A Couple Noteworthy Two-Heel Drive Posts

Tom of Two-Heel Drive shared a couple of posts that caught my eye yesterday. First, he reports that...

The Walkies. Elizabeth King, keeper of the Walktopia blog, dropped me an e-mail this morning reporting she had named Two-Heel Drive the Best Hiking Blog...

Congratulations, Tom!

Then, he tips his dusty and a bit sweaty hiking hat to one of my favorite Pacific Coast (heck, American) authors, Wallace Stegner and includes some of Stegner's words about the value of wilderness...

Found this link to his "Wilderness Letter" at the WTA blog.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment. We need wilderness preserved--as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds--because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it. It is good for us when we are young, because of the incomparable sanity it can bring briefly, as vacation and rest, into our insane lives. It is important to us when we are old simply because it is there--important, that is, simply as an idea.

National Trail Day - No Excuses!

Tom Mangan posts a reminder - and a call to action:

Reminder: National Trails Day is tomorrow. ... For all you Nor-Cal folks, the Bay Area Ridge Trail organization has a bunch of stuff happening tomorrow. The Santa Clara County Open Space Authority also has a little shindig happening in south San Jose.

Here's a Goggle News search of Trails Day events.

Now you have no excuses not to be hiking tomorrow. [Two-Heel Drive]

I see that there is some sort of event in the South Bay at a park I sometimes visit - I may just pop over there via a little hilly route from Calero Park.

On Hiking Poles

No, not hiking Poles... hiking poles... Though I suspect that they use them in Poland, too.

I see that Tom has posted a link to aWildebeat report on hiking poles today.

A short excerpt:

Well what we saw in that study was as -- at the lesser slope, the fifteen degree slope... some people used the poles very effectively, a lot of people didn't seem to make use of the poles at all... As the slope got steeper, then we saw a distinct difference in terms of both men and women tended to use the poles... Then at the steepest slope, when we got them at twenty five degrees, then everybody used the poles much better ...

See Tom's post for links back to the full story.

A few comments of my own on hiking poles.

For a long time I thought that hiking poles (a.k.a. "trekking poles") were for effete wimps. I couldn't imagine myself ever using such things. (Though I wasn't above picking up the occasional trailside stick and using it to get past rough patches, over a snowfield, or across a creek.)

Then some friends of mine started showing up for pack trips with old ski poles. Though I was still skeptical, these were my friends and hiking buddies, so it was a bit harder to dismiss them. This was especially true when one of them would toss me a pole to use on a creek crossing. ;-)

I finally decided I had to give them a try and perhaps 5-6 years ago I picked up a pair. I purchased a decent set of lightweight REI poles that collapsed down to what I regarded as a reasonable size to attach to the pack... and that is pretty much where they stayed. I ended up carrying them 20 miles for every mile that I used them.

But time marches on, and I got older. Recently I have made it my policy to use the poles pretty much all the time when I'm carrying a backpacking load. Advantages? They do help with balance on rough terrain - and they help a lot if you find yourself hiking after dark. They provide some relief on uphill trails also, especially for those of us who learned to diagonal stride for cross-country skiing and can add a bit of push with our arms. I use them on the downhill sections but, contrary to what my friends tell me, I don't think they really take much of a load off my knees - though they may slow me down a bit and soften the blow for that reason.

Another advantage is that with the right kind of tarp or tent (or tarptent...) the poles can substitute for normal tent poles.

Related to the story that Tom links to, a few years ago I discovered - much to my surprise - how useful poles can be on really rough terrain. I had assumed that poles would be fine for trail hiking but that off trail they would be a burden not worth the bother. On a hike up
Giddy Giddy Gulch on Mt. Shasta I discovered how wrong I was. Using the poles I was no longer a somewhat unsteady biped, grabbing for nearby boulders if I got a bit off balance. Instead I was a confident quadruped, able to keep three points of contact while moving one foot. Except in very rough situations (verging on bouldering) the poles turned out help a lot.

So, now I use them in all of these circumstances... and encourage others to do the same.