This month I took some time to hear a speaker talk about her journey hiking the Appalachian Trail (AT). Her name is Jennifer Pharr Davis. She is a hiker, wife, author, mother and now speaker, with an amazing story – hiking can be addictive (although she doesn’t tell it exactly that way).
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As “winter” (for lack of a better word) rolls into spring in southern Arizona it opens up more opportunities to warm up those climbing legs for some great vertical hikes.
During the winter, while all the trails are open around Tucson, everyone stays in the rolling flats of Saguaro National Park (SNP), the Arizona Trail’s (AZT) southern reaches and loop trails like Sweetwater...
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I’d like to debunk a myth spread around by people who know little about hiking - that hikers are just people who slap a few things into their backpacks and wander off into the wilderness.
Serious hiking and especially high altitude, ultralight hiking, calls for a lot of planning and decision-making...
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I recently participated on a post about my top three favorite camping items. I was one of 11 global outdoor personalities asked about the topic. The variety of answers got me thinking about what it means to go camping. Who you ask may affect the answer. How people camp varies widely. For kicks, I’ve boiled it down to 5 classes of campers, ranked in terms of most to least common.
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In a blog post we did earlier this year, we learned that most hikers prefer to have no distractions while hiking. That is, we prefer to enjoy the splendor and beauty that is around us on the trail.…[pause for bird chirping].
For those of you who DO sneak-in your ear buds, allow me to share some of my favorite tunes. They are inspiring, positive and somehow, fit-in just fine with Mother Nature.
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Most of the time I am quiet…absorbing the beauty of my surroundings and not at all bored. On occasion I mumble to myself. Turns out I’m not in the majority. To test this, I conducted a small poll of other hikers. 78% of them prefer to just enjoy the quiet solitude of solo hiking. 8% like to listen to music. There were only two respondents who talks to themselves, myself included. [See poll results above image]
Continue readingI live in Alaska, where two things are inevitable: Snow and mountains. Even in the middle of spring, it's still common to see lingering patches -- or swathes -- of snow across my favorite trails. But that's no reason to stay inside! Here are my favorite tips for a safe, comfortable hike in the snow:
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A quick Google search will yield tons of information on preparing for your first Fourteener. Expert retailers like REI or EMS will no doubt promote their best water-wicking, insulating, ultra-light, GPS-enabled, diode-emitting gear. Do your homework, heed their advice, shop around and do NOT come ill prepared. For that purpose, I’ll share my story and a list of essentials I hope you find useful.
My first Colorado Fourteener was Blanca Peak in the Sangre de Cristo range. I had no idea how brutal the mountain could be. You see, I grew up in New England and did my share of hiking and camping. What the hilly woods of New England couldn’t offer, I sought out by travelling to get my “nature fill”: high desert, beaches, rafting trips, canoeing northern lakes, a week in the Montana Wind River Range, etc.
What I didn’t realize is that I’ve never been this high up before. At 14,000 feet you have 1/3 less oxygen. Also, these mountains are so massive that they command their own weather.
That first trip was a disaster. My hiking mate Kevin (a Houston-based flatlander) was experiencing the Fourteeners for the first time too. Let’s just say, it was his first time in the mountains, let alone trying to bag a Fourteener. We hadn’t made it half way to base camp when exhaustion crept over Kevin. Happy to help in my delirious pre-dawn state, I offered to take Kevin’s pack. It was heavy to say the least. After about an hour of lugging his gear, I had to stop and question, “What in the world did you pack?”(Expletives omitted). Among a laundry list of things NOT to pack, Kevin opted for canned goods reminiscent of his childhood, the chief culprit being a few cans of Beenie Weenies.
Once I was on the mountain the next day, and a mere 500 feet from the summit, I got shellacked by the cold and damp wind. We were running late and it was into the afternoon as clouds gathered around the summit and the risk of lightning strikes seemed imminent. No gloves, no hat and a thin cotton-lined nylon jacket with a long-sleeve shirt were all that protected my core. It wasn’t enough. I was risking frostbite AND hypothermia. I had to turn back.
I’ve since returned to climb Blanca and some other mountains over the years. Here are some tips I learned (the hard way) and essentials to pack:
Tips:
We’ve all been there. That slight feeling of panic when you wonder if you are off the trail, or worse…lost! Then, like seeing an old friend for the first time in years, you spy the next rock cairn just beyond the next bend. Relief.
These piles of rocks are all too common above treeline. They are made by man (and by man I mean men and women) to help guide us and keep us on the right path. We know them, but what do we know about them? The word cairn derives from the Scottish Gaelic word: càrn (plural càirn). Cairns are found all over the world: mountaintops, desserts, uplands, seacoasts, waterways and tundra. In some cultures they are used for burial purposes. Mostly, they are simply beacons to guide us in terrain devoid of helpful visuals – signposts, trees, etc. Where a trail can be clearly visible in summer, a fresh snowfall is quick to obscure your path in winter.
For the most part, cairns should be left alone. Depending on what part of the world you find yourself, that cairn may be sacred. Cairns for religious or burial purposes are many times marked with banners, flags, paint and offerings. In Norse Greenland, cairns were used for hunting. They marked a game driving "lane", used to direct reindeer towards a game jump. Much in the same way the Plains tribes of the United States drove buffalo off cliffs.
In Scottish Highland lore, clan members would place a stone in a pile before a battle. Those who survived the battle returned and removed a stone from the pile. The remaining stones were built into a cairn to honor the dead.
The Colorado Fourteeners Initiative (CFI) is a group who has seen more than a few cairns in their efforts to preserve the alpine trail systems. “In some instances cairns are constructed on a minimal level and carefully placed in areas where the trail is easily lost and there is a risk of straying off the trail and onto the fragile plant life”, says the CFI. “Conversely, cairns are taken down that are misleading and send users off the intended route; or that are unnecessarily placed on the trail, and therefore interrupting the health of the natural ecosystem of the peak and the integrity of the climb.”
If you find that a cairn is in bad shape, by all means stop and stack a few rocks. Show that mountain that you cairn.
As if cairn wasn’t hard enough to pronounce the first time, impress your friends with some other ways to say it:
