Hot Hiking Summer ... or Maybe Forever?
Plus, Swimming Cougars of Oregon, an Accidental National Park Landmark, Fake Gear Reviews, Eclipse Trips, and lots more
howdy
Is it, uh … is it hot enough for you yet?
Over the past year or so, I feel like I’ve been seeing this meme a lot more frequently:
And looking at the headlines for the newsletter this week, I kept coming across stories like
“Panic descends on parts of Europe as NASA scientist issues stark warning,” “39-day heat wave could last into August after smashing 2300+ records,” “Phoenix breaks heat record with 19th day of temperatures at 110F or higher,” “The heat index reached 152 degrees in the Middle East—nearly at the limit for human survival,” and more. Even the New York Times now has a daily updated section on their front page about dangerous heat forecasts in the United States.
We could get into the whole climate change aspect of this, but I won’t. Because I’m sure you know it all already and frankly, it super bums me out. But lately I have been thinking about how now that we’re seeing many more acute effects of the changing climate and rising temperatures, it’s having more of an impact on outdoor plans.
In California, I got pretty used to dealing with wildfires closing down hiking areas and keeping me indoors when the air quality was bad. In a lot of places, you can still hike when it’s hot out as long as you pick the right trail and find the right time, but I wonder if that advice is still going to be applicable if we’re seeing extended temperatures above 110 degrees, you know? If you’ve booked a backpacking trip months in advance and your flight gets cancelled because the runway is too hot, how do you roll with that? What if your school or work schedule only gives you a tiny amount of time to travel in the first place?
One solution may be to cut back on the big-effort road trips and stick to more local stuff—and although I’m sure to some that may sound like a bad thing but there are definitely upsides. You’ll have a lot more flexibility in terms of options, staying local saves money (and personal carbon emissions if you’re tracking stuff like that), and it gives you a chance to forge an even closer connection with what’s special about your local landscape.
Now we just have to all make sure we don’t head to the same beach, right?
Related:
Death Valley hits 120 degrees Fahrenheit … at midnight.
Modern Hiking
Good stuff from the Modern Hiker site
Our trail guide Andrew Shults added two new Southern California routes to the site this week—a route to the iconic (if perhaps over-loved Vanalden Cave) and a fun loop in Challenger Park in the Simi Hills. Both are terrific hikes that won’t take too much out of you, especially if it’s hot out.
It may also be worth re-sharing my tips for hot weather hiking in general, which are good no matter where you’re hiking. If you’re in Southern California, you may also want to check out some beautiful day-hikes just off the PCH and our favorite hot weather hikes in the region. We also have some hot weather hike picks for the Phoenix area, but honestly you folks might just want to stay inside with air conditioning right now.
Thanks for the Coffee
I’ve started rolling out a new way to support the newsletter without pledging to a continuing subscription—by buying me some coffee!
HUGE thanks to Peter, Jed, Anonymous, and Erica for pledging to keep me caffeinated this week!
Also extra special enormous thank you to the two new annual subscribers who signed up this week! I even got an incredibly lovely note from one of them that seriously made my day this morning.
Don’t forget, if you’re a paid subscriber, you get:
Access to the ENTIRE archive of Newsletter and Bonus Posts
20% discount on my signed books
10% discount on Modern Hiker shirts
A subscriber-only Substack chat where you can directly suggest stories and new stuff you’d like to see
Your Parks
Your Places
Play Kick the Cairns
Cairns (those little piles of rocks you sometime see on trails) can be a sticky topic for hikers. On some routes, they DO have a function—they can be used to mark good river crossings or trail routes on terrain like slickrock where there might not be any other way to see a trail. But people can also build cairns as little contemplative outdoor art projects, and while the impact of one cairn isn’t huge (unless it, say, confuses a hiker into taking the wrong route), usually when you see one cairn, you see a lot more nearby. En masse, they can increase erosion and in riparian areas especially, can also destroy habitat.
Rangers in Yosemite National Park took to social media this week to let visitors know it was OK to knock cairns down if you see them on the trail. Speaking from personal history, it’s a very satisfying experience. If you’re not sure if a cairn is for wayfinding or not, just leave it alone, though. I’d say if you see a WHOLE BUNCH of them in one spot, you can go pretend to be Godzilla for a bit.
Via SFGATE
Make Eclipse Plans Now
In April of 2024, the United States will experience a total solar eclipse that will pass in a diagonal line from roughly Texas through Illinois and Ohio to northern Maine. But the Western U.S. will get an “annular eclipse” on October 14, 2023, and that’s worth planning for, too!
An annular eclipse will not plunge the sky into total darkness, but we will get a super cool “ring of fire” effect (yo, don’t stare at this without specialized eye protection, ok?). As an added bonus, the annular eclipse will pass over several national parks in the Western U.S., so if you were looking to book an extra special fall campout, you might want to get going on that sooner rather than later.
The national parks that will experience the eclipse are:
Mesa Verde (Colorado)
Bryce Canyon (Utah)
Capitol Reef (Utah)
Canyonlands (Utah)
Great Basin (Nevada)
Crater Lake (Oregon)
Get some more tips on where to stay and some nearby festivals over at AFAR. And see a full map of both the 2023 and 2024 eclipses over at NASA.
Tech Talk
Gadgets, Technology, and Hype
Fines for Fake Reviews
Even when I was buying a lot of gear, I wouldn’t really consider myself a gear-head. These days, I’d rather just save up for a pricier but more durable / repairable piece of clothing or gear than cycle through the new hot whatevers that come out every month. If I do need to find gear, I try to go to a person or site that I trust (like GearJunkie or Wirecutter). Part of that is because—have you ever tried to sort through product reviews lately? It’s a mess! Thousands of unverified opinions, with no way to tell what’s real and what’s a bot.
Consumer advocacy groups estimate that as many as 40% of online reviews are not genuine (!), and recently the Federal Trade Commission proposed a new set of rules that could start forcing big sites like Amazon, Yelp, and Google to crack down on these fake comments—which could include fines of up to $50,000 for each fake review … for each time a visitor sees it. For the most part, the websites seem willing to work on this, as they don’t like fake reviews either. The proposal enters a two-month period of public comment and likely will be reworked quite a bit, but it’s nice to see a step in the right direction here.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to answer six spam phone calls in a row.
via Washington Post.
Related:
Earlier this year, GearJunkie used AI software to analyze reviews of more than 200 outdoor products and found almost half of the products had fake reviews.
Wildlife Crossing
Wildlife and the Outdoors
These Cats Don’t Mind Water
One of Oregon’s most well-known and visited landmarks had an extra special visitor this week. Haystack Rock, the iconic sea stack formation in Cannon Beach that’s part of the Oregon Island National Wildlife Refuge (as well as featured in numerous movies like The Goonies) was temporary home to a mountain lion.
Oregon is home to an estimated 6,000 cougars but sightings are uncommon. A sighting on the 235-foot sometimes-island is extremely rare. Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife officials think the cat walked to the island during low tide or swam, possibly hunting some of the abundant seabirds that nest there in the summer. The popular beach was closed to visitors while the cougar was on Haystack Rock, but re-opened after authorities spotted tracks leading back to the forested shore and a wildlife cam snapped further evidence.
via Oregon Public Broadcasting
Leafing Out
Plants!
The Tree of Life is Falling
I’ve always found it interesting to see how grassroots community efforts can drive an unusual location or destination to become a landmark—and what happens to those places after the word gets out. While I lived in Los Angeles, the ‘Chandelier Tree’ in Silver Lake delighted people for years … until a neighbor got upset with crowds and filed complaints that shut it down. Griffith Park had (and still has) the so-called Wisdom Tree on Cahuenga Peak, which has had its share of erosion issues and overcrowding from the social media crowd, too.
I didn’t know about Olympic National Park’s Tree of Life until reading this beautiful piece in Seattle Met—it’s a regular old Sitka spruce that was accidentally eroded from underneath due to a drainage diversion from a nearby building. And now it’s created this tunnel of exposed roots that has become one of the park’s most visited and very unofficial landmarks.
And yeah, after reading the piece, now I really want to head up to see it.
One More Thing
Oh yeah, before I go …
Last week I mentioned the closing of San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing, and I had a few readers write in to let me know that its iconic Anchor Steam beer was already sold out from multiple locations. Good news may be (sorry) brewing—a group of beer-loving investors is working on funding a purchase to keep the beer pouring. Details are scant but right now they seem like they want to restore the original branding. A group of employees are also interested in buying the company as a co-op (yay!). Personally, I hope they can get the Christmas Ales back on shelves, too!
Until next time, Happy Trails.
Thanks for all you do, Casey. I was raised by hippies in a hiking family but am now on the mom grind, holding down a full time job, etc. Reading your blog reminds me of how important it is to get outside. I also appreciate your environmentalism and clear point of view. Thanks for encouraging us to hike locally and somehow endure climate change while trying to effect change. Your blog and photos lift my spirits and keep the bee in my bonnet alive to go on a hike. Love and appreciation to you!
Major bummer right now is a good portion of the Angeles Crest Highway is closed due to major repairs. It's closed from Red Box to Vincent Gap, closing off most of the upper elevation hiking in Los Angeles. I told my friends this will be an Icehouse summer lol