When I start a camping trip, the Van Halen song "Panama" [Video on YouTube] often pops into my head -- I wish I could represent Eddie Van Halen's reverby guitar opening in words, but I was humming it and singing the chorus -- Pa-neh-ma ... Pa-neh-ma-ha -- as this picture was taken. That's the Wind River Range coming into view beyond my friend Nick. For the next 10 days, it would dominate us. In fact, this photo represents the last few moments of peaceful hiking. Our packs were really, really heavy, and soon enough the hurt would begin. Then, we would get rained on pretty often, and (for my part) suffer too many black fly bites and a few altitude-related headaches. Still, totally, totally worth it.
I could go on and on here, but my pictures on Flickr really tell the story better than I can.
I'm a shameless sucker for gear, so here's some shout-outs:
Bridgedale socks. They were really wet, ...
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24 Aug 07 · filed under: ecology, flickr, outdoors · 
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Mary Appelhof's Worms Eat My Garbage is one of my all-time favorite gardening books. Not only does it contain the first principles of worm composting; not only is written in an engaging, warm and yet practical voice; it's one of those special books that says a lot about the person who displays it on his or her bookshelf, a freak flag representing all sorts of affiliations, opinions and predilections.
I was thinking about Mary after I read a strange tidbit about worm composting in today's Wall Street Journal Informed Reader blog. It linked to an article in Britain's Daily Telegraph called "Wormeries 'may add to greenhouse gases.'" Hmmm.
In fact, the greenhouse gases emitted by a large commercial worm composting plant may be comparable to the global warming potential of a landfill site of the same scale, according to the Open University. This is because worms used in composting emit nitrous oxide - a greenhouse gas 296 times more powerful, molecule for molecule, than carbon dioxide. Landfill sites produce methane which is 23 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
What is this Open ...
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09 Jul 07 · filed under: ecology · (1) ·
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I'm usually the person who recommends going anywhere but Yosemite in the Sierras because it's expensive and tends to be over-run with people even in the high country, whereas the Emigrant Wilderness, for instance, tends to be pretty sparsely visited, even on the busiest of weekends. But let's keep that on the shhhh. Anyway, I spent 3 warm, sunny days in Yosemite last week with my good friend and all-around good guy Andrew Goodman.
We had nice weather, went to popular places (North Dome, Yosemite Falls -- which has its own Wikipedia page), and yet saw very few other people. Maybe it's the time of year, or the fact that it was a low-snow year, or both? Or our route? We hiked down to North Dome on the Porcupine Creek Trail, and then got back to 120 via the Yosemite Creek trail (where, incidentally, we took some excellent swims). Whatever contributed to it, I've now seen the good side of Yosemite.
Yosemite Valley from North Dome, rendered via the magic of Autostitch. It assembled 25 or so photos from my Motorola SLVR into a ...
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21 Jun 07 · filed under: ecology, flickr, outdoors · (0) ·
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Last night, I saw architect Teddy Cruz deliver a fast-paced, idea-rich presentation at the San Francisco Art Institute. In a little over an hour, he tore through a slide show covering his recent work on the social, cultural, political, and economic forces at work in communities along the US-Mexico border. The slide show itself was pretty impressive -- a blend of research photography, simple PowerPoint animation, and photo collages (like the ones shown in this post, courtesy of UCSD, where Cruz teaches) that looked somewhat like maps but also somewhat like actual photos of urban density.
I'd first heard of Cruz in the NYT Magazine feature from last spring, Shantytowns as a New Suburban Ideal. It details "Living Rooms at the Border," his proposed project to turn a lot in the border community of San Ysidro into a multi-use dwelling/community center/market. He discusses it in more detail in "Urban acupuncture", an article he wrote for Residential Architect Online:
Housing and density need to be seen not as an amount of units but as dwelling in ...
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17 Apr 07 · filed under: architecture, ecology, urban · (0) ·
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During my hike on the PCT in 2001, my two favorite pastimes were swimming and eating. When I was walking -- which was most of the time -- cool swimming holes and sizzling cheeseburgers filled my daydreams. When my hiking partner, Nick, and I talked, it was more often than not about swimming and eating cheeseburgers: How far to the next river, creek or lake? How long would it take to hitch out to get a cheeseburger at the next road crossing?
As the two attached lists indicate, we found lots of chances to follow these particularly blissful pastimes. Cheeseburger-wise, the best were found in the Cheeseburger Belt, which begins as the Sierras give way to the Cascades in northern California, and ends a little north of Ashland, Oregon. The best of the best in the belt were found at Buck's Lake Lodge near Quincy, the Pines Frosty in Chester (which also has kick-ass shakes), and Lake of the ...
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13 Aug 06 · filed under: ecology, flickr, outdoors · (0) ·
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Five years ago today, I was hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail. I spent the summer of 2001 hiking through California, Oregon, and Washington; on the 12th of August, I was chilling out at Crater Lake, Oregon.
Crater Lake had been a really major destination for me, not because of its legendary, otherworldly beauty or because I'd never seen it or because I was looking forward to bumming beers off retirees in RVs, but BECAUSE I was having a new pair of shoes delivered to the PO there. My feet, at that point, were thrashed. The trail can be unkind to feet in a variety of ways -- extreme heat in the south, frequent river crossings and snow in the Sierras -- and it doesn't help when you wear one pair of Asics Gel Trabuco III's for the last two-thirds of the state of California.
I take a look at my PCT journal a few times every summer; the entry scanned above represents some of the happier times on the trail. A little ...
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13 Aug 06 · filed under: ecology, flickr, outdoors · (0) ·
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Like most things in New York, the Park Slope Food Coop is exclusive, filled with beautiful people, and a source of high drama in the lives of everyone involved with it. Most everyone I know in Brooklyn is a member, and all of them are on some sort of weird coop probation because they're behind on their shifts. Skipping shifts is really naughty, and the lengths to which some members will go to get out of them has become the stuff of folklore. On the other hand, others seem almost pathologically conscientious -- in a recent issue of the newsletter was a story of a member who had written into the coop to explain his absence. You see, he was in prison for eco-terrorism. So he may not, you know, be able to cover that Tuesday afternoon produce sorting shift.
08 Jun 06 · filed under: ecology, new york · (0) ·
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The roots of (modern) urban gardening can be traced to the Liz Christy Garden on New York's Lower East Side. (Some good 70's photos of urban hippies getting their hands dirty). When I visited, the cherry blossoms were going off.
25 Apr 06 · filed under: ecology, new york, urban · (0) ·
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