Folks have been posting up a storm lately (must be hiking season or something). Let’s take a look:

• Adam Paul is posting great pix and commentary from the Southern California high country desert — (hey, it’s not Joshua Tree’s fault that U2 became bloated and insufferable for a few years there.)

• CampingBlogger Roy Scribner continues to ignore my example and insists on posting only useful information for camping people. (This time he revisits the 10 Essentials; he mentioned his paratrooping days and I was hooping to see something lethal on his list. No such luck).

• Rick Deutsch, now calling himself Mr. Half Dome, continues to find something Domeworthy to write about five days a week. His technique for the cables is must reading.
• John Fedak is still trying to leave no Tahoe peak unbagged. This pic of wild horses watching him hike is priceless.

• David at Random Curiosity reports on his trip to Hetch Hetchy at Yosemite. You must read to the end to find out why he thinks “Poopenaut Valley” is so amusing.

• Ralph Alcorn is getting all his food ready for the Pacific Crest Trail. He mentions a store nearby: “The Food Mill – our local bulk food store where I can pick from a dozen kinds of granola.” Somethings can only be had in the Bay Area.

• Stuart at Trailspotting profiles Mount Eddy and Dead Fall Lakes. He notes that it’s often still snowy there through the end of May (but makes it sound like we’ve got absolutely no excuse for not going now that the snow’s gone).
• Chris Weiss at Uncooped.com tells how to cope with a rattlesnake encounter (pooping your pants in fear is not one of the recommended responses).
• Coe at Weekend Hike urges us to check out Ring Mountain Open Space Preserve in Marin County (which includes, among other things, a view of San Quentin State Prison — a good thing to be several miles away from; also great views of the Bay and other cool stuff).

• John Soares notes that National Parks are letting people in for free this weekend. So it’s true what they say about the best things in life.
• Yosemite Blog posted one of Dan Mitchell’s beautiful Yosemite pictures.
• Phil Houtz of Wild Rye keeps building a great Southern California hiking/backpacking/adventuring blog. Definitely place for this one in your RSS list.
• John Pugh’s Source to Sea is a great blog about padding from Minnesota to the Gulf Coast and/or hiking the Appalachian Trail (yes, there is sex there).
• Miguel Vieira’s Remembered Earth has been profiling several great hikes around the Bay Area and beyond. Excellent photographs of the Redwoods.

Elsewhere on the Web:

• Dave and Alicia at Trailspace have redesigned the site and made it easier to post pictures. Also: Barbara Egbert’s latest backpacking-with-kids installments: Grade schoolers | teens.
• The Sierra Club has a new “trails wiki” that’s been getting a lot of coverage in the blogosphere. Camping Blogger has it covered pretty well.

See, it ain’t all about me. Now get clicking.

Every winter, the shoreline at Año Nuevo State Natural Reserve becomes jammed with amorous elephant seals. They’re all gone by spring but in the summer a few of the males return to shed their hide, which comes off in large patches you might sew into a vest to sell to discerning death-metal guitarists, if you were handy with a needle and had an active eBay account.

A summer hike to see these ocean-going behemoths is a rare opportunity — in mating season you have to reserve a guided tour and hope a group’s available when you’re free. During the molt of June and July, you merely pay $7 to park, get your permit at the entry gate, and set off for the two-mile jaunt out to North Point, where most of them are hanging out in recent days.

Adult bull elephant seals appeal to my inner guy. All they need from life is to hunt, sleep, swim and screw. They are ugly but tough, bounding across beaches minus arms or legs. They eat sharks. They have no natural enemies except people with heavy weapons.

And you can hear one belch from blocks away. What’s not to admire about these guys?

Well, they probably smell awful but if you’re close enough to get a lungful of their aroma it means you’re about to be crushed by their two-ton bulk (you’d stand about as much of a chance stepping in front of a cruising Escalade.)

You don’t have to be a guy who can’t wipe that stupid grin off his face when he hears the word “harem” to appreciate Año Nuevo (only the toughest of bulls get to have one; the rest get no lovin’ for an entire year — which might explain why their dominance combat is so hard-core.) The views are stupendous, the lands near the trail are festooned with wildflowers and even a few wild blackberries.

The hiking is mostly flat, though the sand dunes will wear you out fast. Four miles here is more like six flat miles in town. Just follow the signs out to North Point — well, all you really have to do walk toward the sound of water going down a very large drain. This is the distinctive bark of the adult bull elephant seal. It’s very loud and the sound carries a long way — you might walk a mile from the first time you year it till you actually see the elephant seals.

Enough jabbering. Let’s see some pictures:

The welcome sign tells you what you’re in for. Normally I do these in sequence but this week I’m going to skip straight to the seals:

They’re all working on their tans here. Not much action until….

Two of the guys pretend to rehearse for battle. They know it’s not December so it’s not time for actual combat. But they put on a bit of a show for the tourists.

Why their belches are so loud: their throats are as big as a water main.

Speaking of large: the marine life study area near the trail head includes this display comparing an adult bull head, left, and an adult female.

Here’s a patch of elephant seal hide we found on the trail. Apparently the wind blows it up here.

Those are my only blogworthy elephant seal shots. These guys really reward a patient photographer with a good camera and the right lenses. I’m impatient and refuse to spend more than $300 on a point-and-shoot, so I take what I can get.

The walk yielded a bunch of non-mammalian shots. The best of the bunch:

Wild blackberries. How can you tell they’re not ripe? Duh, they’re not black.

The cattails are everywhere, and they make excellent framing devices.

We were the second and third hikers to make it out this way Monday morning. The first was the docent waiting at North Point.

There used to be a lighthouse offshore with houses for the staff and their families. Now, though, the sea lions have taken over the island.

Good year for yellow lupines.

Saw a bunch of these leaves with big red growths bulging out of them. No idea what it means, but it looks freaky.

A pretty yellow flower I could not identify.

Lizard pauses long enough to have his picture taken.

Spectacular coastline, as usual.

So that’s a look at the summer elephant seal molt. Standard rules for beach hiking apply here: wear layers, stay away from the cliffs and stick to the trails. Don’t go near the seals, they really can kill you. Winter time is more interesting, though the park is closed during the weeks when the bulls fight it out for dominance (the females show up after these battles are over — they gravitate to the dominant males, assuming they will pass on these characteristics to their pups. Of course this never happens in our species.)

A few links:

• GPS tracks at EveryTrail.com
• San Simeon pix from January 2008.
• Bay Area Hiker entry.
• California State Parks Año Nuevo page.
• California State Parks history of elephant seals.
• Wikipedia entry.

Want to see for yourself? Here’s a Google map to get you there.

View Ano Nuevo State Nature Preserve in a larger map

According to the Free Dictionary, it looks like I was misusing it most of the time. (My definition: “some scary s**t”) .

In my quest to continue providing gear deal scans that will never yield one thin dime of income (I know what you’re thinking: cosmic justice!), I added one for Mountain Hardwear this morning. I figured since they’re based up in Richmond I’ve at least got a local angle. But after I had it all set up I found myself wondering: do typical hiker types of our ilk actually own any of this stuff?

I mean, sure, if you’re planning to climb K2 next year you might want to comb through their catalog, but how many people who haunt the trails in these parts have Seven Summits aspirations?

Mountain Hardwear’s Facebook page has over 4,800 fans, so they must be doing something right (or selling something right). Their blog features the usual heroic ascents and hair-raising expeditions — I know, that stuff sells parkas; it just bores me (the heroism is cool; the stamping-your-brand-on-Everest bit is tedious).

But anyway: do you own any MH gear, and what do you think of it? Worth the premium prices? Anything you’re lusting after? I’d like to think the efforts of our friends at the Richmond HQ are worthwhile to the outdoorspeople who spend more time here than in the Himalayas.

Share your wisdom with a comment.

Back when I bought my first backpacking tent at REI, I bought into the hype that by god if you put all this money into your backpacking tent, you need to protect that investment by buying a footprint to protect the tent’s floor. Well, if you camp out 300 nights a year it might be worth it, but no less a personage than Rick of Best Hikes fame once told me he never uses one, and he’s backpacked everywhere.

But a funny thing happened as my buyers’ remorse wore off: I found myself using the footprint far more often than the actual tent.

While a tent might weigh over 4 pounds, a footprint is 12 to 14 ounces of sturdy nylon you can use just about anywhere you need a layer between you and the ground. Granted it’s way heavier than Tyvek or a thin sheet of plastic, but it’s built not to wear out, so you’ll probably never need to buy another one.

When I decided my backpacking tent was too heavy and passed through my tarps-and-shelters phase, I tossed the tent’s footprint in my pack and always had a nice ground cloth. The picture above is the shelter setup I used on on my White Mountain adventure with Four Wheel Bob. It included a tarp, bivy and tent footprint, all weighing in at less than 2 pounds. Of course I could’ve had a much lighter shelter if I felt like buying more specialized gear, but I threw this kit together from stuff already in my gear closet, which strikes me as more practical/sustainable. (Standard caveat: your gear must match the conditions you expect.)

I’m still not sold on the idea of adding 30 bucks to the cost of a tent you might use three times a year, but I have no regrets about the footprint I ended up buying. If you’re spending a lot of time among desert thorns or camping out on rocky surfaces, then you might want to go ahead and shell out the extra bucks. Otherwise, though, your tent’s probably tough enough for soft dirt.

(Disclosure: I get a commission if you buy anything after clicking on my product links).

What about the rest of you? Share your wisdom in the comments.

Anybody over 6-foot-2 has a heck of a time squeezing into most backpacking tents. This “three-person” tent from REI could be an option, assuming you’re taking a friend along. While cruising for bargains at REI I noticed they’d sliced 20% off the Hoodoo 3 ($249 to $200), which looks like a knockoff of the North Face Tadpole. You’d never solo in this baby — packed weight is north of 7 pounds — but a couple customer reviews reveal an interesting side benefit: room for two tall campers. A snip: “My girlfriend and I are 6′0″ and 6′2″, respectively, and we were quite comfortable sleeping, changing, and playing cards in this tent. Being able to both sit upright with plenty of headroom is a rare pleasure in a tent that is flexible enough to be taken on short backpacking trips.”

The Hoodoo 3 rates an average of 4.5 stars across 53 reviews, and $200 is a fair price for a tent in this range. It’d be a stretch to get 3 adults into a tent this size, but two grownups and a small dog might fit, or a mom and two kids. It has a spacious fly that creates a good front vestibule, and it has a back door and vestibule so you can stow some gear back there that you might want to grab in the middle of the night. The pole setup looks a bit more complicated than I’d prefer, but if there’s two of you it shouldn’t be so hard to figure out. (Foolproof relationship test: if you can get a tent up without hating each other, it has promise).

I’ve had fine luck with two REI tents — they’re sturdy and reasonably easy to set up. And the great thing about REI: if you don’t like, you take back, and they accept your return with a smile .

(Disclosure: I get a 5% commission if you click on a link here that leads to a sale at REI.)

Tripbase.com is drumming up free publicity from link-hungry bloggers spreading the word about its series of awards for notable travel-related blogs. Two-Heel Drive ranks No. 2 in the walking-backpacking category, bested only by a guy attempting 36,000 miles, 4 continents, 25 countries, crossing a frozen sea, 6 deserts, 7 mountain ranges over 12 years.

I’m guessing a few more weekenders to the Sierra would not have pushed me over the top.

More good news: California is oversubscribed in the rankings. Gambolin’ Man comes in at No. 4 and John Soares rates as a finalist (as does Rick of Best Hikes, who has covered far more cool California trails than I have.) Proof that it’s not where you go, it’s how you blog it: all these guys have got way, way more serious trail miles under their shoes.

But anyway: congrats to all who won a place in the rankings. Many quality blogs were left out of the rankings — particularly the lightweight backpacking blogs in the UK. And where is Modern Hiker, the king of L.A. hiking? (Who knows, you might bump into Kevin Bacon on one of his featured trails?)

These things are never fair, of course. But I’m not returning my Oscar, all the same.

Yosemite Blog posted an announcement yesterday that Joshua Gunther, 34, was supposed to be out of the park Sunday after a weeklong backpacking trip from the Ostrander Lakes trail head. The announcement says only that he acquired a permit to enter the Yosemite Backcountry via the Ostrander Lakes Trail but does not say that he actually entered there. All we have is the license tag for his 2000 Nissan (California 8D15054) — and no word on whether it’s been sighted. In addition to the picture, he’s described as 5 foot 11 inches, 190 pounds, with short spiky brown hair, and brown eyes.

If you’re hiking in Yosemite in the next few days (assuming he isn’t found) you’ll find people at trailheads with his picture and this announcement asking for your help. If you’ve been hiking anywhere near Ostrander Lake since June 27, the Park Service needs to hear from you at 209-379-1992. Doesn’t matter whether you think you saw him — if you saw nothing last Wednesday, for instance, it’s still a clue about where the guy wasn’t.

I put together this Google map of the trails coming out of the Ostrander Lake Trail Head. He could have covered an enormous amount of ground in a week, particularly if he’s an ultralighter. The campground icon is for Ostrander Lake — a very popular backpacking destination that I presume anybody planning a week in the Yosemite backcountry would avoid. If my legs were up for it I’d be thinking about getting over to the Clark Range to the east and perhaps hiking up to Red Peak Pass, then returning on the Illouette Creek Trail perhaps up to Glacier Point and taking a shuttle back to the trailhead. Looks doable in a week.

View Ostrander Lakes vicinity — Yosemite in a larger map

Another option: a loop around Buena Vista Peak — there’s a bunch of alpine lakes down there that would seem to entice a backpacker not into seeing how many miles he can cover.

I’m hoping that by the time I post this he’ll have been found and I’ve gone to all this work for naught. Well, not exactly naught: now I know where I want to go backpacking in Yosemite: I can’t imagine this southern section of the park gets much traffic so it might well be an excellent adventure.

I poked around at most of the outdoors boards to see if any clues could be gleaned, but came up dry. If you’ve seen anything, please leave link in the comments.

I do recall that on one Yosemite day hike, the park staff was on the lookout for a guy who’d been missing a couple days. Turned out he had twisted his ankle pretty badly and just waited it out a couple days till he felt like he could walk on it again. After that he just hiked on out to the trail head. Let’s hope for a similar outcome here.

For the past five years I’ve been paralyzed by a prejudice against driving more than I’m hiking. It just seems aesthetically wrong to spend more time on the road than on the trail, especially when Bay Area trails can easily yield a hiking-to-driving ratio of 4-to-1 (that is, four times more hiking than driving.)

I’m also indignant about burning $3-a-gallon gas to convey me to a trailhead. In the woods I’m free of everybody — landlords, grocers, doctors, car dealers — with a claim to the contents of my checking account. After the whole communing-with-nature thing, the next greatest appeal to me about hiking is that I can’t spend any money while I’m doing it. (I suspect this frugality is widespread among our kind, given the cold-as-a-snowmelt response to all the gear deals I’ve been flogging.)

Yesterday’s hike to Lake Winnemucca, however, illustrated the paradox of thrift: the urge to avoid eight hours of driving for three hours of hiking was costing me the experience of being up there among the tall peaks on a perfect day. I could rationalize that the trails around here are good enough, but it’s so much better up there. Today it feels like the best deal I’ve found all year.

Getting into the mountains without breaking the bank

We can tell ourselves the experience is worth far more than the price, but you don’t buy groceries with experience. You also can’t fix the roof or mow the lawn while you’re burning an entire day on a hiking outing. Here’s how I think you can take the sticker shock out of an all-day excursion:

• Never go solo. Taking even one extra hiker along cuts the cost of gas in half. A carload of four takes your $60 gas bill down to $15, which means you can get in four hikes for the cost of one.
• Make it a social thing. I find the time in the car just talking to people to be almost as interesting as the hike itself. If you tell yourself “the hike is just one part of the outing and maybe not the most important part,” it’s easier to get your brain around more car time than trail time.
• Make it a family thing. Keeping your kids entertained all that time is another matter altogether, but if you can pull it off you’ll be turning your kids into little hikers, which has to be a good thing.
• Make it an excuse to go camping. So doing an overnight backpacking trip burns two days instead of one, but you really need to rise with the sun in the mountains to experience all they have to give.

As you’ve guessed, most of this is me talking myself into hauling myself up to the High Sierra. Got more tips? Let go with a comment.

“I can breathe up here.” So said my allergy-prone wife, Melissa, whom I had talked into an “easy” jaunt down to Lake Winnemucca from Carson Pass.

It was an odd thing to hear 9,000 feet up in the Sierra Nevada from somebody who can can barely walk three miles on Bay Area sidewalks before allergies tie her lungs in knots. Five miles with 1,000 feet of elevation gain all above 8,000 feet is a comparative breeze, however.

The things you learn on the trail.

I’ve had a burning itch to get up into the real mountains for the past several weeks but other stuff kept getting in the way. Early Monday morning I woke up with no plausible excuses not to head up there. I asked Melissa if she was game for a road trip; she was, and packed us a picnic lunch and off we drove toward Highway 88.

I wasn’t absolutely sure I was going to hike, but we arrived at Carson Pass under perfect skies and friendly breezes that made up my mind for me. Before I knew it I was asking Melissa — Ms. Gridlock For Lungs — if she was up for a quick walk down to Winnemucca. The sign said 1.5 miles one way — how hard could that be? The last time I tried something like this, we discovered her redwood allergy right in the middle of the biggest redwoods in the Bay Area, but she was in a go-for-it mode, so off we went.

For once fortune smiled on my foolishness. I kept waiting to look back and see her gasping for breath, bathed in sweat and begging to turn back. Never happened. According to my GPS it’s more like 2.5 miles down to Winnemucca from the Carson Pass trail head — uphill the whole way; perhaps a thousand feet of climb in the whole out-and-back, but still a moderate hike by any stretch. I got the racing heartbeat I always get hiking at altitude; I’m not sure Melissa’s ever got going that fast.

Score one for the magic of mountain air.

The cool thing about Carson Pass around the Fourth of July is that the Pacific Crest Trail through-hikers are starting to pass through. We saw at least a half-dozen.

You can pretty much always tell the through-hikers: they just have an aura (and, of course, odor) of having been walking for a very long time. As I passed two on the trail, I yelled out “how long you guys been out?”

Since the middle of April, they said. Asking is the other way to tell. It’s perhaps better not to think about: Half of April, all of May, all of June, a week into July and they’re not even half-way to Canada.

This is Blue Eyes, left, and Socks. They both have Trail Journals, it turns out. His | Hers.

We also met a guy called “Two Weeks and Three Days.” That’s how long his wife figured he’d last on the Appalachian Trail, he told us. Guess he’s showing her now. Melissa gave a pair of her impossibly tasty oatmeal chocolate chip monster cookies to a hiker named Paul (no trail name). We also saw a couple trying to thumb a ride into Tahoe. We weren’t heading that way, so we missed that trail-angel opportunity.

OK, let’s see some of that High Sierra scenery:

I’m too lazy to look this up: anybody want to identify it for me?

Round Top in the distance. Lake Winnemucca is at its base.

A trail runner was sending her dog fetching a stick in Frog Lake, which is less than a mile from the trail head.

Abundant photogenic snags.

We stopped here at Lake Winnemucca — the breezes flowed in distinct patterns across the surface of the icy waters.

I tried to get a little arty here. Not sure it worked.

Melissa wanted photographic evidence that she had successfully hiked all this way.

Always fun to see llamas on the trail. They walk with incredible poise — like they were bred for incredibly narrow Andean footpaths where their ancestors had two choices: develop good balance or die trying.

More sun and snag action.

Hikers and dogs dash through a patch of remaining snow.

I cannot resist oddly bent trees.

Here we are back at the Carson Pass trail head sign board.

I’m hoping I can get back up to the Sierra at least a few more times this summer, but gas prices are a bit of a buzz-kill. We’ll see. (If people start buying stuff, I’ll start ponying up for sexier trips. Till then, though, it’s gonna be hikes around these parts).

Before I close, I want to send a shout-out to Stuart at Trailspotting, who gamely bagged Round Top last year and created a nice little hike write-up.

Related links:

• 24 Hours at Carson Pass: Snow camping with Steve of the WildeBeat.
• What’s in Those Pine Needles Anyway: Taking Melissa on an ill=fated redwoods hike.
• GPS plot and slideshow at Everytrail.

Here’s a Google map if you’re thinking of heading up that way.

View Carson Pass Trail Head in a larger map