Monday, December 19, 2016
Thursday, July 14, 2016
“Why on Earth would you speed hike?”
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| The author and Anish crossing paths on the AT. Anish is smiling, I am grimacing in pain. |
But every year, someone announces their intention to attempt a speed record on a long distance trail. And as inevitable as that is, so too is the chorus of people who feel the need to tell everyone that they can't possibly figure out why anyone would want to do such a thing.
The chorus also seems to have definite ideas of how people who attempt speed records could better spend their time, in much the same way that people who don’t hike trails at all often think that long distance hikers would be much happier if they, say, bought a house, or drove a vehicle that wasn’t 22-years old, or, at the very least, showered more than once every 5 or 6 days.
So it goes without saying that none of us really understands what makes other people happy or why. Or at least it went without saying right up until just a sentence ago, when I went ahead and said it anyway.
But the Night Hiking To Mars blog is nothing if not informative, and so we present to you the results of a survey we’re pretending to have done, in which we asked “speed hikers” what benefits they derive from hiking an entire trail in the time it takes me to eat a half gallon of ice cream at Pine Grove Furnace State Park.
The Top Ten Benefits Of Speed Hiking
#10: Getting to smell the roses at 4am, when their odor is less likely to be overpowered by hiker funk.
#9: Dramatic reduction in the number of times you’ll hear Wagon Wheel.
#8: On trail at both dusk AND dawn, thus increasing the number of Bigfoot encounters.
#7: Pink Blazers give up after half a day.
#6: Getting to hear the part where people say “Hike Your Own Hike, but . . .” and being out of earshot by the time they’re telling you what you’re doing wrong.
#5: Fewer hotel stays means more money to spend on whiskey and Honey Buns.
#4: Acquiring the knowledge of what it feels like to elevate your chafe game from a minor annoyance to a full blown medical condition that requires skin grafts and rehab.
#3: Quickly outpacing people who want to tell you all of the advantages of hammocking.
#2: Ability to annoy internet “hikers” without having to suffer the indignity of starting a gofundme campaign.
And finally:
#1: By the time the giardia symptoms appear, you’re already sitting on your toilet at home.
Dedicated with love to my very fast friends, some record setters and others just plain speedy, whom I support without understanding you at all -- Anish, Tatu Jo, Snorkel, Trauma, Swami, Lint, and any other lunatics whom I'm forgetting.
Sunday, March 6, 2016
Guidebooks For Trail Widths: A Review
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| If I'm delusional, why does this tee exist? |
Ever since setting the record, I have been bombarded with emails from hikers asking for all sorts of information and advice concerning hiking the Widths of the Trails, also known as Side To Side Hikes (or S2S). And while that previous sentence is absolutely untrue, I think we have to ask ourselves if it’s an outright intentional lie, or if I’m living in some weird fantasy world where hikers not only want to hike Trail Widths, but also one in which people actually read this blog.
Hard to say. But either way, I’ve decided to offer help via a review of the guidebooks that may or may not be available for hiking the Trail Widths, because frankly I am far too busy customizing my Hiking Eating Helmet to keep answering all of these emails that may or may not be coming in. So let’s start with the PCT.
Pacific Crest Trail
There’s really only one choice here. Yogi’s Pacific Crest Trail Width Handbook has all of the information you need to successfully hike the Width of the PCT. The first part of the book has advice from a number of previous Width Hikers, which is incredibly helpful when in the planning stages of your hike. The second part is an on-trail guide with all sorts of useful information, including trailhead locations, good places to nap, water sources close to roads, hotels to stay in before your hike and bars to celebrate in afterwards. Highly recommended!
Continental Divide Trail
As with the PCT, the recommended guide book is put out by Yogi. Her Continental Divide Trail Handbook Width Edition has the same basic format as the PCT book, so if you’ve used that it will seem familiar. Admittedly, you can probably get by without a guide book for the PCT Width, but a guide for the CDT Width is a must. Sometimes there’s no footbed for the Width, sometimes you can be on it and not realize it, and sometimes you think you’re walking the Width of the CDT and you’re really on a game trail. It also includes such vital information as the best place to buy a velvet John Wayne painting while on trail, where you can ride an enormous stuffed Jackalope, and which restaurants have burgers so large that in order to eat them you have to unhinge your jaw like a snake.
I haven’t used them, but I’ve heard from other Width hikers that the recently completed Jerry Brown Width Map Books are excellent. Nobody thinks they’re going to get lost while hiking 2-4 feet of trail, but it happens all the time. Particularly if, like me, you’re easily confused.
Appalachian Trail
Hiking the Width of the Appalachian Trail is the most popular of the Width hikes out of the three trails, due mainly to its close proximity to large population centers full of lazy people. Consequently, there are more options. All of them have their pluses and minuses.
AT Guide
David Miller’s AT Width Guide has information on the distance from one side of the trail to the other for the entire AT, which would seem like overkill if this were an actual book. It includes the slope of the width as well, integrated into each page using an overlaid slope map. The nice thing about this guide is that it is available in both Eastbound and Westbound versions. It also comes inside a heavy duty zip-lock bag, which is perfect for people who live underwater and hikers in the Smokies in April (which is pretty much the same thing).
ASDHA Width-Hikers Companion
The Width-Hikers Companion is compiled every year by Appalachian Short Distance Hikers Association volunteer field editors and is available from that organization as well as the ATC. It has excellent information on trailhead locations, which is ideal for driving to the trail and walking three feet. There is a pdf version available as well as a companion phone app, but the 288-page book is the recommended version for starting fires and swatting at mosquitoes.
Width Data Book
All of the information in the ATC-published Data Book is available in both the AT Guide and the Companion, but it is the smallest, lightest option and is recommended for UL Width Hikers which, honestly, really should be just about everybody.
There are, of course, other options out there, including not bothering with a guidebook at all. But whether you’re a planner or a winging-it kind of hiker, keep in mind that with Width Hiking, “The Very Short Journey Is The Almost Immediately Reached Destination.”
Note: For reasons that boggle the mind, some people want to hike the lengths of these things instead of the widths. Not sure what that's all about. But if you are one of those lunatics, the same guidebooks are available for lengths!
With thanks to Matt Bowler and Bill Garlinghouse for help with terminology!
Sunday, February 21, 2016
Hiking Memes Volume Two
This is the second volume of hiking memes I've put together for your
enjoyment, as a tribute to your good taste. If this were Buzzfeed I'd
say that you won't believe #5, and that this post will CHANGE THE WAY YOU
THINK ABOUT EVERYTHING!!!
But it probably won't. You might laugh a bit, though, and that will be good enough.
But it probably won't. You might laugh a bit, though, and that will be good enough.
Feel free to steal 'em and share 'em, if you're into that kind of thing.
Tuesday, February 2, 2016
The Northern Terminus Of The Appalachian Trail: A Modest Proposal
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| Katahdin, topped with either clouds or an unacceptable amount of pot smoke, depending on whom you ask. |
The Background
On November 19th, 2014, Jensen Bissell, the Director of Baxter State Park, sent a letter to Ron Tipton and Wendy Janssen. Ron Tipton is the Executive Director of the ATC and is also a former AT thru-hiker (1978). Wendy Janssen is the Superintendent of the Appalachian National Scenic Trail and to my surprise is NOT also the female protagonist in Peter Pan.
In the letter, Director Bissell outlines his concerns about the increasing number of thru-hikers that has risen to a shocking and unsustainable 3% of the 63,000+ annual park gate visitors, and notes that ATC’s vision of more people enjoying outdoor recreation runs counter to the Park Authority’s vision of a “fixed capacity” of non-car driving visitors who will enter the park and not act like complete idiots, or at the very least will not share their acts of idiocy on social media.
In addition to concerns about sheer numbers, the letter includes a list of observed bad behavior and neediness by thru-hikers in the park that is “not meant . . . to serve as a litany of complaints,” but manages to serve quite well in that capacity anyway, in the same way that anything said before the phrase “no offense intended” was probably incredibly offensive.
Summing up, the letter calls on ATC and the NPS to come up with a plan to do something about hiker numbers and behavior in a section of the trail that the letter also points out “has no federal designation and is under the control of the Baxter State Park Authority.” Director Bissell’s letter was of great concern to the AT hiking community, not only because the previous sentence makes no sense, but also because of the not-so-subtle threat that if someone other than BSPA didn’t come up with a solution, THEIR solution might involve “relocating . . . the trail terminus.”
The 2015 Season
Fast forward to July of 2015, when, as a result of his summit shenanigans, record-setter Scott Jurek was cited for drinking alcohol, spilling alcohol, and for having too large a group with him when he did the previously mentioned things with the alcohol. In a plea deal Jurek pleaded guilty to drinking and was assessed a fine that Penobscot County District Attorney R. Christopher Almy admitted was $300 greater than a public drinking summons would typically carry under state law. That may seem unfair, but at least he wasn’t cited for speeding.
It was, however, Jurek’s Clif Bar headband that really seemed to bother Director Bissell. In a Facebook post, Bissell noted that “Scott Jurek’s physical abilities were recognized by corporations engaged in (selling) running and outdoor related products . . . The race vehicle used to support Scott in his run, as well as Scott’s headband, clearly displays these corporate sponsors.”
And as it turns out Baxter does NOT like corporate commercialism, which might come as a bit of a surprise to L.L. Bean, not only because they received four commercial filming permits in Baxter from 2012 to 2013, but also because they sell a line of jackets called “Baxter State Parkas."
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| Just in case you thought "Baxter State Parkas" was a joke. |
But in the past few months there have been a series of meetings involving BSPA, ATC, NPS, MATC, ALDHA, FBSP, and, oh, I don’t know, HYOH, NIMBY, and YMMV, and “enforce the Park rules for everyone” doesn’t seem to have been an option anyone is particularly interested in attempting.
The Proposal
My initial thought was that the solution lay in getting Clif Bar to sponsor every thru-hiker, since it seems that Baxter is only interested in citing high profile, sponsored hikers for the sake of making a point. This, however, seems like an unlikely solution. Clif Bar couldn’t possibly be interested in sponsoring hundreds of willfully homeless dirtbags with entitlement issues and delusions of grandeur. And from the other direction, thru-hikers wouldn’t be interested in Clif Bar sponsorships because after two months of eating them Clif Bars taste like cardboard and despair.
And even if that plan was possible, it wouldn’t account for Baxter’s concerns about the sheer numbers of hikers, because, as previously mentioned, Baxter has a “fixed capacity model” in place.
Unless maybe you’re a visitor who isn’t on the AT.
In 2014 Baxter State Park had 63,049 folks come in through their gates. Back in 2002 the number was 8,605 people higher (71,654!), or more than four times the number who came into (or out of) the park via the Appalachian Trail in 2014. I suppose that if you can fit inside a vehicle you can also fit into Governor Percival Baxter’s vision.
In any case, Baxter apparently can’t handle more AT hikers. We’ll just have to take their word for it.
So the only rational option left is to bypass Baxter State Park entirely and move the Northern Terminus of the Appalachian Trail to the A.T. Cafe in Millinocket.
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| The new proposed route for the AT |
After
crossing Abol Bridge, with its magnificent views of Katahdin,
Northbounders would continue along the Golden Road for an additional
19.4 miles and finish their hikes at a terminus sign on the sidewalk in
front of the Cafe on Penobscot Avenue. Along the way they’ll walk along
the confusingly named River Pond, enjoy striking views of Millinocket
Lake, and try desperately to see and breathe as loggers and hunters throw
up clouds of dust at high speeds. As an added bonus, siting the A.T.
on a road means that “thru-hikers” who have been yellow blazing up the
trail can get in one last celebratory hitch before heading home and
submitting to the ATC for their 2000-Miler certificates and patches.
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| A triumphant end to a thru-hike! |
And although they are absolutely lying about that, for the purposes of this editorial we’ll pretend to believe them.
And so it will be with the relatively chicken-poop-free A.T. Cafe. Northbound hikers will finish their hikes and be able to celebrate by doing things that would be objectionable in the Park -- they can have a beer AND a milkshake without worrying about spilling either on the ground. They can write their name on things (in this case, ceiling tiles).
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| Tagging in the AT Cafe. |
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| Bonus: Summit Sundae NOT available on summit of Katahdin. |
Of course, at that point Baxter’s distinction between “AT Hikers” (“a user group not defined in [their] trust mission”) and “members of the public” (a group that apparently is part of the trust mission but doesn’t include thru-hikers) disappears.
They’ll just be visitors in the park, no different than any other hiker on the mountain, and their behavior won’t be the responsibility of (or reflect poorly on) anyone but themselves.
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| The Beginning Of A New Ending? |
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
"Wild" Debates On The PCT (Part 3): Sharing The Trail
The Pacific Crest Trail is a National Scenic Trail that stretches
approximately 2,650 miles from Mexico to Canada through California, the
State of Jefferson, Oregon, and Washington. Previous entries in this series have focused on overcrowding issues related only to hikers; Part One
of this series focused on hikers carrying large pieces of furniture on
the PCT, and in Part Two we looked at the contoversy surrounding caches of office
supplies.
But as the 2016 hiking season approaches, a vocal group of “Share The Trail” advocates is once again pushing for access to the Pacific Crest Trail, hoping to open the trail to uses beyond hiking and horse-packing. Which brings us to the subject of part three of this series: sharing the trail with NASCAR drivers.
Proponents of the status quo believe that In order to continue to protect the trail as a resource and to provide a safe and unique recreation experience for the primary users – hikers and equestrians -- other forms of outdoor activities must be banned.
But if NASCAR enthusiasts have their way, that will soon change. “Our mission is simple,” says Kyle Busch fan Kevin Gallagher, “we hope to join the PCT community . . . as with other dedicated members of the PCT community, our primary goal is to protect, preserve and promote the PCT in homage to its world-class significance, for the enjoyment, education and adventure of hikers, equestrians and stockcar racers alike.”*
People who drive stockcars and their fans feel that they have been unjustifiably excluded not just from the trail, but also from the process of deciding who gets to use it, and have expressed their frustration via social media:
"The damage to the ground is done by the trail builders . . . everything after that is negligible."* -- Wendi Merritt
The NASCAR Perspective
A number of arguments have been put forth by racing fans to justify a change in the rules. Some claim that historically, NASCAR was a part of the trail. “Prior to 1988, there were stockcars all over the place legally, and there was never a problem,” says Denny Hamlin fan David Vitti. “Admittedly, there’s no real evidence to back up those claims, but I do have a nice black and white photo of a group of NASCAR enthusiasts on the PCT in Oregon, so there’s that.”
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| A nice black and white photo of a group of NASCAR enthusiasts on the PCT in Oregon |
Others point out that stockcars create less impact than backpackers or equestrians.
As Kevin Harvick fan Steve Cain points out, “regarding impacts, a NASCAR driver passing through on an all-day type of drive isn't usually setting up camp, collecting wood for a campfire, rinsing off in a stream or lake, etc . . . I think it is safe to say an overnight backpacker absolutely has more environmental impact than a racecar driver. And don’t even get me started on horse poop.”*
Even if there is some impact, NASCAR fans insist that the number of added trail volunteers would more than make up for any impact. "There are 75 Million Nascar fans in this country," says Matt Kenseth fan Kelly Dewire, "Imagine the thousands of man hours that would pour into trail maintenance on the PCT if stockcar drivers could use it."*
But ultimately, most of the arguments revolve around sharing a tax-payer funded trail. “Hikers will say just about anything (true or not, mostly not) to justify their exclusionary views,” says Kasey Kahne fan J. Chad Kinsey, “this is all about rationalizing the fact that they won't share a taxpayer funded trail (apparently to the tune of $1.8m/year for the PCTA . . . ) with newcomers.”*
The Hiker Perspective
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| Sharing the trail. What could go wrong? |
But is that a good enough reason to limit access? Not for Jimmie Johnson fan Harold Frederick, as long as the drivers’ intentions are good. “Drivers NEED to be conscientious, but 'nearly's' and 'almosts' are no reason to prohibit stockcars anywhere. We'll wager that not one driver has tried to startle, scare or injure other trail users.* In any case, 2015 NASCAR rules required a horsepower reduction from 850 to 725 AND a smaller spoiler. Which means that if you do get hit by a car, it’ll be going 3-4mph slower than it would have under the old rules. So stop being whiners.”
For others, even with those changes, the trail is simply not the place for racing. “No one is being excluded from enjoying the trail,” says Kolby “Condor” Kirk. “NASCAR enthusiasts are free to enjoy the trail, as long as they leave their cars at home. Or at the trailhead. Whatever. But the fact that it’s public land simply does not mean that everyone gets to do whatever they want on it.”
Gregory “Dartman” Schley agrees. “I used to think that tax-payer funding meant that I was allowed to do whatever I wanted to on public land. But from personal experience I can tell you that’s not the case. Or at least the Secret Service violently disagreed with my viewpoint when I went nude sunbathing in the White House Rose Garden. Honestly, the only good thing about that was that the strip search went pretty fast.”
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| This slope may or may not be slippery. |
Not true, says Greg Biffle fan Shelly Skye. “Listen, nobody wants accordion players on the PCT. Some people may think that our argument would open the floodgates to other uses, but in the fantasy world we live in nobody but us wants to do whatever they want wherever they want. And should we be wrong about that, we’ll dramatically rethink our 'Share The Trail' philosophy.”
“As for complete access, we don't seek access to every mile of every trail at all times. What we'll seek is reasonable access. That means in crowded areas we'd work with local land managers and other trail users to allow stockcars only on certain days of the week or even separate trails in some places. And we have no plans to expand our access into Wilderness areas.”*
When asked if that entire last paragraph was a bald-faced lie, Skye said "absolutely."
"Does anyone really think that we’ll be satisfied once we get SOME access? Have those people ever read If You Give A Mouse A Cookie? Six year olds know that’s not how human nature works. Good lord. Grow up.”
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| NASCAR fans are fired up about PCT access. |
It’s hard to say how or if this debate will end, or even whether or not I just made it all up. But for now, trail managers seem to be taking a respectful yet firm stance:
“In tandem with our primary partner in the management of the PCT – the US Forest Service – we are committed to working within the Partnership for the National Trails System on developing a meaningful dialogue around the NASCAR issue. We feel it’s imperative that this conversation be civil, thoughtful and deliberate. But ultimately, who are we kidding? It’ll happen over our dead bodies.”
*Note: all quotes with asterisks are real, as are the quotes in the social media images -- they just come from a non-NASCAR version of "Share The Trail" proponents. The quotes are real but the names are fake, and I have substituted in the appropriate NASCAR-related words.
Thank you to all of the folks who allowed me to attach their names to quotes for this article!