Latest Photos

posted Aug 10, 2010 8:53 AM by Paul Wagner   [ updated Aug 10, 2010 8:58 AM ]

For those who would like to sit through the entire slide show of our summer vacation, here's the link to the Picasa folder with all the photos ( well, most of them!) from our recent trip from Twin Lakes to Benson Lake and Matterhorn Canyon.  Seven days, three passes over 10,000 feet, and some of the most spectacular scenery in Yosemite or anywhere else!   http://picasaweb.google.com/balzaccom/TwinLakesToBensonLakeAndMatterhornCanyon#

The Bear Bell Boys

posted Aug 9, 2010 9:33 AM by Paul Wagner   [ updated Aug 9, 2010 1:36 PM ]

So there we were, resting below a pass over 9,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada, and a strange tinkling noise came to our ears.  I looked at my wife in confusion.  A bear bell?  In the Sierra?   (We've seen one bear in the last three years and three hundred miles of backpacking--and it ran away when it saw us.  See it in the photo at left?)   For those who don't know: bear bells are used by some hikers in Grizzly country to give an audible warning.  Grizzlies hear a lot better than they see, and the goal of the bear bell is to let Ursus Horribilus know you are coming.  In Glacier National Park the old joke is that you can always tell the difference between Black Bear and Grizzly Bear scat, because the Grizzly Bear scat always has little bells in it!    But the last Grizzly Bear in California was shot in 1922, and there have been only 12 Black Bear attacks in the state since 1980--that's thirty years-- and none of them were fatal. (To put this in perspective, over 4,000 people die every year in motor vehicle accidents in the state.)  So wearing a bear bell in the Sierra is a bit over the top---particularly if you drove your car to the trailhead!   When the group of middle-aged men passed us, I couldn't help asking:  Is that a bear bell your wearing?   Yep, it was.  "I really, really don't want to see any bears on this trip!"   Nor any other wildlife, it would appear.   After they passed us by, we waited a bit longer on the trail--we could hear that bell dingling down along the trail for quite a few minutes after they passed.  We shared chuckle at their expense, and then finally took up our packs and followed them down the trail in peace ad quiet.   Which would have been an amusing end to the story, but it wasn't.  The next day, as we rested in our campsite, we heard a familiar tinkling coming down the trail.  Yep--they were hiking the same route, and set up their camp across the lake from us.   No harm done, and we shared another smile.   The next morning, as we started out, we found our same group of just leaving their camp.  I invited them to go first (since they had passed us the first time, I assumed they were the faster hikers.)  I figured that they would be out of earshot within a few minutes, especially if we walked a slower pace behind them.   Not so.  It turned out that they were quicker to descend a trail, but slower going uphill. Within five minutes we found them sprawled along the trail resting.  "We take a lot of rests, so we are probably going to be passing each other all  day long," explained one of the men.   Oh joy.    "I hope not," I replied.  "You should just pick a livable pace and hold it."  I replied.  I was not in the mood to hike to the sounds of little bells in the wilderness all day long.   To their credit, they did just that.  And it turned out that their pace up over the next 10,000 foot pass was slower than ours.  We had a lovely day hiking in sweet solitude, the only sounds we heard being the wind in the trees, the burbling of the streams, and the singing of the birds.    It was only much later that afternoon, after we had set up camp, that I heard the bell again.  I was fishing the nearby creek when I heard its now familiar tinkle as the men walked by up the canyon.    We never saw or heard the again.  No did we see any bears.    But if you find some bear scat high in the Sierra with a litte bell in it, you'll know what happened!

 

 

 

Nap Time

posted Jul 23, 2010 9:37 AM by Paul Wagner   [ updated Jul 23, 2010 9:43 AM ]

There is something truly luxurious about nap time in the mountains.  You've done your hike (or not, if it's a lay-day!) and the sounds of nature slowly drift away as your eyes close...   Restful?  Like nothing I've ever known.  True, I'll take a nap when we're at home, but so often it seems as if it is a recovery technique.  In the mountains, even after a long hike, it seems like luxury.  Nothing to do, nowhere to go, no meetings to plan.  Just taking the time to lie down and snooze.    Our new Neo-Air mattresses seems to help, but M often just uses her old Z-rest on the ground, and seems to get the same results.  And my brother in the photo above seems perfectly happy with a tiny slice of thin foam...and a relatively flat rock.   My point exactly.

 

 

 

You know how to whistle, don't you?

posted Jul 14, 2010 9:36 PM by Paul Wagner

Years ago, when our two girls were still living at home and accompanying us on the occasional summer hiking adventure, we bought them each a small emergency whistle.  I don't think they cost more than couple of bucks, and maybe less.  As you can imagine, the girls drove us nuts for a few minutes in the car with those whistles, and then promptly forgot them.   Years later, P found them again.  He's a big believer in whistles, and so when we started to do more hiking on our own, he fbrought them out.   M wears one tied to the shoulder strap of her pack, and P carries his in the camera case he wears on his belt.  We forget about them most of the time. The don't weigh anything, and they are now just part of our equipment.   But twice in the past three years those whistles have come in very handy.  The first time was on a day hike in the middle of a pack trip.  We were following a rather sketchy trail up a lonely canyon, and there were all sorts of side trails and use trails to confuse us.    Now P always hikes faster than M, so he was ahead...and realized that he hadn't seen M for a while.  We do try to keep some kind of visual contact as we go, but when turned around to look. there was no sign of M.  And no sign was not a good sign.  So he hiked back a hundred yards more or so.  Still no M.  And then he began to get worried, and noticed all the use trails, and realized that:        1.  We were an hour away from camp, and we had not really talked about where or how long we were going to hike.       2.  We were up a canyon six miles from the nearest trailhead.       3.  We might not have been lost, but niether of us knew where the other one was....and niether of us knew to go forward or back to start searching.    Not a good scenario.    So P started yelling for M.  No answer.  None.    The scenario just got worse.    And then he remembered the whistle.  And sure enough, he blew it twice, and then waited.  After a few seconds, he heard an answering whistle, coming not from above him as he expected, but from underneath the bluff he was standing on.  And within minutes, we were back together again, and hiking away.  Greatly relieved.    All of this came to mind last week, when we were hiking a lightly used trail in the Hoover Wilderness.  At one point the trail gets quite confused, and P waved to M at that point, to tell her he was taking the lower trail.  But when M got to that point, she was confused.  And she remembered her whistle--and started to blow.   Which was perfect, except she didn't wait for a response, she just kept blowing away.  Which P interpreted to mean that she was in some kind of serious trouble.  And he sprinted back up to trail to save her from ...well.  All's well that ends well.   And in the wilderness, there really is no substitute for whistle.

 

 

 

Crossing the Rubicon, or Denial

posted Jul 5, 2010 8:12 PM by Paul Wagner   [ updated Jul 5, 2010 10:22 PM ]

There are few things that bring out the creativity in hikers the way stream crossings do.  It seems that while following one another on a trail is a simple process, crossing a stream suddenly introduces a wild streak of willful derring-do or note of pure caution that challenges each hiker to choose his/her own path.   This is true even with the two of us.   Now one of us is a gifted dancer, who can waltz or gavotte, and follow any move or rhythm instantly with her clever feet.  The other one of us approaches dancing with all of the finesse of a drunken giraffe...trying mainly to stay on the right foot on the right beat.  Clearly, one of us has the advantage when it comes to the delicate procedures required to cross a mountain stream.     It's the giraffe.    P grew up hopping on rocks around rivers while he was fishing, and it is absolutely second nature to him.  And when it comes to crossing a stream, he usually votes for whatever is quickest:  log, hopping on stones, leaping across the gap, and even sometimes trying to walk on water.  (The latter not usually working...which is why he reserves it for late in the day on the last day of the trip.)   But hopping across stones is fun for P.  He leaps, he balances, and he cleverly drifts from rock to rock with ease.  With a pack or without one, it's almost automatic. And there's a kind of natural rhythm to it that's a lot like dancing.  At least in his mind.    M, on the other hand, gracefully steps up to the creek...and pauses.  She looks for a better way.  She wants the path that is the easiest, safest, and least likely to get wet.  And she is perfectly willing to look for a few minutes to find it.  Astonishingly, despite her superb balance on the dance floor, she is not all that comfortable hopping from rock to rock.  She doesn't trust their stability.  All that time in the dance studio has made her elegant and graceful, but it doesn't help her leap from stone to stone.   It's a source of some amusement for us on every hike.  P leads the way, and shows M that his route certainly works.  And sometimes, once she has considered her options, M follows him.  But just as often she looks over the situation and chooses a different path: something a little calmer, or perhaps something that requires a slighly shorter leap of faith.    And then there is the wading.  Wading is always an issue, because we don't like to get our hiking boots wet.  Hiking in wet boots is miserable business, and so we always carry a pair of Crocs for this purpose.  They work great...but they also take time.  You have to pull off your boots and socks, put on your Crocs, wade the river, take off the Crocs, dry your feet, and then put socks and boots back on.  That's not the quickest way to cross a stream, and we don't like to do it.  But we do wade across rivers and streams, especially early in the year, when those lovely stones that have been artfully placed by previous hikers are now completely under water.  But it's a last resort.    Recently P's brother joined us for a hike, and we were both just a bit interested to see how he would proceed.  Would he follow in P's footsteps, and hop across the streams?  Or would he follow M's path, and choose the more sedate approach.    Our first big stream crossing brought us our answer.  P decided, rather quickly, that the only way across this stream was to wade it.  Yes, it was icy and surrounded by snowbanks, but there really wasn't another way.  He pulled off his boots, pulled on his Crocs, and waded in.  It was icy, but he got across.  And waited impatiently for the others.    M was not convinced.  She looked carefully for a narrower crossing, or one that was shallower. Or one that offered a few stones to keep her feet dry.  Only after minutes of review did she finally relent, and wade the stream where P had crossed. It was icy, but it worked.        But where was P's brother?  He finally appeared, after an extensive foray upstream.  He had tried to use a log, but the snow gave way beneath his feet, and he showed up with a large scrape on his head.  Of course he had tried a different approach.   And he remained unconvinced.  But in the end, he waded across with the rest of us.   After a few moments of first aid for his head, and a few more to get all of our footwear back on our feet, we were ready to hit the trail again as a team.  We were one.    At least until the next stream, when we could each look for a better way...