I, of course, want only peace and harmony for the world’s peoples. And stuff coated with Gore-Tex (or EVent, because I respect all faiths. Speaking of which, here’s a nice comparison of Down vs. Synthetics from the folks at Sierra…
Hiking
Hiking on Christmas?
by tom • December 14, 2007 • 4 Comments
Hey, I’m tempted, but at least one day a year has to be invested in the interests of domestic tranquility. An essayist in the New York Times, being of the Hebrew persuasion, mentions how he wanted to have a little…
Travel
Hiking in Ojai
by tom • December 14, 2007 • 0 Comments
That’s “O-hi,” by the way. CNN has one of those “getaways” pieces that mentions this detail: Take a hike: Of the 24 hiking paths that crisscross the valley, the 6 1/2-mile Last Chance Trail, which winds through the forested Santa…
Blogs
Cool site: Weekend Sherpa
by tom • December 13, 2007 • 1 Comment
Weekendsherpa.com is a slick, well-done site devoted to outdoors activities in the Bay Area. Main attraction is a weekly e-mail newsletter. Here’s an entry from this morning’s missive: Once a year Muir Woods is transformed into a luminous nighttime landscape.…
Hiking, Trails
Park profiles from Merc columns coded up
by tom • December 12, 2007 • 0 Comments
The project I started yesterday is in pretty good shape today — I’ve taken all the Hikes columns I’ve written for the Mercury News and given each one a static page with a hike description, breakout box of essential park…
Don Edwards National Wildlife Sanctuary
A plug for Don Edwards National Wildlife Sanctuary
by tom • December 12, 2007 • 2 Comments
A story in this morning’s Chron describes a billion-dollar plan to open up old Cargill salt ponds, build strong levees and let nature take its course, which should mean hundreds and perhaps thousands more birds and other wildlife in the…
Mangan's memoirs
What I’m up to this morning
by tom • December 11, 2007 • 2 Comments
I figured out awhile back that the paper’s posting only about six weeks’ worth of my hiking columns, so I’m building an archive of them here instead. They’re in the rail under “local park profiles.” These are the ones I’ve…
Photography
Gorillapod thoughts
by tom • December 10, 2007 • 6 Comments
I bought one of these Gorillapod tripods last spring and finally made up my mind to take it out in the woods and see how handy it is for hiking. Turns out it works pretty well — it stands on…
Uvas Canyon County Park
My Uvas Canyon adventure
by tom • December 10, 2007 • 10 Comments
It took me a full two days to get one good hike in at Uvas Canyon County Park, which is odd considering the park has only seven miles of trails to begin with. It might’ve gone smoother if it hadn’t…