6/26/11 Posting

As I’m off to a party this afternoon to share pictures from my Grand Canyon trip, I thought I’d post a couple of pictures in this blog. Our trip was off of the North Rim and during that time we visited two different drainages with some fantastic water features.

The first was Thunder Creek where you can watch the water blast right out of the side of a cliff wall.

From the North rim, the water percolates down through the rock, finding weaker spots in the rock. All the seeped water gradually gets channeled into the same little tunnels, gathering water pressure as it goes. Then it roars out of openings in the rock. There are several locations in the Grand Canyon where you can view this sort of phenomenon.

The other drainage we visited is the Deer Creek area. This area is famous for its pools and waterfalls that we certainly enjoyed on the 90 degree day we were there. Lovely!

One thing that backpacking and hiking has taught me is the value of food planning and making sure that I don’t neglect to bring a decent amount of food and eat it along the way. But even I still mess up occasionally and come up short in the calorie planning area. Let’s make sure you don’t!

As the hikes get longer, you should be bringing and eating more food. You should also be bringing more food than you think you might need. Sometimes you’re out longer than you think you might be, or the trail is harder or longer than you originally thought, or someone gets hurt and it takes longer to hike out. There are lots of reasons, but the solution is the same—bring lots of snacks and a good lunch and be sure to eat constantly. You must condition yourself to eat before you are even hungry to avoid spiking your blood-sugar levels. This becomes even more important as you pile the miles and gain on your hikes.

I can tell you from first-hand experience it’s no fun to bonk (American slang for experiencing a really low blood-sugar level). You become light-headed, low-energy, nauseous, and really dumb. If you don’t maintain a constant caloric intake, it can happen to you fairly quickly and once you get there, it’s hard to recover. So keep salty, calorific snacks handy to munch on while you walk or if you stop for a moment. Keep your body supplied with a constant amount of energy and you’ll feel much stronger as you put the miles behind you.

6/19/11 Posting

I spent the week over in the Okanagan area with my family doing a little hiking and a little fishing, and spending lots of time around the campfire. Matt and I have a little travel trailer that we take out on a couple of camping trips each summer. I still love to backpack and camp in a tent, but after a really cold fall trip to Yellowstone a few years ago where we were scraping ice off of our sleeping bags in the tent, I just love being able to turn on the heater from the bed in the trailer on a cold morning. It makes getting out of bed early to go hiking a little easier.

Part of our vacation fun was spent scouting trailheads in the Pasayten Wilderness. This is where you have a map showing both forest service roads and trails and you drive to all of the trailheads you can find. If the trailhead looks promising once you get there, you get out and hike for a few miles and see what the trail is like. In this case, my backpacking friends and I are thinking of doing a backpack trip up to Horseshoe Basin in the Pasayten, so my trail scouting had an ulterior motive—I wanted to see where the snowline currently was so we could decide if a 4th of July backpack trip in the area would be feasible.

If you haven’t been in the Pasayten Wilderness before, I would highly recommend it. It’s the largest wilderness in the U.S. and is not highly travelled. There are a lot of trails and several loop hikes are possible. The snow also melts out earlier than on the west side of the Cascades. The only downside is that it’s really not close enough for a day hike when you live in the Puget Sound area. Guess that means you’ll just have to travel a bit to go to someplace cool that you probably haven’t been before.

That’s true of many of the hikes that we’re offering in July and later on this summer. Some of them are a bit of a drive, but well worth it. I hope you are able to see some sights you haven’t seen before and develop an interest in checking out more hikes in the same areas.

Happy hiking!

6/12/2011 Posting

I’ve moved to a 4/10 schedule at work, so I now have Fridays off to do fun things like hike. This Friday, I headed to up to Lake Serene with a couple of friends.

If you haven’t walked on the Lake Serene trail before, it’s actually a good training hike because of the large number of flights of wooden stairs built into the trail. The stairs are steep and built for hikers with longer legs than myself. I need to pace myself to move continuously up the steep stairs and I also use the rest step quite a bit to keep to from building up too much lactic acid in my leg muscles.

If you find yourself breathing too heavily and working your muscles too hard, you need to ease up on the speed a bit, bring your heart/breathing rate down, and start using the rest step to give your muscles a brief rest. It’s amazing how well this technique works even if used on intermittently. I used it quite a bit as I was climbing out of the Grand Canyon a couple of weeks ago. The trail was steep, my pack was about 37 lbs., and we were hiking at an elevation of about 7000 ft. Just walking slow wasn’t doing it and I was over-taxing my body, so I performed the rest step on every third step I took and I started to immediately feel better.

If you haven’t learned how to pace yourself yet, you’re going to find that the longer hikes of July, August, and September are very tiring. I would urge you to spend the rest of your hiking time in June to work on continuously hiking at a speed you can maintain and feel good while doing so. Hiking too fast uses up more of your body’s resources and makes it harder to keep up with your caloric and water needs as the day progresses. You’ll feel better at the end of the day if you can keep pacing in mind.

6/6/11 Posting

Sorry I’m a little late in getting this out. I spent a glorious weekend over near Winthrop at Sun Mountain Lodge leading a club hike to promote summer hiking in the Methow Valley. I had a wonderful time leading a group of hikers around the trails of Sun Mountain. The weather was awesome and the company was even better.

Every year I need to include the obligatory article about insect encounters. As we’re in tick season right now, please remember to be sure and check yourself for ticks after each hike. Check yourself all over. You can't feel them on you until they have already burrowed in. They will wander around (unfelt) on your body until they find a place to dig in and feed. While we don’t have the types of ticks in the Northwest that can carry Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever or Lyme’s Disease, it’s still best to be vigilant of these small critters. Click on this link for information on how to remove a tick if you find one: http://dermatology.about.com/cs/miscellaneous/a/tick.htm

You will also start encountering mosquitoes and the occasional dreaded-black flies on some trails. Be sure to carry insect repellent with you or someway of covering up to discourage these pesky critters. I like to carry a lightweight nylon long-sleeve shirt that I can pull on to both protect myself from biting insects and from getting sunburned. I find Deet insect repellent to be noxious, so I have some eucalyptus-based repellent that I use which is fairly effective for short periods of time; but I prefer to just cover up when the bugs become bad.

Have a great week and I look forward to hiking with you soon.