Adventures in Onionism

Instead of writing this paper about Kenyan elections that's due in a couple weeks, I've been reading about adventures that I have to add to the list. 1- Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic . Skurka 's running it this year. 2- Barkley . I found this great Post article about the race from last year. Brian Robinson broke the course record this year. 3- Nolan's 14 . And to think I wussily only bagged one 14er on the whole CDT. The next time I do it, I'll have to include this in my route.

Score one for public transit.

The Fence(s) The only lame part of the entire weekend was a short drive to see the monument at the border. In the last year or so, extra fencing has been added. Instead of just a 15-foot high solid wall built of old containers or train car walls, there is now a meter-high 3-strand barb-wire plus chicken-wire fence 10 yards beyond the first, and it has little placards on it so that xenophobes that helped pay for the fence can brag about their xenophobia. "A US CITIZEN BOUGHT THIS POST THE US GOVERNMENT SHOULD HAVE" This brings up something important. This fence is on BLM land, right? I assume so based on the fact that the trail goes right through here, but I suppose I could be wrong. If it is public land, then am I right that the government is allowing private organizations to build fences with xenophobic shit written on it on public land? "KEEP YOUR OWN SIDE" I love it when stupid stuff has typos to confirm the ignorance. "MAY GOD CONTINUE TO PROTECT AMERI...

Me at the Border I spent the weekend at the ADZPCTKO with Nitro , Tatu Joe, Ducky (the Wise) , Tomato, BearCan't , Mattress, Love Barge, Nano, Sly, Disco , WeatherCarrot, Too Obtuse, Nacho, Tall Paul, Mags , and Wildflower (AKA Icognito Cheeto Bandito). I got a ride down with Firefly. I'm tempted to just end my post there, as it would seem like complete gibberish to many of you. But I won't. The ADZPCTKO is the Annual Day Zero Pacific Crest Trail Kickoff, held the last weekend in April (also known as NFL Draft weekend, where, miracle of miracles, the Redskins, despite Dan Snyder's best attempts to screw it up, actually managed to avoid throwing away multiple draft picks on Chad Johnson and instead traded for more picks. Hallelujah!) at Lake Morena campground, 20 miles north by trail from the Mexican border near Campo, CA. Conventional wisdom says that the weather window on the PCT is such that there's not much point to starting earlier thanks to snow in the S...

I'm pretty much over This American Life (I am a tad tired of it, a la this Onion article , but mostly it's just because I think that constantly listening to my iPod has decreased my attention span to the detriment of school work, and I got that ticket a while ago for wearing headphones while riding my bike, which is when I did most of my listening) but anyway, a couple weeks ago's aggravating show had a story that related to something I've seen on all my big hikes--the slash, pictured above. It's the cleared area along the border between the US and Canada. I hiked along it for several miles after finishing the AT (and, oops, accidentally crossed into Canada for a couple minutes until getting picked up by the Mounties), crossed the slash on the PCT, and turned around there on the CDT. Someday I'd like to investigate the possibility of a long hike along the slash. It's always seemed like an accidental freebie when it came to trails with public access--no ...

I just finished reading Alan Weisman's The World Without Us . He imagines what would happen to Earth if humans were to all the sudden disappear completely. The outdoorsy misanthrope in me has always loved stuff like this ( 28 Days Later , Children of Men , that line from Fight Club where Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) talks about drying venison in the empty lanes of an abandoned superhighway , and I Am Legend had it not sucked) so I was really looking forward to this book. I of course knew that it would be totally different than any of those movies because it's all about the environment, but still. I wasn't amazed, but it was worth reading. There were discussions of New York City subways filling with water and the future of the plains of Africa (complete with a long history of human evolution) that didn't really do it for me, but discussions of the Texas-sized pile of trash in the middle of the Pacific , how long all our plastic crap will last, how all our nuclear pla...

I ate a bunch of my friend's homemade energy bars when I went and visited him in Truckee over Spring Break, and they were delicious. I've tried to become a foodie (i.e. eat vegetables) in the past few months, so I basically haven't eaten any food in bar form since I finished the hike (where I consumed 90+% of my calories in bar or Little Debbie form). Anyway, I figured making my own bars would be a reasonable way to get the ease of bar-form food without eating processed stuff or paying a bunch for Odwalla or ProBars . So over the last couple weeks, I amassed the following: Stock: Sunflower Seed Nut Butter* Peanut Butter* Almond Nut Butter Sweetener: Brown Rice Syrup Blue Agave* Molasses Honey Stuff: dried mixed fruit almonds raisins raw pumpkin seeds crispy brown rice nutty rice date pieces rolled oats* brown flax seed* chocolate chips* craisins wheat germ *=organic I got most of the ingredients from the Berkeley Bowl, and a lot of it from the bulk aisle. I'm guess...

I spent the weekend doing a two-day Wilderness First Aid course taught by the Wilderness Medicine Institute of NOLS on Cal campus. I generally have a very strong aversion to paying for anything having to do with the outdoors, and I've gone to great lengths to avoid getting a guide to lead me on any backpacking trips (except for Kilimanjaro, where it's completely unavoidable and probably guarded by AK-47-wielding Tanzanian police, and even then we still hiked so fast our porter couldn't catch up, but I digress). I was actually worried that the course would be full of people that didn't know the first thing about first aid, but in fact, I was probably one of the least-informed people there, as a good portion of the class was using it to re-certify as a Wilderness First Responder. And as far as the material went, I did learn a few symptoms or methods of treatment that I didn't really know, but mostly it was good to learn a systematic approach (full of lots of acron...

I listened to Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief on tape, mostly while running the 50-miler last weekend. There are some pretty crazy stories about orchid hunters exploring wild jungles back in the day, so half-way through I was thinking " I want to be a crazy obsessed orchid nut," just like reading Michael Pollan's books made me wish I knew about wild mushrooms. It probably didn't help that Mt. Diablo was covered in beautiful California poppies . But the book got really tiresome by the end. If you read it, seriously, stop after the main court case is resolved. Nothing happens in the rest of the book. Or better yet, just go watch Adaptation instead.

OK, maybe not completely solved, but this website that I heard about on Marketplace seems like a decent idea. If you're still reading after checking out the story/site, my first reaction is that the boycotts or threats might not be that great an innovation, but the idea of raising funds for public goods (but not charging anyone's credit card until the necessary amount has been raised) is pretty interesting. And maybe after the site's been around for a while and has some data maybe there'll be a dissertation topic hiding in there somewhere.

I just got back from setting a PR in the Diablo 50 miler . I finished in about 13:32, beating my previous best of 14:49. The usual 50 miles with 13,340 feet of vertical gain, but today it decided to be 83 degrees, and I got really nauseous and tried to vomit, but I felt great for all but those vomity miles 37-42. One of my big goals for the year was to break 14:00, and I did it. Good thing too, because I realized that thanks to the CDT hike, I've literally spent over half of my waking hours in the past year training for this. Thanks to Marcus for altering his Saturday bike ride to run into me on the course once, and thanks to Zack for an excellent job of pacing for the last 12 miles.

My roommates and I went to the city to see the Olympic torch, and like everyone else, we got faked out . Oh well, at least we ate good Thai food on the way back. I'd tell you what I thought about Tibet, Taiwan, Darfur, the Olympics, Iraq, Cuba, and everything else, including how maybe one solution would be to go back in time and get Jimmy Carter and Zbignew Brzezinski to get China to recognize an independent Taiwan in exchange for the UN and the rest of the world recognizing China if only I didn't have such a big headache.

I saw Carrie Fisher's one woman autobiographical show Wishful Drinking this afternoon at the Berkeley Rep . In addition to the obvious fact that I loved her as Princess Leia, I have this vague memory that my mom thought she was pretty cool when I was a kid, and I viewed her as this recluse genius, like JD Salinger or Bobby Fischer (without the anti-semitism). Or sort of like Tina Fey before there was Tina Fey. So that's why I wanted to see it, and I wasn't disappointed. There were definitely times when her delivery came off as stale (the show's been going for a while), but when she ranted about not being able to get the "Help me Obe Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope," speech out of her head, she did the turn of her head and switching off the hologram recorder spot on. All her stories about her being the child of movie stars, being turned into a Pez dispenser and a shampoo bottle , being married to Paul Simon, having her second husband leave her for a m...

I just finished listening to Steve Martin's Born Standing Up . It was not funny. OK, it was absolutely hilarious when he told jokes from his old stand-up routine, but he didn't tell good jokes about his routine or life as a stand-up. Mostly it's him describing his childhood, how his father took a spanking too far once and only once told him he loved him, how his parents' deaths brought him and his sister closer together, how he was very lonely on the road, and how he had anxiety attacks, and thus mostly it's very not funny. Of course not everything has to be funny, but I think it's clear that Steve Martin's comparative advantage is in funniness and not in introspective narratives about how hard it is to grow up. It did make me really want to go watch The Jerk , though.

Next to none of you will find this interesting, because you need a good set of maps and detailed knowledge of the CDT to make sense of it, but I just put up a complete list of the alternates that I took and/or made up on my yo-yo of the CDT last year .