IAP Political Forum

I don't know how "cultural" this is, but I just got back from backpacking the eastern half of Mt. Rainier's Wonderland Trail. My buddy and I had done the western half 8 years ago and finally coordinated our schedules to do the other half.
We took 7 days, 6 nights. Hiked about 40 miles. I haven't totalled the elevation gains and losses but they were prodigeous--there is no such thing as flat on Mt. Rainier!
We saw some of the most awesome country imaginable. We were constantly amazed at how few people were out there taking advantage of this spectacular national park during the best hiking time of the year, when the bugs are almost non-existant.
Anyone have other great hikes or national parks they enjoy?

Yellowstone was great (the 2 days I spent there). I hope to go back someday with the family.

Yosemite is nice as well, spent many summers camping there as a kid.
I've never been an avid hiker, but I do enjoy short walks on hiking trails from time to time.

What is the relative height (summit altitude - starting point altitude)? Photos would be appreciated.


Most of my hikes this year were here. (http://www.tnp.si/national_park/)

I am hiking a good bit lately, right now northern Arizona around Flagstaff where I am working.  So far just day hikes, have not been on camping hikes in many years.  I have been on some beautiful hikes in the San Francisco peaks, am planning this week to summit Humphry's peak this week, about 12,000 feet, it is no Rainier, but is the highest point in AZ.

Lately have also done some cool short hikes in Chovy's neck of the woods, an area called Half-moon bay, and Los Gatos Creek, an cool in town hike/jog area in Campbell.

I am also planning to do some hiking this winter in the Superstion Mountains just east of Phoenix.  Great desert hiking in November-April time frame.  You can also hike them other times of the year, if you don't object to spontaneously bursting into flames.

Half Moon Bay? I used to live in Montara, just north of there, many, many moons ago. I got a chance to hike in Yosemite, Kings Canyon, and Sequoia National Parks. That was some spectacular country. Many of the trails would start at 6,000 feet!
Our national parks are real treasures.

I'm jealous of you guys. I need to find a hiking buddy.

We'd have to swear to not discuss politics  ;D

Actually, my hiking friend--also the best man at my wedding--tends to view politics through conservative eyes, and we generally leave politics out of our conversations.

Wouldn't want to talk about politics... I'd be to busy admiring nature and thinking about what useful things I could make out of my surroundings.

Totino,
aren't you attending college now?  I would think you could find a hiking partner around campus, or check with the student union to see if there is a hiking club?

Or, if nothing else, do what I do, all my hikes over the past several weeks in northern Arizona have been solo.  You just need to be careful which hikes you choose.  Keep to shorter, well used and defined trails.

Yeah, I joined our outdoors club :). We're going to be doing roughly half of the Adirondack peaks this year and half next year.

How boring.

But then, I tend to embrace argueing about things that most people shy away from. Rteligion and Politics

You're more open-minded than a lot of people I talk with. I agree with you that the two most interesting topics of conversation are religion and politics, and I find an awful lot of "polite" conversation b-o-r-i-n-g. Although it's always gratifying to meet people who share your own opinions, it's a real treat to find people with whom you can disagree and still converse civily. I don't know many...

Thanks for the thread JPN. I didn't even know about MT Rainer until I read your thread. Talk about ignorant of US geography.

I googled it ands read up about it. It looks spectacular, especially with the city in the foreground.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Rainier

IMO hiking or exploring the outdoors does a lot of good for your disposition. I am not sure why. You just get a completely different perspective of issues, situations the world.  :)

It's definately the closest I ever get to a religious experience. Awesome, in-your-face nature like that is so timeless, so awesome, so utterly unmoved by our presence. It was there millions of years before us, it will be there millions of years after us, and it couldn't care less. It just...is.

Okay, enough of that... ::)

What you said made me think of a passage from the book I am reading... So I'll share:
Bear Grylls - The Kid Who Climbed Everest

Jim Whittacker, the first American to climb Everest, tells the clients he leads up Mt. Rainier that you may love the mountain, but the mountain doesn't love you.

He says that to remind his clients to be careful, but it also speaks to the utterly oblivous nature of nature.

He has a good quote. It's something like: "You never conquer a mountain. Mountains can't be conquered; you conquer yourself."

I enjoy reading books about climbing.  The last one I read was Ed Viestur's "No Short Cut to the Top" (I think JPN mentioned it in the book club thread).  The thing I found most impressive in Viestur's narative was his respect for the mountains.  The way he would turn around and head down within a couple hundred feet of the summit if he deemed it unsafe.  In the beginning of his book he mentions guiding on Rainier, and describes what happens to a guy that showed contempt for the mountain. 

Alaska's nice.

 ;D

Where abouts did you go?

Has anyone been up to Denali?

Alaska is my home, Totino.  ;D

Denali is the most heavily used National Park in Alaska. If you plan to visit, get as much info as you can beforehand. 99% of the park is regulated backcountry, and you need a permit for whatever unit you plan to use. It's best to come up with 2 or 3 different plans in case you can't get your first choice of backcountry units.
You may also be surprised that you can't actually see Denali or Foraker from the park visitor's center. On a good day, you can see them from Anchorage or Fairbanks 200+ miles away, but a 3000' ridge hides them from the VC...
With the exception of Nanga Parbat in Kashmir, Denali is the tallest mountain in the world from it's base to it's summit, but you can't see the whole face of NP like you can see Denali, so Denali is the biggest mountain on earth to look at.

Kenai Fjords and Katmai are the parks I use the most. There are commercial fisheries on the Katmai Coast and KFNP has some great surf spots.
Some have called Lake Clark NP the most scenic spot in Alaska. Switzerland should have such Alps...
The scenery and opportunities in Wrangell-St Elias NP are as at least as intense as Denali, and it's about twice as big...
Gates Of The Arctic NP is something special as well.


To Alaskans, the NPs are not necessarily the choicest places to go. Our two National Forests, the Chugach and the Tongass are so big and wild that it would take years to even see all of either. Managed by NFS
Then there's the National Wildlife Refuges like Kodiak NWR, ANWR, Izembek, Becharof, Alaska Maritime NWR - all American Edens in their own rite. USF&W managed.
Then there's lands and rivers managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) - millions of acres spread all through the Great Land.

America's Public Land is a vast National Treasure. Alaska is it's Crown Jewel.
 





http://www.nps.gov/aplic/about_us/index.html

Wow, I didn't know you lived in Alaska. That's pretty sweet man.
My father was stationed up there while he was in the Army ages ago.

If I ever went to Denali it'd be done through a guided expedition. But I don't have anything near the knowledge/skill required for that. I'm an utter noobie lol.

There's a whole lot more to Denali National Park than climbing Denali!
That's for a very few with the skills, experience, and a very strong desire to bag it.
Although it's very wild backcountry, there's millions of acres of pristine wilderness there that do not require an ice axe and crampons to negotiate.
You can spend weeks in the backcountry seeing a lot more bears and wolves than people. You can stay in a luxurious historic lodge like Kantishna Roadhouse (http://www.kantishnaroadhouse.com/home.htm).
There's lot's of flightseeing from Talkeetna, Willow, Anc or Fbx.

(http://www.flyk2.com/images/map.jpg)

There's also rafting on the Nenana and other rivers.

Denali is also kinda well known for wildlife photography too..


Interested in climbing stories? Here's an audio interview done with a friend of mine, Brian Okonek. You'll get to listen to a legendary Denali climbing guide and one of the pioneers of guiding in the Alaska Range talk about his career for the historical record. It's the kinda thing you don't get to hear everyday, and riveting stuff if you're into climbing...

http://uaf-db.uaf.edu/jukebox/DENALI/html/brok.htm


If you have a map or know the area, you can begin to understand his "gift" for understatement.

 ;)

There's a whole lot more to Denali National Park than climbing Denali!
That's for a very few with the skills, experience, and a very strong desire to bag it.
Although it's very wild backcountry, there's millions of acres of pristine wilderness there that do not require an ice axe and crampons to negotiate.
You can spend weeks in the backcountry seeing a lot more bears and wolves than people. You can stay in a luxurious historic lodge like Kantishna Roadhouse (http://www.kantishnaroadhouse.com/home.htm).
There's lot's of flightseeing from Talkeetna, Willow, Anc or Fbx.

(http://www.flyk2.com/images/map.jpg)

There's also rafting on the Nenana and other rivers.

Denali is also kinda well known for wildlife photography too..


Interested in climbing stories? Here's an audio interview done with a friend of mine, Brian Okonek. You'll get to listen to a legendary Denali climbing guide and one of the pioneers of guiding in the Alaska Range talk about his career for the historical record. It's the kinda thing you don't get to hear everyday, and riveting stuff if you're into climbing...

http://uaf-db.uaf.edu/jukebox/DENALI/html/brok.htm


If you have a map or know the area, you can begin to understand his "gift" for understatement.

 ;)

There's a whole lot more to Denali National Park than climbing Denali!
That's for a very few with the skills, experience, and a very strong desire to bag it.
Although it's very wild backcountry, there's millions of acres of pristine wilderness there that do not require an ice axe and crampons to negotiate.
You can spend weeks in the backcountry seeing a lot more bears and wolves than people. You can stay in a luxurious historic lodge like Kantishna Roadhouse (http://www.kantishnaroadhouse.com/home.htm).
There's lot's of flightseeing from Talkeetna, Willow, Anc or Fbx.

(http://www.flyk2.com/images/map.jpg)

There's also rafting on the Nenana and other rivers.

Denali is also kinda well known for wildlife photography too..


Interested in climbing stories? Here's an audio interview done with a friend of mine, Brian Okonek. You'll get to listen to a legendary Denali climbing guide and one of the pioneers of guiding in the Alaska Range talk about his career for the historical record. It's the kinda thing you don't get to hear everyday, and riveting stuff if you're into climbing...

http://uaf-db.uaf.edu/jukebox/DENALI/html/brok.htm


If you have a map or know the area, you can begin to understand his "gift" for understatement.

 ;)

There's a whole lot more to Denali National Park than climbing Denali!
That's for a very few with the skills, experience, and a very strong desire to bag it.
Although it's very wild backcountry, there's millions of acres of pristine wilderness there that do not require an ice axe and crampons to negotiate.
You can spend weeks in the backcountry seeing a lot more bears and wolves than people. You can stay in a luxurious historic lodge like Kantishna Roadhouse (http://www.kantishnaroadhouse.com/home.htm).
There's lot's of flightseeing from Talkeetna, Willow, Anc or Fbx.

(http://www.flyk2.com/images/map.jpg)

There's also rafting on the Nenana and other rivers.

Denali is also kinda well known for wildlife photography too..


Interested in climbing stories? Here's an audio interview done with a friend of mine, Brian Okonek. You'll get to listen to a legendary Denali climbing guide and one of the pioneers of guiding in the Alaska Range talk about his career for the historical record. It's the kinda thing you don't get to hear everyday, and riveting stuff if you're into climbing...

http://uaf-db.uaf.edu/jukebox/DENALI/html/brok.htm


If you have a map or know the area, you can begin to understand his "gift" for understatement.

 ;)

WTF?
No matter how many times I post, it disappears

Try it this way...



There's a whole lot more to Denali National Park than climbing Denali!
That's for a very few with the skills, experience, and a very strong desire to bag it.
Although it's very wild backcountry, there's millions of acres of pristine wilderness there that do not require an ice axe and crampons to negotiate.
You can spend weeks in the backcountry seeing a lot more bears and wolves than people. You can stay in a luxurious historic lodge like Kantishna Roadhouse (http://www.kantishnaroadhouse.com/home.htm).
There's lot's of flightseeing from Talkeetna, Willow, Anc or Fbx.

(http://www.flyk2.com/images/map.jpg)

There's also rafting on the Nenana and other rivers.

Denali is also kinda well known for wildlife photography too..


Interested in climbing stories? Here's an audio interview done with a friend of mine, Brian Okonek. You'll get to listen to a legendary Denali climbing guide and one of the pioneers of guiding in the Alaska Range talk about his career for the historical record. It's the kinda thing you don't get to hear everyday, and riveting stuff if you're into climbing...

http://uaf-db.uaf.edu/jukebox/DENALI/html/brok.htm


If you have a map or know the area, you can begin to understand his "gift" for understatement.

 ;)

Very cool. I'll have to look into the other places. And I'm listening to that interview now.

What do you do in Alaska, if you don't mind me asking?

Whatever I want. Hehe... (Sorry..that's the standard Alaskan answer to that question...)

I split my time between commercial fishing and my surveying/mapping firm, so I'm outside a lot...  ;D


Rather than 'jack JPN's very coo thread, why don't I start one called "Alaska"?...

 :-[

Imagine that, a fellow geographer.

I do surveying and mapping work for an engineering firm. I just started a few weeks ago, but I worked with air photos for most of last year. TBH, I'm excited as hell about the prospects of the field. So far doing alternating between CAD and surveying has been my dream job.

Great minds think alike.  ;D

I bet you've got one hell of a navigation setup on that boat too, as well as some fish-finding GIS tools and what-not?

The most amazing climbing story I've read is Touching the Void. There's a film of the same name. True story. Incredible.

now here is something you and I can agree wholeheartedly on.

I have not read the book yet.  I saw the movie, including the interviews with the actual guys and their trip back to that mountain so many years later. 

Just an unbelievable story of the will to survive.  I could not imagine being in that situation.  Truly an unforgettable story.

gomper, have you read Krackauer's Into Thin Air? About the Everest disaster in 1996. Best book I've read for describing step by step what it's like to climb Everest.

I trekked to the Mt. Everest base camp way back in 1984, but I'll never go higher than that.

Into Thin Air is one of the first climbing books I ever read.  One of the parts of it that I did enjoy was how well Krakaur descrbed the whole process of setting up a climb, getting permits, setting up base camp, climbing up, then down, them higher, then down to acclimatize to the extreme altitude.  All of that was fascinating to me.  He also did very well at disecting the events that lead to the tragedies of that season. 

I later read Anatoli Boukreev's book about the 1996 Everest season, it was good to get another perspective, but was not as well written as Into Thin Air.

That is way cool that you were as far as base camp on Everest, that is a lot closer than most of us will ever get, I would love to be able to say I had done that.  I am affraid I will just have to stick with my hiking though, and leave the real climbing to others.  Who will hopefully write books about it so I can join them as a spectator after the fact.

I read Krakauer shortly after Norgay's book describing events from the same season. Krakauer has a more journalistic approach, Norgay is more poetic. I can't find Bukrejev's book.

Did anyone watch the imax movie filmed in 1996? I check imax in Europe (damn, the one in Vienna was closed) from time to time, but I don't expect it will be shown sometimes in the near future.

That's awesome man. Did you climb something else in the area?

No. And it wasn't a climb, just a hike (what they call "trekking"). Porters carried our heavy gear and cooked for us. We slept in tents most nights. It was a lot of hard walking but really pretty cushy in its own way. The Sherpas would wake us up with bowls of hot water to wash our faces in. We stayed a few nights at Lubuche and hiked to the top of Kala Patar at 18,500 feet. It was quite amazing to look up at the Khumbu Ice Fall, where the real climbing begins for those going up Everest.
I spent five weeks in all in Nepal. Quite an adventure. I had taken leave from the USS Dixon to do it. The XO didn't believe I was really taking vacation time to do that until I brought my pictures back. I don't know why, but for some people a trip like that is entirely off their radar screen.
And now I'm happy to spend a week just lying on the beach in Hawaii.

The other really big trip I took was in 1990-1991. Three months overland from Cairo to Kathmandu, which was my second visit to Nepal. I did it through this British outfit: http://www.explore.co.uk/ (http://www.explore.co.uk/) It was surprisingly inexpensive, but there are few frills. We traveled in a custom-built truck and slept in tents at night. But what an adventure--floating down the Nile at sunset in Faluccas, Crusaders' Castles in Syria, Alleppo, Turkey, (me and the other American had to overfly Iran and meet up with the group in Quetta, Pakistan), the Khyber Pass, India, and ending up in Nepal. The group itself was interesting because we had two Americans, two Canadians, four Brits, four Austrialians, a Swede, and a woman from Iceland.
A trip of a lifetime.

Look up that link and drool at all the possibilities.

Me and some friends have been exploring the possibility of flying our bikes over to Europe and riding from Europe all the way across Russia. Would be a fantatstic adventure.

We already did south from Kansas City clear down to Panama, West side of the Canal. Then a ship back to New Orleans

We did Anchorage Alaska BACK TO Kansas City.

Wow, they are pretty cheap jpn. Thanks for the link.

No kidding. I bike, but never more than an hour each way, max(!)

The trip to Panama must have been epic.

Cheap, and again, few frills. For that reason most of their clients are pretty young. The thing is, since it is so cheap, you're living a lot closer to the ground than if you go with an expensive tour and stay in lavish hotels. You miss a lot of the experience that way. For instance, at noon we'd stop somewhere and the guide would give four of us some money. Then we'd head out into the town we had stopped at and find bread and vegetables and meat for that night's dinner. We rotated cooking responsibilities. The meals were therefore rarely very great, but we got a real feel for the availablility of various foodstuffs as we traveled along. For lunch we'd often stop on the side of an apparently person-less stretch of road and set up our camp chairs and tables. Within minutes there would be throngs of local folks standing there, watching us. We were like a visiting show for them, I guess. Same thing in the afternoon when we'd set up volleyball nets and have some great games. As a result we had numerous opportunities for interaction.

On the other hand, for the real "authentic" experience I suppose the best way of all is not going with a guided group at all. But hey, I wanted vacation too. Traveling in the third world by yourself is a lot of work, especially if you don't know the language. I remember the sign in the Cairo central train station showing where all the trains on the various tracks were heading. Couldn't make heads or tails out of the Arabic. And since Arabic numbers are different too, it was even more mysterious.

So this low-rent adventure travel way to go is a good compromise between having someone taking care of most of the headaches, while at the same time not being entirely cut off from the common folks.

Sorry I should have been clearer,,,,,Motorcycle. I have a 1999 Idian Chief touring bike and they both have harleys