2Heeldrive - Walk it off Wimp!

Just a teaser,

here are some of the photos my brother took on a recent trip to Yosemite. For more, visit http://www.eyehike.com and look in the Gallery.

Enjoy!

Half Dome Sunset Silouette

Fern Spring Falls

Valley View Sunset

By Sandi Doughton
Seattle Times science reporter

Several climbers, including John Race and Olivia Cussen, have reported seeing a U.S. Geological Survey marker atop Mount Rainier in recent weeks.

The U.S. Geological Survey marker now on the summit originally was installed in 1956 on Rainier’s crater rim.

Climber's find a new suprise atop Mt. Rainier

Wow, where did you come from?

Is global warming shrinking Mount Rainier?

A survey marker atop the Northwest’s tallest peak sure makes it look that way.

Protruding from the summit with nearly 2 feet of pipe high and dry, the marker appears to have melted out of the ice cap that covers the mountain’s highest point.

But records from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) tell a different story.

The marker was never buried beneath the ice — and wasn’t installed on the summit in the first place, said surveyor Larry Signani, who led teams that remeasured the mountain’s height in 1988 and 1999.

“It looks like the original,” he said after examining photos of the marker. “But it didn’t melt out of the ice.”

The marker was installed by the USGS in 1956 on bare ground on Rainier’s crater rim, more than 200 feet from the actual summit. The rocky rim is almost always snow-free, swept bare by wind and warmed by steam that rises from the volcano’s depths.

“We’re not going to put a survey marker in snow or ice,” said cartographer Dale Benson, of the USGS Denver office.

Original story can be found here

Chinook and Cayuse passes have closed for the season after the state Department of Transportation reviewed a snowy forecast and assessed the avalanche risk.

Due to heavy snow accumulation on the roadway, DOT crews temporarily closed Chinook Pass just after 7:30 a.m. on Saturday. Crews assessed the stability of the hillside on Sunday morning, and determined the avalanche risk is too great to allow traffic to safely cross Chinook Pass and Cayuse Pass.

Since Friday, Chinook Pass has received more than three feet of snow. More snow is forecast.

The Highway 410 Chinook Pass closure points are at Morse Creek (five miles east of the summit) and at Crystal Mountain Boulevard (eight miles northwest of the summit). Access to the Crystal Mountain Ski Resort from Highway 410 remains open.

DOT and the Mount Rainier National Park staff agreed to close Highway 123 (Cayuse Pass) for the season. The highway is closed within Mount Rainier National Park from the 4,675-foot Cayuse Pass summit at the junction of Highways 410 and 123 to Steven Canyon Road. DOT closes each pass for the winter due to high avalanche risk and hazardous driving conditions.

I found this article in the New York Times, and thought it was a good one.. Enjoy!

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: August 1, 2009
MOUNT HOOD, Ore.
While backpacking here with my 11-year-old daughter, I kept thinking of something tragic: so few kids these days know what happens when you lick a big yellow banana slug.
My daughter and I were recuperating in a (banana slug-infested) wilderness from a surfeit of civilization. On our second day on the Pacific Crest Trail, we were exhausted after nearly 20 miles of hiking, our feet ached, and ravenous mosquitoes were persecuting us. Dusk was falling, but no formal campsite was within miles.
So we set out a groundsheet and our sleeping bags on the soft grass of a ridge, so that the winds would blow the mosquitoes away. Our dog looked aghast (“Ugh, where’s my bed?!”), but sulkily curled up beside us. As far as we could tell, there was no other hiker within a half-day’s journey in any direction.
We debated whether to put up our light tarp to protect us from rain. “No need,” I advised my daughter patronizingly. “There’s zero chance it’ll rain. And it’ll be more fun to be able to look up at shooting stars.”
It was, until we awoke at 4 a.m. to a freezing drizzle.
The rain not only punctured the doctrine of Paternal Infallibility but also offered one of nature’s dazzlingly important lessons in perspective, reminding us that we’re just tenants — and ones without much sway.
Such time in the wilderness is part of our family’s summer ritual, a time to hit the “reset” switch and escape deadlines and BlackBerrys. We spend the time fretting instead about blisters, river crossings and rain, and the experiences offer us lessons on inner peace and life’s meaning — cheap and effective therapy, without the couch.
All this comes to mind because for most of us in the industrialized world, nature is a rarer and rarer part of our lives. Children for 1,000 generations grew up exploring fields, itching with poison oak and discovering the hard way what a wasp nest looks like. That’s no longer true.
Paul, a fourth grader in San Diego, put it this way: “I like to play indoors better, ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.” Paul was quoted in a thoughtful book by Richard Louv, “Last Child in the Woods,” that argued that baby boomers “may constitute the last generation of Americans to share an intimate, familial attachment to the land and water.”
Only 2 percent of American households now live on farms, compared with 40 percent in 1900. Suburban childhood that once meant catching snakes in fields now means sanitized video play dates scheduled a week in advance. One study of three generations of 9-year-olds found that by 1990 the radius from the house in which they were allowed to roam freely was only one-ninth as great as it had been in 1970.
A British study found that children could more easily identify Japanese cartoon characters like Pikachu, Metapod and Wigglytuff than they could native animals and plants, like otter, oak and beetle.
Mr. Louv calls this “nature deficit disorder,” and he links it to increases in depression, obesity and attention deficit disorder. I don’t know about all that, although his book does cite a study indicating that watching fish lowers blood pressure significantly. (That’s how to cut health costs: hand out goldfish instead of heart medicine!)
One problem may be that the American environmental movement has focused so much on preserving nature that it has neglected to do enough to preserve a constituency for nature. It’s important not only to save forests, but also to promote camping, hiking, bouldering and white-water rafting so that people care about saving those forests.
One sign of trouble: the number of visits to America’s national parks has been slipping for more than a decade. Likewise, Europe and Canada have both done an excellent job of building networks of long-distance hiking trails, while the U.S. has trouble maintaining the trails it has.
One of our family’s annual backpacks is the 40-mile Timberline Trail circuit around Mount Hood, crossing snowfields and dazzling alpine fields of flowers. In years when we’re particularly addled, we hike it as many as three times. But a washout almost three years ago left part of this gorgeous trail — completed in the 1930s — officially closed, and unofficially rather difficult to get by. Here’s a spectacular trail that was built in the last depression, and we can’t even sustain it.
So let’s protect nature, yes, but let’s also maintain trails, restore the Forest Service and support programs that get young people rained on in the woods. Let’s acknowledge that getting kids awed by nature is as important as getting them reading.
Oh, and the slug? Time was, most kids knew that if you licked the underside of a banana slug, your tongue went numb. Better that than have them numb their senses staying cooped up inside.

Original Article can be found Here

Story by;
Susan Schell
of the Gateway
Published: 12:01PM May 13th, 2009

Washington’s National Park Fund welcomed Gig Harbor resident Linda Glein to its board of directors last month.

Glein was elected to the board due to her long and diverse leadership background with non-profit organizations like BetterInvesting-Puget Sound Chapter, the Gig Harbor Branch of American Association of University Women, the Minerva Scholarship Foundation, Tacoma Women’s Sailing Association, Toastmasters and the Peninsula Writer’s Association.

Glein describes the National Park Fund as the state’s official fund-raising arm for the national parks.

“They have a wish list of things they can’t afford to do unless people fundraise,” she said. “The fund raises money to do things in all three parks. Though the board tends to meet in Seattle, they try to get people from all around the state. They wanted more South Sound representation.”

When her husband retired, Glein said they both became involved with many things.

“I thought, ‘We really should think about what our passion is,’ and the national parks just sort of popped up as No. 1 on my list,” she said.

Glein heard about the National Parks Fund several years earlier, but she was deterred because its office was in Seattle. At Christmas time last year, she discovered it was rebuilding its board, and that it had an office in Fircrest.

Glein offered to volunteer when Executive Director Eleanor Kittelson asked if she wanted to be on the board.

“They want to get geographical representation on the board that appeals to different populations,” Glein said. “They were looking for people that have an emotional attachment to the parks. All of the board members are passionate about this.”

Glein moved to Washington from Nebraska when she was 8. While her parents immediately embraced the Pacific Northwest, the homesick child did not.

But that soon changed.

“I hated it,” Glein said. “My grandma and grandpa were still back there, and all my friends. My parents never looked back — they loved it. They just loaded up the car when my dad got a job with Boeing.

“I’ve never seen it written in history, but I know there must have been a Boeing migration. Everyone’s dads worked for Boeing.”

Glein warmed up to the area when her parents took her camping and hiking in the national parks. That’s when she fell in love with Mount Rainier.

“It’s the first place we went, and there was so much incredible beauty,” she said. “The alpine meadows are so accessible. That’s the place I go most often. I go on day hikes there all the time.”

Glein, who said her favorite is the Skyline at Panorama Point, laughed when she recalled calling Mount Rainier “my mountain.”

“I think everyone calls it ‘my mountain,’ ” she said.

She has hiked and camped in all three national parks in the region, and she said each has its own charm.

“Olympic National Park has such incredible diversity,” Glein said. “We went to various places, and there you’ve got the oceans and the rainforest. It’s an incredibly large wilderness area.

“The Cascades have a lot of unexplored wilderness area,” she added. “I went camping with my mom there as an adult.”

The national parks are a treasure the Gleins pride themselves in when visitors are in the state. One particularly tough customer was a young man from Munich who shunned the parks during his visit because he wanted to do other things.

“He thought he knew everything about mountains because he lived near Bavaria,” Glein said. “Finally, the day before he left, we put him in the car and drove him to Mount Rainier. He just kept saying, ‘I am so sorry.’ He was so apologetic. He said, ‘I thought I knew mountains. I had no idea what I almost missed.’ ”

National Park Fund

For more information on Washington’s National Park Fund, visit www.wnpf.org.