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Santa Fe Rail Trails
Today’s bike exploration is a success. After passing what might have been a no trespassing sign on a dirt road heading north from Rancho Viejo, I intersect a dirt jogging trail, as I hoped. This bends east, climbing to the Santa Fe rail line to Lamy, which has another rutted dirt track along it. I’m…
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Rancho Viejo Bike Exploration
There are an intriguing number of dirt roads surrounding my new neighborhood. My recumbent bike is no mountain bike, but I can usually handle a trail on it if things don’t get too steep or rocky. I have some high hopes for old railroad beds in the area, but the first I investigate is quickly…
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Tobico Marsh Hike
Mom takes me on her favorite hike north of Bay City. Many different kinds of trees are turning here. Mom finds a few mushrooms, but she says the harvest has been much better in past years. We see swans from the boardwalk near the marsh, but we decide they’re the introduced variety rather than the…
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Leaf Storm in Ann Arbor
I’m visiting my mom in Michigan this week. We’re treated to this amazing autumn spectacle at a friend’s house in Ann Arbor:
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Caballo Peak Loop
There are miles of trails right out of Los Alamos that I haven’t touched yet. Most of the town is surrounded by burn areas from the 2000 Cerro Grande fire, which gives it a unique flavor. Burn areas are often pretty, but horrendous to hike through due to piles of deadfall and thorny new undergrowth.…
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WordPress Tally Graph Plugin
I’ve released a new plugin that I use to create the bar graphs in my blog sidebar. I’m going to try to host it almost entirely on the WordPress site, so this may be the only post about it here. Here’s the link: Tally Graph Plugin at WordPress.org
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Book: High Infatuation / Steph Davis
I admire Steph Davis for her climbing, diet, and ability to express the inexorable draw one can experience toward the outdoors. The book is not as much about her personal relationships as I thought it might be given the subtitle “A climber’s guide to love and gravity”. She quotes some of the same Rumi poems…
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CDT Torreon Road / NM197 Overnight Loop
I park near a tiny paved road in the remote mesas of this part of New Mexico, find the cairns that mark the Continental Divide Trail here, and start hiking. It soon occurs to me that this is a strange place to take a long hike at the height of the fall aspen season. It’s…
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Under a Roof
This morning, with a measure of sadness and anxiety, I placed my home of the last six months in a storage lot for the winter. Our eight-foot Lance camper has been a better home than we dared hope. Yes, we’ve had to replace the water heater and contend with a number of irritating mechanical problems,…
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Borrego Mesa / Truchas Peak Loop Hike
Hoping to see some colorful aspen, I return to this area where I trained for the Pacific Crest Trail in early 1996. Back then it took me six tries to summit Truchas Peak using snowshoes much of the way, and getting back so late my girlfriend at the time had called the state police. Even…