The Perfect Weekend
November 7, 2023 § 1 Comment
We returned to an area of West Virginia where I believe the first backpacking trip that I drove down to meet what would later become known as “The Virginia Crew” finished up. Then, it was a point to point that finished just off the Tuscarora Trail near Rt 48 between Strassburg and Wardensville, and now it was an in and out back up into Racer Hollow out of The Wilson Cove Wildlife Management Area. We picked this weekend, basically, because I didn’t give but 2 possible weekends for me to participate, and as it so happened, turned out to be the weekend after Walt’s final day at Iridium, bound for his post-work-life as a retiree.
Anyone reading this that lives in the Northeast knows that it has basically been one fucking shitty assed Autumn that has had weekend after weekend ruined by at least 1 day of solid rainfall. This NYT article spells out the doom in NY self-picking apple orchards that rely heavily on Autumn weekenders getting out there to pick apples, so I think it is safe to say that we all harbored great expectations of a fine weekend for this excursion. As soon as one could pull a long term posit, it was looking good, and unlike all my other long term looks, this forecast actually improved every day it got closer. At some point I realized that temperature wise, it wasn’t going to be any different this weekend than it was my entire week above 10,000′ this past August in Utah. So, with that great news, I put away my 0 degree bag, and packed my 35 bag with a liner and not only committed to my 45 liter Lite AF pack, but I did not even pack rain gear. No Pack cover, no tarp, no rain jacket, and no rain kilt. I, and a few others it turns out, went all in on the forecast.
« Read the rest of this entry »The High Uintas 2023
September 10, 2023 § Leave a comment
Host: “Welcome to the show everyone, I want to thank you all for tuning in we have a very special guest tonight but more on that in a bit. Let’s first give a shout out to our sponsors, Preparation H, cause when you need a friend, well that is all the help you are going to get. And now, let’s welcome our guest tonight, some of you know who he is already, but our guest flies way under the radar, and he has just returned from another (self – described) miracle in the wilderness, everyone give it up for a very special guest, Eric Hallander.”
[Crowd is clapping, could be a wee bit more boisterous and louder]
Eric: “Thank you, thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here tonight with such a welcoming audience. Thank you. You are all too kind. Thank you.”
Host: “That is quite a welcome you got there. It appears you might have a following. Ha!.”
Eric: “Well, it is hard to self-promote, but I give it a go, you know. Put meself out there as they say.”
Ragbrai L – Looking Back
September 10, 2023 § Leave a comment
My take away from this year’s edition should be a “What did I learn?” take away, and not a “What didn’t I like?” or a “What can I complain about?” post as I have read some summaries on the Ragbrai Facebook page, and to be honest, some of those posts seem like complaints to me.
I think one thing we have to agree upon first, is that this year was different. I haven’t even done this even before and even I can tell that it couldn’t possibly have been like this every year for 50 years. I did do it with some folks who have done it before, and more than once, and one of their general observations about Ragbrai was that the average age of participants was rising every year. Reading between the lines, that means that Ragbrai needs new blood, and that old farts like me are not, and should not be the target audience. I am glad that our group included 4 23-something young women and 3 early 30 ish young men, so that is something.
« Read the rest of this entry »Ragbrai L – Sunday Through Saturday
August 12, 2023 § Leave a comment
As I said in the previous post I would like to keep this to 3 posts, so I will not go into too many details regarding this trip. I will mention a few items of interest to me, and I will either embed, or post links to other content that you may or may not wish to click through to. I will post this Facebook link to a Ragbrai LI group where you are free to peruse what others liked/disliked about this years ride.
Sorry Tabitha, I don’t have an image with all of us.
« Read the rest of this entry »Minnewaska Loop-do-Loop
August 9, 2023 § Leave a comment
As I begin to add some hiking miles to my legs for my upcoming High Uintas Wilderness backpacking trip, my trusty hiking friend Jed proposed a loop in Minnewaska State Park. For those in ignorance this is a beautiful NY State Park just west of New Paltz, and is home to “The Gunks” aka The Shawangunk Mountains. An incredible natural beauty rich in Geology, and fortunately protected many moons in the past by the Mohonk Preserve and the Mohonk Mountain House. What keeps the park going, financially, is that it is very difficult to avoid a paid parking spot as most of the access is paid, and the street parking has been eliminated. There is something for everyone here. If easy is what you want, then the miles of Carriage Trails are for you. In the Summer months they’re also pretty sunny, but in the Winter months they’re groomed for some of the best cross-country skiing on the East Coast. In addition the Carriage Trails are open to cyclists, where a gravel bike works best, and a road bike with at least 28’s would work, and finally is easy for a Mountain Bike, but whatever your choice of transport is, miles and miles of Carriage Trails provide for a great day in the saddle. Scattered around are the various “Footpaths” that allow for and produce a much different hiking experience.
« Read the rest of this entry »Ragbrai L – Let’s Do This!
August 5, 2023 § 2 Comments
My Des Moine’s Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa finished this past Saturday July 29th in Davenport Iowa. This was my first Ragbrai, but not my first time riding across Iowa, as that occurred in 1981 when Frank Falcione and I rode our bikes across the country, at the time somewhat trying to get to that year’s start town on the West side of Iowa for that year’s Ragbrai. We weren’t even close to the start date as I recall, but we did have a good ride.
« Read the rest of this entry »Jed and Cindy Smock
August 4, 2023 § Leave a comment
A very bizarre message came across the family IM feed this morning from Daughter #2. She came across this video posting which occurred on the LSU campus and posted May 19th this year. As soon as I saw this woman, I knew I knew her. To say “knew” is maybe a little too much. I “knew” of her. Once I listened to the recording, I knew “That’s her!”.
Who is her? This is Cynthia Lasseter who started appearing with Jed Smock as he travelled campus to campus in the 80’s preaching against the “sins” that was considered a “Healthy College Experience” then, and probably still is considered healthy, but that statement may depend on your perspective. As long as we are talking consenting adults, then healthy. I think Jed showed up at Penn State in the Spring of 1980, on his own. He set up, at that time on the steps of Willard Building, as that was probably the highest concentration of College-aged heathens to be found anywhere on campus, and considering State College was surrounded by Mennonites and Amish, at least for 150 miles in any direction.
Jed, was sharply dressed, telling the flock “God rewards the faithful”. “God doesn’t want us to walk in rags when we preach his greatness, so that is why I preach in $1000 suits and wear a Rolex. God wants me to be on time.” Jed appeared towards the end of the Spring Trimester each year, guessing that he saw a need to preach hard at Penn State, and then one year, yes, I was there for a while, he showed up with a partner. Sister Cindy he called her. I don’t think they were married at the time, but eventually she did marry Jed, bearing them 5 girls which apparently grew up travelling campus to campus in their parents ministry. If you told me that Marjorie Taylor Greene was one of their girls, I wouldn’t be surprised in the least.
So, Cindy was there, and as I recall, Jed was doing his normal spiel when suddenly he would refer to a saved soul he was responsible for, and then Cindy would take the stage and talk about how she had been a college sinner, how alcohol had numbed her sense of self, and she was a sex toy to many an undergraduate, and maybe a professor or two. She went on for hours about how she had “whored and whored and whored” and the crowd ate her up. Our crowd in the 80’s was not unlike this crowd in 2023.
So, Cindy is still active, and after 40 years of practice has her act down pretty well. Along comes a female comedian who takes this twitter capture, and turns it into a Tik Tok Summer hit. This is the You Tube link. It doesn’t end there either, a the New York Times caught wind and produced an article written by Madison Kircher.
Back in 1980, this all seemed “Very Bizarre” even then, however today, Cindy Smock seems like just another regular crazy Evangelical Christian nut case, who like the “Freedom Caucus” and pretty much any GOP member of Congress, is bent on dragging this country backwards into the hot hell of biblical brimstone. I hope at least one of their daughters made it out with some sense of humanity and normalism (new word), but I doubt it.
Planning a Long AT (Thru?) Hike
June 8, 2023 § Leave a comment
You can read through my entire list of entries and find more than a few dedicated to the Appalachian Trail, however I am nowhere near a “significant” portion of “hiked” when it comes to the full Springer Mountain to Katahdin distance of 2100+ miles. It looks more impressive to say that I have hiked All of New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, most of Vermont, and some of PA and Virginia, but that total still doesn’t even add up to the length of the trail in Virginia alone, and that is less than a fourth of the total.
So, as I near retirement, and as each year brings me another year closer to my end of days, and eliminates another year of accomplishments, it seems it might be time to try something, and so I have set in place an initial itinerary for starting a thru hike in 2024, beginning the 2nd of March from Georgia.
First question you might have is “What does that even mean?” If you don’t follow AT Thru-Hiking, then you probably are unaware that it is more popular today than it has ever been before, and with Social Media, and near 100% signal availability, is brought to a viewing public through Video journals on You Tube, as Pictorials in Instagram, and Blogs via any of the many Bloggable platforms available to content providers. For example, this year I have been following Chris Howard on he blog, and last year I followed Hiking Mitch (The Endless Mountains) on Instagram, and Natalie on You Tube, and before that it was Dragon Sky, Dixie, and Rocket. Anyway, what am I getting at? Well, the AT is a limited resource. If a highway interchange consistently has 0 available rooms, someone will build another motel/hotel to cash in. That doesn’t exist on the AT, so the AT Conservancy manages a tool that allows you to create an itinerary where you can plan your journey against everyone else’s planned journey, and they will keep track of all the “sites” you choose for your overnights. This allows them to manage those resources by not allowing someone to select a site that theoretically doesn’t have any available spots for you.
What does that mean? Will there be “Campsite Police” out there making sure only hikers with “Reservations” can stay in any site? No. It’s simply a tool for planning your trip. If there is one take away from nearly 100% of all thru hike attempts, it will be this. No trip goes according to plan, so while you can’t really plan an entire 2200 miles on the trail, you can barely plan 200. It all really depends on what happens on the trail, and how aggressive, or passive your individual plan is.
Now, most of my friends know that I am usually an aggressive planner, however I am going to be 65 next year, and do I really need to be aggressive? I don’t think so. So, there is no reason for me to planning 15-20 miles days in the first month of this adventure. The longer you push it each day, the more the body suffers, and if you really want to make your goals, then you have to choose reasonable goals, and that doesn’t mean simply, reasonable daily goals. It means reasonable weekly goals.
So, what is one of my “reasonable goals”?
- I would like to last at least 1 Month
A month? That’s it? Let’s look at me. Until 2010, almost 100% of my backpacking experience was limited to long weekends. Yes, I did two and half weeks in 1982 on The Long Trail, and yes, I have done a fair number of week long adventures out west in the last 12 years, as well a couple of week long adventures on the AT in Mass and Jersey, but I have not spent that much time, day in and day out camping since I rode across the country in 1981.
Let’s look at another reality. Weather. I have been very very lucky with weather throughout my outdoor adventures. Sure it has rained out West, or snowed, but it hardly ever lasted more than a few hours, and then the sun came out. What didn’t dry immediately, could dry later after we made camp, and if still not dry, then with the aid of a campfire, everything was restored to normal. Even when it snowed all night and most of the day in Banff, we still got a fire going, eventually, and spent all evening drying out before sleeping dry. And we started dry the next day.
The exception was my first attempt to hike the NY section of the AT in 1998 when a tropical storm hit the second morning, and instead of trying to sit it out, I moved out onto the trail and got soaked, eventually abandoning my hike. Bad rain gear, and a bad decision led to that abandon, but the point is this. Georgia in March is wet, and it’s cold, and when it’s wet, it can be wet for a few days, so there is a key to success, and “dry clothes” have to be kept dry, and away from wet clothes, AND, you have to be able to don wet cold clothes (unless you can dry them somehow) and continue on the next day. As long as it isn’t pouring and windy as fuck, if you keep moving, you generate warmth, so you really have to be able to manage the bad times, and I have never really had too many of these bad times. So, I can’t say for sure how I will handle them. I am making some new gear purchases to handle backpacking in the rain better. What does that include you ask? 1. I usually hike in a kilt, so I have rain kilt from Z-Pack. 2. My LL Bean gore-tex rain jacket is now shit, and I have replaced that with a cheaper, and thru-hiker approved solution. 3. I will get the cheap simple pack liners and use them, though I also purchased an insert for my Osprey Pack, though I am not sure I would take my Osprey on this adventure. 4. I might consider a small hiking umbrella as well.
I think a key thing for me, is I feel like I can exist better sleeping in a shelter in the rain, rather than my tent. While I have a vestibule, I am a big human, and I also don’t like mixing “Where I eat” with “Where I sleep”, so at this point, I feel like when it comes to foul weather, I would rather be in a shelter than in my tent, and if I keep my distances low, then maybe, so the thinking goes, I can be first at a shelter, and guaranty a spot inside. That is what I am thinking.
There is another big challenge to get over on a trip like this, and it comes down to what I already know about the AT, and that is this. Except for a small percentage of the time, and this goes just as much for a canopy free forest as well as the full canopied forest, the AT is 95% hiking in a limited sight range under the canopy of trees. While the type of tree may change as you move North, hiking in trees has limited rewards. I contrast that with hiking out West where the visual rewards are almost 100% on all the time. Out West you might complain about too much Sun. That is never an issue on the AT. Another factor on the AT is a lot of the trail was laid out after much deforestation, and so with all the second generation forest, many of the vistas once numerous on many smaller hillocks, are no more, and it feels like the trail takes you up for no reason what so ever. Some of these minor hills aren’t such easy climbs either, so after a few of them it’s easy to start yelling at the trail designers who more than likely are all dead and buried.
What happens if I last a month? To last a month, at the pace I was looking at is about 325 +/- miles and could be in the middle of the Smokies, so clearly at that point the next goal, which really seems pretty straight forward, is to make it to Virginia. Looking back at my first goal, I might ask “Did I already try to chew too much?” One thing to consider here though is that of all the people who do start a thru-hike, many of them quit within the first month, so the point of that note is that the further you survive into a thru-hike, the less congestion there will be for resources. So that impacts just how close I need to try to track my itinerary, and once that is behind me, then it’s simply a matter of assessing my interest in continuing, and then setting the next goal. For example, once I get to Virginia, and since Virginia is 500 miles, it would seem like the next goal would simply be to make it to West Virginia, and Harper’s Ferry. That’s at least another month, and since it will be April, that isn’t a cakewalk, but most of Virginia, once you get into the Shenandoah’s is high up on the ridge, and I have backpacked some of those sections, and they aren’t really that bad. Gradual climbs as I recall.
If I reach Harper’s Ferry, then it’s decision time. Am I done? If I am not done, then continue NOBO, or jump to Maine and do the Flip Flop and hike South from Katahdin back to Harper’s Ferry. I think it will depend on the “when”. What time of year is it? Let’s be reasonable and say I make it to Harper’s Ferry the middle of May. That might be too early to start from Katahdin, and everyone knows that Black Fly season is no fun in Maine, but that begs the question “Are the Black Flies a Coastal thing or a woods thing?” The other thing is to just keep going. Maryland is only 40 miles, and then Pennsylvania another 260. I know what May in PA is like, and it can’t be any worse than Georgia in March. Anyway I like PA.
Another item I haven’t covered here are visits along the trail. Andy is at the beginning, Bill and Lorraine are just off the trail in Weaverville near Ashville NC, and then Terry and Laurie in Smith Mountain Lake Virginia. Of course there will be some time off the trail to see these folks, and not to mention my Northern Virginia backpacking friends when I reach that locale.
So, that is it for now.
The following is what the first 3 days will look like as formatted in my itinerary.
3/02/2024
Amicalola Falls
SP Visitor Center
(GA)N/A (0.0) Section 1
During the spring thru-hike orientation will be provided
throughout the day at the AFSP Visitor Center. You
should also plan to begin your thru-hike here due to
poor road conditions and limited parking at Springer
Mt.3/02/2024
Springer
Mountain Shelter
(GA)9.00
(9.0) Section 2 Shelter holds 12 people + 18 tent pads, 2 privies andfood storage.
3/03/2024 Hawk Mountain
Shelter (GA)
7.90 <<< daily mileage
(16.9) Section 2 <<< total mileageHawk Mt. Shelter is likely FULL by 3pm during Feb. 22
through April 18 – use Hawk Mt. Campsite if arriving
later than 3pm. The shelter holds 12 people + 9 tent
sites, privy, food storage cables and spring.
Weminuche 2022
August 20, 2022 § Leave a comment
This is going to be a very short post. I promise.
If you follow my writings then you know that I just finished writing up my adventure from 2021 a few weeks ago. These long multi-day trips become a chore to sit down and compose sometimes, and I don’t want it to seem like I drone on and on about the same old drivel. So I got distracted and didn’t finish documenting last years trip, and then time kept marching forward, as it always does (tick tock), and before I knew it, other adventures had come and gone, and been written up as well. It wasn’t until I rode the Rockies again in June, that I came to realize I needed to finish the 2021 write-up before I began 2022!
So, what is going on in 2022? Well, let’s begin with who is going. There were four people who wanted to go last year, two of whom actually had monies invested in the trip when shit happened. The other two, father and son, had family obligations that kept them away, and so on the second day of our trip last year, amidst the beauty of the San Juans, I decided then and there to come back this year. I wasn’t going to do the exact same trip, but I would plan a new trip and anyone who wanted to join was welcome.
For a while, I had the interest of a couple of campers who came last year, but other things got in the way, and they backed out. So, it is five of us. A pretty nice compact little group. We have Larry and his son Drew, myself and my daughter Alyson, and my friend Mike. Everyone has spent time with me in the back country before, though this is the first time that my daughter has been able to join us again since the Grand Canyon in 2012.
That is the base. I have been in contact with some others that could join us, but as of this writing, I am not sure we will have anyone else just yet. You might be thinking “If they were going to join you why wouldn’t you know that, and since you are in Durango, wouldn’t they have had to make arrangements already?” and you would be right for most people, but the extras I refer to all live in Durango. We shall see what we shall see.
What are we doing? Last year we took the Durango Silverton Diesel to Elk Creek and then backpacked an inverted “C” from West to East to South To West and eventually came out at the “other” stop on the train. So train in, train out. This year we are going to start at Pine River Trail Head, further East and South of our adventure last year, and hike North East for a couple of day, then turning North West to intersect the Continental Divide Trail, which we follow to the Vallecito. If you read last years trip details, then the Vallecito will be familiar, and we will basically then follow the route from last year. The only difference from last year will be instead of a two day Columbine effort, we will do it in one day.
Now, again, if you read last years account, it should be obvious by now that decisions are made on the trail, and last year we made more than a few. I am sure the same will happen here as well. It all depends on how people feel, however we have distance that has to be covered, so there isn’t a lot of room to do less in a day while there is a lot of room to do more. So let’s leave it at that.
We depart into the wilderness next Friday. I am going out tomorrow, and people are joining starting Sunday. There are things to do still to prep, and I will be working still as well. I am not sure at this point if I will post anything more until I return, but …
The Assault on Mount Mitchell 2022 – A Baby Seal was I
July 30, 2022 § 2 Comments
When Terry Downs sent me the registration link, this seemed like a great idea. I was going to sign up for Ride the Rockies again, and having this activity in May would force me to get out there and train, because this beast is a monster. In case you aren’t aware, Mount Mitchell is the highest point East of the Mississippi. The term highest has to be understood. The Appalachian Trail does NOT traverse Mount Mitchell and so Clingman’s Dome (soon to be renamed thus ridding us of another Confederate traitor) is the highest point on the AT. Mount Mitchell Highlands NJ is the highest coastal point South of Maine (Cadillac Mtn though is on an island). Mount Mitchell in NC is the highest thing around for man miles. This ride begins all the way South in Spartanburg South Carolina and generally winds it’s way North and West until it ascends to the Blue Ridge, and then its South to the final climb to the summit. One hundred two miles and more than 10K feet of elevation gain.
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Big Bird's Adventures 