Outdoor Discoveries

More photos of North America

The North America section of the photo gallery now looks a little more substantial after adding an album for photos from last year’s trip to the San Francisco Bay Area. There already was one for those from 2019’s trip to British Columbia, and that looked a bit lonely on its own. It is not so easy to claim an interest in exploring another continent with only one substantive visit having happened.

While my appetite for North American explorations has been sated somewhat by those two trips, I cannot rule out the possibility of there being another this year. Seattle and Washington State both look tempting. A visit to Olympic National Park could be a possibility. However, as I know from my designs on Denver and Boulder in Colorado for the summer of 2020, anything could happen that stymies such schemes. Nothing has been planned yet, since I have a few things on my plate at the moment.

It helps to have good maps…

While writing trip reports for Tenerife, I was reminded of the travails that I encountered with using the maps that I had in my possession. At the time, I found myself cross-referencing data between different providers for working out where I was going. That was not ideal, but I managed to make it work.

Something similar happened in Canada. When the maps from Natural Resources Canada did not have all the detail that I expected, I resorted to using the base map provided by ViewRanger because it showed trails on there. For my various traipsings, that did suffice, even if there are possible risks like those highlighted in an article on the TGO website.

In the UK or Ireland, it may be that the tracks shown cannot be used by the public, so you need to check how things look on the ground. Then, there are possible errors because many trails are crowdsourced. That is another reason for checking on what surrounds you and applies when using user routes found on various apps and websites. The likes of AllTrails and Outdooractive come to mind here.

In my case, I ran into no problems in Canada because I was following low-level trails and established tracks much of the time. For off-trail use, mapping from National Resources Canada would have proved as necessary as the use of a compass and awareness of wildlife. Hiking in North America takes one into wilder places after all. Finding paper maps takes a bit more work, as I found, but the added effort pays dividends as long as you watch coverage of where you are planning to go.

In a more recent excursion to California, the Gaia GPS app became invaluable as long as I had downloaded the map data before setting off on hiking trips. Topo Maps+ from Glacier Peak Studios may be another option for users of Apple devices, but I stuck with what I had courtesy of a subscription to Outside+. In any case, Gaia GPS did whatever I needed, and I hardly needed to check any paper maps that I had.

That was just as well, since map scales vary widely for U.S. hiking areas anyway. USGS quads may be standardised, but the same cannot be said for other publishers, with National Geographic being a prominent example. Still, any device has a limited battery lifetime so being proficient with a map and compass remains a necessity, especially in remote areas where mobile signal may be too limited.

Thinly spread

There is a saying or proverb in the Irish language that becomes the following when translated into English: the sandpiper cannot attend to two beaches. This and other pieces of wisdom are to be found in The Little Book of Celtic Mindfulness. In fact, the title likely is a misnomer, at least to me, for wisdom fits the contents better than mindfulness, though the greater fashionability of the latter possibly won out in this case.

As someone who has divided his life between different places for so long, the phrase with which I open this piece resonates more easily with me. With family remaining in Ireland and work taking me to the U.K., there always has been a sense of there being different shores. Add explorations across two different continents to the mix, and you very easily can end up without a sense of permanent abode.

Maybe that is one meaning of the Christian wisdom about gaining the world only to lose one’s soul, even if the idea of pilgrimage is baked into that tradition as well. Sometimes, too much application of logic and reason to the ways of life can show you that nothing retains self-consistency, no matter how hard you try.

There is something ongoing in my life at the moment that reinforces the opening point. It causes me to remain focussed on that, so I cannot go further afield, Nevertheless, there remain opportunities for wandering that I can take, and their descriptions may follow at another time. Whenever the weather offers, my body goes wandering too.

Thinking back to last year, my wandering took me to Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Channel Islands, France and California. This is quite unlike the pandemic years that grounded me in my local area, allowing for many deeper explorations. That is being rested these days when I can see other parts. North America remains tempting, as does seeing more of Scotland. Other places may feature yet because life’s plans cannot be set in the stone. The explorations continue.

A return to North America

Last month, I made a return to North America after an absence of nearly four years. There might have been a trip to Colorado in 2020 only for the pandemic but I chose the San Francisco Bay Area as a follow-up to my time in British Columbia.

This time around, it was hiking around the Bay Area that provided the main lure. San Francisco itself is often beset by fog during the summer because of climatic conditions, but there are clear spells too. The meeting of cooler oceanic air with hotter continental air is the cause of this, and that cooler air also makes the city much cooler than other surrounding areas too.

For photography, that means that you need to take your chances when you get them. My first evening there was a cloudy affair as was the next day, apart from a break in the cloud cover during the morning time. The return of cloud cover did little to help photographic efforts around Golden Gate Park, Land’s End, Bake Beach, Marshall’s Beach, Golden Gate and Crissy Field. There was a lot of fog obscuring the Golden Gate Bridge and Marin Headlands too. A partial reprise a few days later benefitted from an afternoon break in cloud cover to provide some impressive lighting at times.

Before that though, I went to Angel Island State Park where some unusual weather was seen. There was an odd juxtaposition of fog and low cloud along with hot strong sunshine. The latter won out much of the time and I got to see many little lizards scurrying about the place on a hike that took in Mount Livermore as I went around the island. On my return to the mainland, I was drawn back to Crissy Field and the Golden Gate Bridge by way of the Embarcadero and Fisherman’s Wharfe. There were rewards for this reprisal and I tried out a bus on the way back to the city too.

That reconnaissance came in handy for a trip to Muir Woods National Monument since the journey to Sausalito used the services of the same bus company. Once there, a pre-booked shuttle conveyed me to the National Monument where I spent most of the day. The shade of the tree cover provided some respite from the intense warm sunshine. On the way back from Sausalito, I got a good sighting of the Golden Gate Bridge that encouraged me to walk over and back across it to get some pleasing photos. A mistake with a bus made the return to my lodgings a lot longer, but no harm was done. That misstep was to have its uses for someone else during the following weekend.

Point Reyes National Seashore was my target for the next day, though it might have been better to head to Stinson Beach instead since the weekend bus timings were better for that location. Nevertheless, I enjoyed a shaded hike around Mount Wittenberg and returned to San Francisco at the time that I had planned. Since this was my first time there, I did not overstay to avoid problems with transportation.

Two days later, it was the turn of Stinson Beach and Mount Tamalpais State Park. If this had been a weekend venture, there might have been a circular hike taking in more of the Matt Davis Trail. However, I was sated with the ascent that took me along part of the Dipsea Trail and the Steep Ravine Trail, though the segment of the Matt Davis Trail that I briefly sampled more than intrigued me so it pained me to turn back. That was to catch the last bus of the day to Sausalito, which met with the ferry to San Francisco despite a need to attend to a poorly man at the side of the road on the way. That ferry boat’s close passage by Alcatraz was my closest approach to the iconic location of my trip, and I feel no need to have got any nearer.

Souvenir hunting had its effect on my choices too. For one thing, it drew back to Point Reyes National Seashore for another hike. This time, I headed towards the coast on the Bear Valley Trail before making a loop at the end using the Glen Trail and the Coastal Trail. That gained me expansive views up and down the coast before returning to the Bear Valley Trail near Arch Rock. There was a lot of tree-shaded hiking too, which was just as well given the heat of the day. Getting back to the visitor centre early meant that I could go back to San Rafael on an earlier bus. From there, I went around by El Cerrito to gain some inspiration for a visit to the East Bay Parks.

Before that, I headed to Sausalito for another souvenir and then to San Francisco City Hall once the sky had cleared. From there, it was back to El Cerrito where I made my way to Wildcat Canyon Regional Park. Though there were possibilities for gaining more height, I eschewed these because my legs felt less strong after all my exploits. My passage took me through Tilden Nature Park and then to Tilden Regional Park. After that, I descended to North Berkley, from where I went to Daly City to see if I could reach Mount San Bruno State Park. Fog halted that exploit so I returned to my lodgings, not displeased at being halted. Much had been gained and I flew home the next day without any regrets.

Americana

In a previous post, I mentioned Ken Burns’ magisterial The National Parks: America’s Best Idea and even wrote a few words about this documentary film series. Not living in the U.S.A., I found this quite accidentally when reading an article on either the Outdoor website network (probably the Backpacker part but I am not sure now). Both are part of the same media group and I became a subscriber to Backpacker magazine in 2020. In Canada, there is Explore and they perform much the same function for that part of the world.

Before this, I was inclined to do long trawls through guidebooks for acclimatisation and awareness. This can work but it is not just time-consuming but also can be trapped within one’s own predispositions. After all, America’s National Parks are known by many around the world so it can be easy to gravitate towards them but there are other kinds of public lands that are amenable to exploration, some of which abut conurbations so they can be easier to reach. Here, I am thinking of what lies on the doorsteps of San Diego in California, Portland in Oregon or Phoenix in Arizona. Two of these came to my notice in a serendipitous manner, the first from a tragic story on the Backpacker website and the last from a Wanderlust webinar.

There also is the usefulness of a more gradual approach taken with an open mind. A concerted effort can and does help but the slower accumulation of insights and possibilities is how I got going in hillwalking in the first place. It happened so naturally that I hardly noticed what was happening and this also brought with it a growing cultural awareness. The same approach might help to restart nascent explorations of North America yet.

All this highlights background realities regarding the scale of North American wilderness as well as equipment choices offered by brands that are not so pervasive on this side of the Atlantic like Canada’s Durston. There are times when you need to watch for product placement though and Backpacker’s online webinar series from 2020 was a case in point, especially given they erred on the side of overdoing just that at the expense of conveying an experience of the wild places that were featured.

Still, knowing the cultural side of things remains ever useful and that returns me to the feature film series mentioned at the start of this piece. The history of the American National Park system was not that well known to me, even if I was well aware of the influence of John Muir from my reading of his writings during the winter of 2017/8. What happened after him and the issues surrounding the various contradictions of a motto like “For the Benefit and Enjoyment of the People” became plainer to me as I watched the film series.

The tension of high visitor numbers is very clear to us now and it always has been a problem as has allowing people to visit using their cars. That there has been road-building in otherwise pristine areas is part of this, even if that was curtailed in Denali National Park in Alaska by a persistent campaign by one of the park naturalists. The conflict between conservation and having visitor services like hotels and other amenities pervades today and that is likely to continue. Even so, there has been progress too with a different attitude to wildlife meaning that we now need to keep away from wild creatures rather than mingling among them as once was the case.

There is much to learn about another continent half a world away and doing this one morsel at a time makes things stick better. The more gradual approach also allows for added serendipity so you get to find out about places that do not come to light from a concerted effort.