Dan's Outside

Meeting on the Trail

I had another one of those experiences yesterday where I meet someone on the trail that I’ve only met online before. This time it was Cait Hutnik (of Light of Morn) who had written me over a year ago about some interesting spots near some of my New Almaden hikes. We had a good long trailside talk about wildflowers, photography, driving to the Sierra, and an upcoming wildflower photography event in mid-April.
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March 19, 2007 Posted by gdanmitchell | Commentary | Comments Off on Meeting on the Trail

One of These Years is Not Like the Other…

I hiked at Almaden Quicksilver this morning, heading out to one of my favorite spring spots, a grassy oak grove just south of the Webb Canyon trail. (A photograph is posted below.) It felt like a nice mid-spring day with temperatures into the upper 70 degree range. The problem is that it is still winter.

During the past couple of years a mid-March hike would have involved slogging through or carefully finding a path around a lot of very wet and muddy areas. One spot near the start of today’s hike was nearly impassible near the end of the previous two winters. Today it was barely damp in the wettest spots.

While the new grass is beautiful (and turning the hills around here an improbable green as always) this is not going to be a flower-fillled or lush spring in central California. Unless we have a late March weather miracle, I’m afraid this is going to be a pretty dry year.
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March 17, 2007 Posted by gdanmitchell | Commentary | Comments Off on One of These Years is Not Like the Other…

Email Newsletter Coming – Interested?

I’m about to begin sending a monthly (or thereabouts) email newsletter from my photography web site. Please send me an email (dan@gdanmitchell.com) if you are interested in being on the distribution list. (I’ll keep your email address and other information confidential, and I will not share or sell it to anyone else.)

– Dan
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March 16, 2007 Posted by gdanmitchell | Commentary | Comments Off on Email Newsletter Coming – Interested?

Mystery Snowmen – The Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNVvlkYe3kM
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March 7, 2007 Posted by gdanmitchell | Commentary | Comments Off on Mystery Snowmen – The Video

Snow Much Fun to Be A Snow Man With a Snow Cam

A sunrise photo of the natives cavorting in front of Half Dome. See a sunrise today on the Sentinal Dome Snow Cam in Yosemite.

Yes, I’m smiling! :-)

(Thank you to Yosemite Blog for the pointer.)
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March 6, 2007 Posted by gdanmitchell | Commentary | Comments Off on Snow Much Fun to Be A Snow Man With a Snow Cam

A monument… to something

My friend Tom Mangan (Two-Heel Drive) posted today about Hetch Hetchy, and concluded:

My takeaway after visiting the reservoir is that even if we can make the valley “whole” again, we’re better off letting it stand as a monument to the cost of so-called modern civilization. Some people want to imagine a world in which we get to have all our favorite toys and our favorite wilderness sites. Well, we can restore this Hetch Hetchy, but it’ll just require the creation of another one somewhere else. Fixing one ecosystem by ruining another is a strange kind of environmentalism.
[Two-Heel Drive]

Tom, I have to disagree.

While leaving Hetch Hetchy in its current state (e.g. – very large bathtub for San Francisco) does have the potential to remind us of the costs of civilizaton, there are problems with this notion.

For one thing, while millions of people visit Yosemite Ntional Park (mostly visiting that very beautiful and much drier valley a few miles to the south) very, very few ever see its waterlogged near-twin. In order for a monument to have the desired effect, it must be in a location where it cannot be ignored… the way that the travesty of Hetch Hetchy has been largely ignored.

Tom is probably right that emptying Hetch Hetchy might require the filling of some other valley lower down this or another central California river drainage. But this valley is in the middle of one of our greatest national treasure, Yosemite National Park. These places were established to preserve and protect the natural features they contain. One can accept reservoirs elsewhere and support the draining of Hetch Hetchy simply on the basis of its location.

In addition, if Hetch Hetchy is to be a monument to anything, I would rather it be a monument to our capacity to recognize a grievous mistake and set things right. Once drained, Hetch Hetchy would serve that goal in many ways. It would be a monument that would be seen and be a worthy destination for visitors. It would continue to caution us about taking our world’s treasures to lightly; while we could drain the Hetch Hetchy valley today, it will be many, many years before the effects of its damming (those damn effects?) will fade enough that they won’t be noticed. I am confident that we would tell a story of how proud and good we were as a people who had the integrity to undo this horrible mistake – a story I would love for my heirs to hear around a campfire in Hetch Hetchy valley some day.
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February 8, 2007 Posted by gdanmitchell | Commentary | Comments Off on A monument… to something

Mountain Lion Stories

A few have come to my attention this week:

• There is the story of the couple who were hiking in a northern California park when a mountain lion appeared from nowhere and attacked the man. His wife managed to get the lion to let go of his head (by using a log and then standing her ground when the lion turned its attention to her), and they made it to a nearby road where they got assistance.
• My brother, who lives in a semi-rural part of the greater Seattle area reports that he was out for a pre-dawn walk recently when he heard the characteristic “whistle/scream” of one of the big cats. He decided to head back the way he came, but on the way back heard a rather violent confrontation between a couple large animals, one of which must have been the cat.
• Recently I was hiking at Uvas Park south of San Jose when I noticed some rather large prints in the dust on the trail… and they were not boot prints. I suspected a mountain lion had made them, and I confirmed this by checking them against a sign back at the start of the trail. In such a situation I hope that the reports that these big cats are somewhat shy are true, but I pay extra attention to my surroundings and am prepared to wield a log, tripod, or rock if it comes to that. It never has.

Despite hoping that I’ll see a mountain lion some time, so far I’ve seen nothing larger than a few bobcats.
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January 31, 2007 Posted by gdanmitchell | Commentary | Comments Off on Mountain Lion Stories

Snowshoe or Ski?

(An old article – posted here so as not to lose it during the site transition.)

I know how I would answer that question.

Tom (at Two-Heel Drive) returned from a recent trip to Yosemite waxing rhapsodic about snowshoe hiking. (But somewhat less rhapsodic about cold, wet socks… you’ll have to visit his site to read about that.)

I have cross-country skied for more than 30 years (yes, since I was 2 years old… or maybe I meant 20? ;-) and more recently done some telemark skiing. I did try snowshoeing a several years ago when we took a large group of high school and middle school kids on a winter hike up the road to Donner Pass near Lake Tahoe. I had never tried snowshoeing before because, compared to magically gliding through the woods on skis (hey, it is possible to get the waxes right once in awhile… ;-), snowshoeing seemed so, well, plodding. But I decided to give it a try.

It did feel like plodding. I can’t say that I really enjoyed it much at all. I’ll admit that it is an effective and practical means of getting out and about in snow country, but there didn’t seem to be much poetry in slogging along on giant loose-fitting “shoe extenders” – at least not compared to cross-country skiing. For me the downhill sections were especially bad – I wanted to take advantage of all of the gravity equity I had built climbing the hill, and enjoy a good schuss back down the hill. Contrary to the photos I see in outdoor magazines, the downhill was not faster than the uphill – and if anything is less exciting than slogging uphill it is slogging downhill.
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January 29, 2007 Posted by gdanmitchell | Commentary | Comments Off on Snowshoe or Ski?

Busy Weekend – Mostly Indoors

(An old article – posted here so as not to lose it during the site transition.)

No posts for the past several days as I was in Southern California – doing indoor activities at UCLA and other places. While I did do some photography there, it doesn’t really seem right for this web site. (Shots of the campus and so forth don’t really seem like the usual hiking, wilderness, etc. fare.)

January 29, 2007 Posted by gdanmitchell | Commentary | Comments Off on Busy Weekend – Mostly Indoors

Strange… or Fun?

An interesting idea from Trailcraft:

Backcountry Cooking Party.

I’ve always been a bit nervous about trying new recipes on the trail. I guess it’s because I don’t want to go hungry and I definitely don’t want to pack extra food for every meal.  For several years when I first started backpacking I stuck exclusively to the freeze-dried, pre-packaged meals because they were easy and I knew they were edible.

And then a few years back I came up with the idea of getting together with friends to experiment with backpacking recipes in the safety of my backyard.  Now it’s an annual tradition, The Backcountry Cooking Party!

[Trailcraft]

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January 24, 2007 Posted by gdanmitchell | Commentary | Comments Off on Strange… or Fun?