 2008 • 5 Comments
Read this before you buy one. (Read the whole thing, it’s a corker … I won’t spoil it here. It’s about the Backpacker Magazine guy on Denali, in case you’ve seen the coverage on other outdoor blogs.) Previously: Mulling the…
Trekking poles for women — any such thing?
by tom • June 18, 2008 • 14 Comments
One of the latest arrivals at Backpackgeartest.org is the Leki Diva Antishock Trekking Pole system (left). This one got me wondering if there’s much need for a women’s trekking pole — they don’t have much to do with boobs or…