Outdoor Travel Geek

  • the confluence

    They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder. I guess that’s true for places as well as for people. It’s been a little over a year since I’ve last been mountain biking at the Auburn Confluence, or Auburn Connie as I sometimes call it. I had forgotten how much I loved biking there. It’s…

  • pickle juice

    A couple of years back, when I first started to get into mountain biking, and before I really had any friends who mountain biked, I joined a group called Bayside Adventure Sports. Despite being the youngest person in the group by like a dozen years, I was the slowest person in the group. After a couple…

  • thanksgiving homecoming

    The month of November has always been a gluttonous month for me. First there’s the leftover Halloween candy to deal with. Then there’s the fact that my birthday and my brother’s birthday both are in November. And what is a birthday but an excuse to eat, drink and be merry multiple times? Then of course…

  • fountain of youth?

    Most people who read my crappy blog with any sort of regularity probably know that I’m not all that great at planning. Sometimes the lack of planning leads to some interesting stories. This weekend, for example, was pretty interesting. For a brief moment on Saturday I stood naked in the Ventana Wilderness, struggling to get…

  • the real season finale

    Originally I was going to title this post “season finale.” But when I typed the title into wordpress, it told me that I already had a post titled “season finale,” which I wrote almost exactly one year ago. So I changed the title of this post to “the real season finale.” Since I work a…

  • back to the bike

    It’s hard to believe I’ve gone an entire year without hopping on my mountain bike. I actually enjoy mountain biking a lot more than road biking, but I end up on the road bike a lot more, mostly because it’s more practical. I can just hop on the road bike and ride out to Winters…

  • the capital

    One of the great things about my job is that it’s relatively flexible. It’s because of this flexibility that I can take advantage of great deals on flights. Back in June Southwest had an amazing sale on airfares throughout the country, so I ended up booking a trip to Washington D.C. I actually visited DC…

  • first pho king five

    This weekend I ran my first 5k run. Well actually, I take that back. To say I ran the 5k would be too generous. I ended up only running a bit more than half of the route, and ended up walking the rest with a cramp in my shin. The sad thing is, I know…

  • a special place

    This weekend I went on what will probably be the last backpacking trip of 2011. It was to a place called the Trinity Alps Wilderness. After having been to Yosemite twice in the last month, I didn’t have overly high expectations of this place. This trip was with the usual backpacking crew that Dan organizes,…

  • weekend of fun

    Every once in a while I get an email from one of my friends with the subject “weekend of fun.” Weekend of fun is his little euphemism for house work day. He bought a house recently and is slowly remodeling it. So he sends out these weekend of fun emails asking for help. I’d totally…

  • the dome

    Gosh. I had been looking forward to this trip for a long time. I had first tried to get my Half Dome permit in April, but I had overslept by 30 minutes, and by the time I had woken up and logged onto my computer all the permits were sold out. I tried again in…

  • yosemite backcountry

    Let me tell you something– when it comes to backpacking (or actually outdoor trips in general) I am lazy. It’s a weird kind of laziness. I will gladly drive two hundred plus miles to hike upwards of 20 miles. I will carry a 25 pound pack filled with gear up two thousand feet of elevation…

  • vintage photography

    A little less than one month. That’s how long this film had been sitting in my camera. And that’s how long it had been since my hike out at Loch Leven Lakes. I suppose that’s actually not that bad. After all, it took me over a year to finally upload the time lapse videos from…

  • barbecue and bachelors

    So apparently the Nugget Rib Cook-off in Reno is a pretty big deal. According to the website over half a million people visit it every year. I had been wanting to go for the past few years but for some reason or other I was never able to make it until this year. At the…

  • emeralds, rubies and hobos

    I have been to Emerald bay a few times now and the experience has been different each time. This time it was with some friends from college. I first started going to church in college, so these were among my first church friends. I’m not sure why this area is called Emerald Bay. Maybe it’s…