RIP Summer?
Have summers lost their carefree vibe? Plus, a waterfall re-opens, a big comeback for beavers, the must-have app for fire season, the sound of hiking, migrating mangroves, and more!
The Big Story
Something to talk about
An Elegy for Vancouver Summer
I’ve gone a long time without really loving summer as a season. Growing up in New England, I wasn’t yet into going outside that much. So although a break from school was nice, the season’s memories are mostly dealing with sticky east coast humidity and huddling in the one room in my family’s house that had a window air conditioning unit (I did enjoy the thunderstorms, though).
In Southern California, I loved hiking in June Gloom but Proper Summer just meant hot hot heat and relentless sun. Again, not an issue, provided you woke up early enough, but as the years went by (and the temperatures kept rising), the novelty of beach weather in October wore off, replaced by worry about more places I loved being burned and breathing in wildfire smoke well into the fall.
Now that I live in the Northwest and trudging my way through it’s gray, drizzly rainy season, a magic summer was always pitched as part of the promise of living here. And you know what? Summer here is magic, but with the big wildfires and heat domes, it’s not without its sense of occasional dread.
Journalist Paloma Pacheco writes about what it’s like to sit in this discomfort from her hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia over at ZÓCALO. And you’ll also learn a new vocabulary word to try out this summer, too.
Modern Hiking
Good stuff from the Modern Hiker site
We’ve got some new trails added to the site recently, including the Catalina Verdugo Trail, which is neither on Catalina Island nor technically in the Verdugo Mountains (“talk amongst yourselves…”). But it IS a great, quick hike with some incredible views that’s good pretty much all year round, and that’s good enough for our trail guide Andrew Shults! Hey, they don’t all need to be backcountry leg busters, you know (although we do have a ton of those, too)
Your Parks
Your Places
Back to Butte Creek Falls
This week, the Butte Creek Falls recreation area re-opened to hikers about four years after the 400,000-acre Santiam Fire destroyed the forests and trails nearby. The Oregon Department of Forestry, which manages the area’s hiking trails, small campground, and shooting range, have called the area “one of the true gems” of the Santiam State Forest.
I haven’t been there yet, but I’m excited to check it out. OregonHikers has a nice write-up of this pretty short side trail … but if you were looking to make more of a day out of this, it’s pretty close to Silver Falls State Park, which is one of my favorite spots in the Northwest. More on the re-opening over at The Oregonian.
Mist Trail Scheduling
If you are one of the many (MANY) hikers who hope to hike the Mist Trail in Yosemite National Park (say … en route to Half Dome?), you may need to double-check your timing. Back in April, a rockslide damaged about a 1000-foot long segment of the John Muir Trail. That section of the trail is opened, but now from July 1st through October 31st, repair work will be done on the Mist Trail above Vernal Falls. The work will require a closure of the Mist Trail / John Muir Trail intersection just above the Vernal Falls footbridge to the top of the waterfall on Mondays-Thursdays from 7AM to 3:30PM. The trail will be fully open on weekends and in the evenings, pending future safety issues.
Aaaaaand don’t forget the park does require a peak-time drive in reservation every day from July 1st through August 16th. You’ll want to bookmark the Yosemite NPS page and check it often before you head out!
The Sound of Hiking
For a few years, I had a sound engineer as a neighbor in my bungalow courtyard in L.A.’s Little Armenia / Thai Town. He was a pretty adventurous backpacker and would lug his recording equipment way out into the backcountry to record ambient sounds to use for film and television projects and his own creative stuff, too.
Recently, I was clued in on a Portland, Oregon field recordist who’s doing something similar right here on Substack. Chad Crouch’s Soundwalk finds the author recording ambient nature sounds from city parks and mountain trails, and even mountain lodges, layering on his own instrumentation to build out the sounds into full-fledged compositions.
If you are looking for some very zen, super chill audio adventures (and maybe you’re stuck inside doing work or something lame?), this is such a great spot to head to. Subscribe below!
Tech Talk
Gadgets, Technology, and Hype
Your App for Fire Season
Yeah, everything’s on fire again. It’s summer. It’s kind of a bummer, but it’s the world we live in, and at the very least, you should try to be as on-top of fire news in your region or where you’re planning on being outdoors. But that’s not always especially easy, as different agencies can sometimes have their own websites and systems to track, and I’m assuming you have given up on getting timely news through your social media algorithms like I have, right?
I just heard about the app Watch Duty, which is available on iOS, Android, and via Web Browser. In addition to offering up tons of information on active wildfires across the Western United States, the app can also be used to notify you and provide status updates that threaten life or property based on your location or on locations you set within the app.
Watch Duty is operated by actual humans—“active and retired wildland firefighters, dispatchers, first responders, and reporters” according to the website—and it’s a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so the service is completely free.
Via The Tech Friend newsletter.
Wildlife Crossing
Wildlife and the Outdoors
Beavers are Back!
After ten years of planning and preparation, the southern Sierra Nevada mountains in central California are getting some of their beavers back. The Tule River Tribe had proposed returning the dam-building rodents to the South Fork of the Tule River for the first time in over a hundred years.
Beavers were once plentiful in California, but were nearly wiped out when Europeans and Americans flooded the region looking for fur and gold. The Tule River Tribe consulted their own histories of the region and worked with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, reintroducing a family of seven beavers earlier this month.
Biologists expect the beavers to eventually do what beavers do—build dams and engineer the environment, creating wetlands and meadows, forming reservoirs for water that can help during drought conditions, boosting biodiversity, and generally being awesome. Additional beavers will be released slowly over the coming years to re-establish the population, and this project joins efforts to re-establish beaver populations in other parts of the range, too.
Leafing Out
Plants!
March of the Mangroves
Mangrove trees are pretty awesome—growing in brackish water and along the coasts, these rugged trees can grow into massive forests in the world’s tropical climates, often tolerating conditions that would kill other plants and providing robust habitat for critters on land, sea, and air.
Scientific American has a very interesting in-depth article about how mangrove forests are now being found well outside their traditional range, as far north as the Florida-Georgia line. As with any species taking hold in a new area, it’s a mixed bag. On the one hand, mangroves are great at buffering land against erosion, their forests are some of the most biodiverse places on the planet, they’re great at filtering pollutants from water, and they sequester more carbon than any other plant on earth. On the other hand, they’re replacing salt marshes, which are also extremely biodiverse and important to many migratory birds, and they’re much less resistant to cold snaps than marshes, meaning one cold winter might kill off an entire established forest and be super bad for erosion.
The article (via Apple News) is a long but interesting read.
One More Thing
Oh yeah, before I go …
If you’ve been following the Modern Hiker project for a while, you’ve probably noticed quite a bit of a slow down on social media posting. I basically gave up on Facebook a year and a half ago (and found the time to start this newsletter instead!). I still pop on Instagram every now and again, but even that is feeling like a waste of time these days—no matter what I do, posts are usually seen by less than 5% of my 40.4k followers unless I throw money at Mark Zuckerberg, which I refuse to do.
Anyway, this idea gets thrown around a lot, and seemingly much more frequently these days, but I really enjoyed this Substack post from artist Marloes De Vries on why she’s nuking the Instagram account that brought her so much work many years ago. There are a lot of insights into the current vibe of Online that really ring true to me. Maybe to you, too?
What surprises me most is how little space there is on social media to be oneself. The internet used to be my haven, a place where I felt seen. In the ‘real’ world, I often felt like an outsider, but online, I found kindred spirits. Perhaps that’s why I now feel the need to distance myself from social media—I no longer feel welcome there.
Trail sounds nice, though.
Until next time,
