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"Backpacking" to me places emphasis on carrying stuff on your back, in a backpack. One hears of people "backpacking through Europe". This emphatically does not mean hiking from point A to B, camping on the ground, carrying all your necessities with you. It's just a way of saying you used a...

One possible response to the "I don't have a light but I do have a cell phone" callers: arguably if the night is not expected to be a very cold one, they should just be left out there overnight. Nothing teaches as well as the burned hand. "Call us back in the morning if you're still lost". Or...

Rather than looking for a specific list of places to avoid, I suggest you spend your effort learning to recognize avalanche terrain, and the conditions which are likely to produce them. You don't have to know a lot. A little knowledge goes a long ways. Avalanche danger in the Adirondacks is...

an artefact of weather stations Of course you are right. It's an artifact of weather stations, or the lack thereof. A similar claim, the "world's greatest annual snowfall" or some such, is bestowed on the Paradise inn, around treeline on the S slope of Mt rainier. Or the Mt Baker ski area...

I think the biggest challenge in snake-rich areas (Baja California, the Sonoran desert, and parts of interior Columbia Basin in my case) is to just stay alert. In practice it seems to me that most of the time they sense you before you sense them, and reveal their presence by either rattling or...

It's called a mast year. Oaks do it too. So do douglas firs, for that matter. It's an evolved strategy to keep nut predators at bay. If the trees produce very little for three or four years and then produce a bumper crop, the nut-eaters will be overwhelmed and unable to eat all the nuts. If...

they can also just wait until they fall to the ground, and eat them there. Much less work.

I beg to differ. The Adirondacks are much wilder, and much more intact, from an ecological perspective. Nowhere else in the NE is there so much land in conservation status. I live in WA, where there is (by eastern standards) vast acreage of wild, empty country within a three-hour drive, and...

Everybody seems to think Baxter is managed as a wilderness preserve. Some of it is not managed that way, though. According to the park website, the northwest quadrant of the park, north of the perimiter road and west of Matagamon lake, about 14% of the land area, is a designated "scientific...

paternalism, not ose limits, is the issue Limits on backcountry user numbers, to keep a place wild, or to protect sensitive species from human disturbance, philosophically I have no problems with these although they can be constraining. They are in place in many national parks and federal...

This really is an odd lament to hear regarding Baxter, given that in numerous ways they seem to try to keep the lid on visitation. I would really like to know how many people they discourage and turn away, with their totally anal, paternalistic, and locked-down backcountry camping system, and...

I have been up Huntington, if not the Tripyramid route. And it would be very misleading as a guide to what is considered "3rd class" in NW guidebooks. People should not assume they can get up a "3rd class" route in the Olympics or Cascades because they can get up the Huntington ravine trail...

There really isn't any such thing as a third class trail. Class II, max. 3rd and 4th class are hard to define precisely and definitions change with region, with guide, with individuals, whether or not they are supposed to. To my way of thinking, 3rd class is postentially exposed, but most...

This is a point of view I have never encountered before. There is an easy way to tell roughly what the declination is set at by seeing where the fixed transparent arrow points to on the dial. It's as easy as looking down and seeing, "hm", this arrow points a little over 20 degrees to the right...

I have always found it interesting and amusing that "panic" comes from the greek god Pan, the god of wild forests and darkness. And that "panic" fear was originally specifically the fear of being in the presence of Pan, that is, in wild forests.

Periwinkle's account of a solo night hike up Bondcliff way, in which she is quite upfront about being scared of the dark, brings up an interesting subject, which one might call atavistic fears. Forests and darkness are in fact scary, and I think really that it is rooted in evolutionary...

Obviously this is a subject on which people have widely differing opinions. Personally, I use them only on snow. Heavy pack and strictly trail hiking are two factors which would encourage their use. They are a pain in obstructed off-trail situations. Regarding putting weight on them, and...

What about hitching in, or biking in? If they're going to create a control system based on private cars, it seems an easy way to avoid it.

Actually, I would not say that all bears are scared of dogs. I have seen black bears charge dogs, which then ran towards the nearest humans (us), leaving us to deal with the oncoming bear. This is known as a classic stupid mistake in grizz country, but it does happen with black bears. Loose...

The operative question is how many of us are *carriers*. Probably quite a few. Particularly those of us who have been just drinking the water without ill effects for a long time.