Category: Hiking and Backpacking
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What’s Your Hiking Rating?
Rate Yourself as a Hiker Know your capabilities before you sign up to go hiking. Leaders are encouraged to screen prospective hikers to make sure that each participant can finish the hike. Screening is important, because someone who can’t finish a hike puts himself in danger and ruins the enjoyment for all. In the screening…
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Miner’s Needle, Western Superstitions, New Year’s Day
Thirsty hiker takes a drink at the junction of the Dutchman's and Coffee Flat Trails. Note the 'eye' of the needle. Left-click to enlarge.
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Cathedral Rock, Western Superstitions, New Year’s Day
My hiking partner James L. begins the descent into Coffee Flat. The magnificent formation in the distance is variously referred to as Castle Rock (Tom Kollenborn) and Cathedral Rock (Jack Carlson). Left-click to enlarge. Related articles Another Hiker Lost in the Superstitions The Killer Mountains Strike Again: Jesse Capen's Remains Found
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What It Takes to Appreciate Nature
Those who must wrest a living from nature by hard toil are not likely to see her beauty, let alone appreciate it. But her charms are also lost on the sedentary city dwellers for whom nature is little more than backdrop and stage setting for what they take to be the really real, the social…
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My Jeep Guru
My Jeep from the Arizona Trail:
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Jeep Wrangler: Trailhead Access in Style
It was going to be either a Harley-Davidson or a Jeep Wrangler. I took the three-day motorcycle course, passed it, and got my license. But then good sense kicked in and I sprang for a 2013 Wrangler Unlimited Sport S. I'm a hiker, not a biker. And I value my long-term physical integrity. 'Unlimited' translates to…
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The Killer Mountains Strike Again: Jesse Capen’s Remains Found
The Superstitions are not called the Killer Mountains for nothing. Many a man has been lured to his death in this rugged wilderness by lust for gold. A few days ago, what appear to be the remains of Jesse Capen were finally found after nearly three years of searching. Another obsessive Dutchman Hunter in quest…
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Another Hiker Lost in the Superstitions
Do as I say, not as I do. Stay out of the rattlesnake infested inferno known as the Superstition Wilderness in summer! I often hike alone in the Killer Mountains in the summer. But I observe the following precautions: I hydrate throughly before leaving the house and carry at least a gallon of water and enough…
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The Range of Light
John Muir (The Mountains of California, 1894, Ch. 1) on California's Sierra Nevada mountain range: . . . the Sierra should be called not the Nevada, or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years spent in the heart of it, rejoicing and wondering, bathing in its glorious floods of light, seeing…
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First Water to Canyon Lake
Here are some shots from last Sunday's Superstition Wilderness 7.6 mile point-to-point hike from First Water trailhead to Canyon Lake trailhead. A delightful hike that starts out easy as one meanders out on the soft and flat Second Water trail though Garden Valley. But then it gets rocky. By the time you come to the…
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All’s Well That Ends Well
Yesterday's hike was almost over. The light was failing as we gingerly negotiated the last steps of the treacherous downgrade of Heart Attack Hill. Suddenly my hiking partner let out a yell and jumped back at the unmistakable sound of a diamond back rattlesnake (crotalus atrox). It was a perfect hike: physically demanding in excellent company…
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Scenes from the Superstitions
James L., fanatical hiker, who I have been introducing to the Superstition Wilderness. A native Arizonan, he has no problem with hiking in the summer in this rattlesnake infested inferno. I hope not to have to make use of his nurse practitioner skills. The knife hanging from his belt suggests he might, in a pinch,…
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Moonsets and Microclimates
One advantage the early riser has over his opposite number is that he is better placed to enjoy certain celestial and atmospheric phenomena. One morning the moonset over the hills behind my house was unusually entrancing. The moon was at its fullest and the sky at it clearest. The Morning Star, that overworked example of…
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Bluff Spring Loop, Superstition Wilderness, 6 May 2011
This is a 9.3 mile hike out of the Peralta Trailhead, Superstition Wilderness, Arizona. I have done it countless times in both the clockwise and counterclockwise directions. The route sports about 1260 feet of elevation gain according to David Mazel (Arizona Trails, Wilderness Press 1991, p. 47) We commenced hiking at 6 AM on the dot…
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The Lure of the Trail
It astonishes me that there are able-bodied people who cannot appreciate the joy of movement in nature. I don't expect people to share my pleasure in solo wilderness adventures. Most people are incorrigibly social: it's as if they feel their ontological status diminished when on their own. With me it is the other way around.…