Snow and boarding

After 3 years, I've finally gotten back to snowboarding! I have just not had the time or money the past few years, and 2 weekends ago I finally dusted off the old board and hit a local park with a big hill. I figured a local park would be a (free!) good spot to brush up, and brush up I did. Didn't fall as much as I thought I would. I'm a little timid on the board, and I was never that good, but I had a great time. My brother came with me the first time, then the second time we took my fiance and a friend. This past summer, a co-worker of mine moved to Germany and sold a lot of his things he didn't want to bring along. He had a nice Burton board & bindings he wanted $100 for, plus boots for $30, so I snapped it all up for my fiance Pano, since he'd be much more likely to try it if he had his own gear. Great deal for all of it, and the board and boots are exactly his size!

(my LTD Snow board on the left, and fiance's Burton Float on the right)

When we all went together that first weekend, our other friend who came didn't have a board or tube or anything, so he took a big box to sled with - it worked pretty well for what it was! My brother got Pano strapped into his board to try out, gave him the basics, and got him going. I was both surprised and not surprised that by the end of the day, he was going down the entire hill without falling, and enjoyed it!

(Top: fiance, front: brother, down the hill: friend with sled-box, middle. Bottom: me pretending to rock it)

A few issues we need to iron out: my boots don't fit well (too big), Pano realized he was more comfortable boarding regular, with his left foot forward, but his board is set up to be goofy, which is right foot forward, and his board needs a sharpening/wax. When I got my gear 5 or 6 years ago they did fit me for boots, but they're really too big & very hard to get into, so I am going to look into replacing them. We will bring Pano's board somewhere to get tuned up and have the bindings adjusted for him, and he has no problem with his boots. Last weekend we tried a different venue and went to the local golf course, which was great but we went late in the day & lost the light pretty quickly. Hoping to go again this weekend if we have the time! I'd like to go to a real mountain, but unfortunately all of us are pretty broke, so doing it locally for free is really great.

(pretty snowy road and trees after one of our storms)

This is a really nice way to get outside a little during all this ***** snow we're having. I'll be the first to say I love the snow, but enough is enough. We probably have had 60+ inches of snow this year so far, and it's totally insane. There are 20-30 foot piles around and they just keep getting bigger with every storm (we've been getting a storm a week since the new year). I've been hit with some really bad cabin fever lately and getting out to board a little has been helping. I wanted to start winter hiking this year and I'm planning to get some microspikes to try out, but there's just too much snow right now - I'd need snowshoes, which are more than I can afford at the moment. Snowboarding is an acceptable substitute for now and I'm glad I'm actually getting to do it this year!

Favorite Outdoor Places - OBN photo prompt

Yesterday, the OBN posted a new photo prompt - post a photo of your favorite outdoor place. I love photography & have zillions of pictures from all my trips, and it was hard to pick just one, so I decided to do a first/second/third place.

Third place: Arizona/Tucson area

My aunt lives in Tucson and I've been out to see her a few times. We went out this past April & spent 5 days there, and it was the perfect trip to play with my new camera on! The landscape out there is just gorgeous - the desert, mountains, saguaros, everything. We did a short hike about half an hour outside the city, and I took this photo on the hike. The "cactus" looking cacti are saguaros, which are unique to a very small area of southern Arizona, and the fuzzy one at the bottom is a teddy bear cholla.

Second place: Green Mountains, Vermont

I have done two amazing overnight trips in the Green Mountains of Vermont - this particular photo is from our 2008 trip to Camel's Hump. We hiked up in drizzle, fog and even hail (it was crazy!), and got to the summit to find it totally boxed in. We were a little disappointed, but the clouds started to clear after a little while and gave us absolutely amazing views of the mountains through the clouds. It was really surreal! I haven't hiked in the Green Mountains with the rest of my group, just my best hiking buddy Meg, but I'd like to do more trips in Vermont this year. Vermont is a really special place!

First place: Franconia Ridge, NH

I have done the majority of my hiking in New Hampshire, and one place I will go again & again is Franconia Ridge. I've done two big loop hikes on the ridge, both with my friend Meg, and I am planning to bring the rest of my group up there this year since they've never been. I should say that the White Mountains in general are my number one favorite outdoor place, but Franconia Ridge is beautiful. The views down into the notch and across at the cliffs of Cannon, north to the Presidentials, and east into the Pemigewasset wilderness are just amazing - it's a very spiritual thing for me being up there. There are usually crowds on the ridge so it isn't very solitary, but that's an acceptable tradeoff for me.

I do have a few runners-up for favorite outdoor places photos that had to be included:

Ferry Beach, Saco, Maine

Ferry Beach is my favorite place in the world. It's a Unitarian Universalist camp on the coast of Maine that I grew up camping at every summer, and it's very special to me. My church does a retreat for a weekend up there every fall, and my family still goes. Ferry Beach refreshes me mentally, spiritually, and in every other sense of the word, and this past fall when we were there, I woke up to be on the beach for sunrise every morning. It was magical, and I got some great pictures.

Arizona

This is one of my favorite photos from our Arizona trip this past spring. We did a sunset horseback ride in the desert - my fiance really wanted to ride a horse in the desert (he's really into the wild west thing... lol), so we found a ranch & did it! It was a wonderful experience, and I got this awesome shot on the ride.

Imperial Sand Dunes, California

This has to be one of the coolest places we've ever been. On our trip out west this past spring, we drove to Tucson to visit my aunt from San Diego, which was an awesome 2-day road trip. One area we went through was the Imperial Sand Dunes, a huge dune sea in the far southern part of California near the border of Mexico and Arizona. We were super excited, pulled off into the recreation area & ran up the dunes to get a view. The dunes extended out from either side of the highway as far as the eye could see. Definitely one of the most amazing things I've ever seen, right up there with the redwoods. I wish the power lines & ATV tracks weren't in the picture, but we took some fantastic shots of the dunes.

These are my favorite outdoor places/photos of said places! I hope to be acquiring more 'favorite outdoor places' as I continue to hike and travel but I hope the photos are enjoyable :)

What's in a name?

I recently submitted Squeaky Trees to the Outdoor Blogger Network directory (thanks to OBN, by the way! Great site!), and they post 'outdoor writing prompts' to get the bloggers talking. This week, the writing prompt posted was titled It's Your Blog...Name, asking folks to explain the names they gave their blogs. There are plenty of interestingly-named blogs out there, so it was fun to read some of the tales!

I figured it would be fun to join in & whip up a quick post about my blog's name, Squeaky Trees. Relatively simple story, but still :) This past Memorial day I was hiking in Vermont, summitting Mounts Killington and Pico on a one-night overnight trip. Our first day we summitted Killington and it was breezy, cloudy and pretty damp with intermittent rain falling. It actually cleared up after we left the summit & headed north on the Long Trail and turned into a nice sunny day, although still windy. A portion of the trail between Killington and Pico is a nice, relatively level walk in the woods, and because of the wind, we started to hear the trees squeaking against each other.

This was not the first time I'd heard it, but it was the first time I paid attention. It's really creepy if you hear trees squeaking in the wind and don't know what it is - it could sound like an animal, or even a person screaming. I realized it makes me happy to hear the trees squeaking, or singing as I considered it, because it's almost as if they are reminding you that they're alive. It's a wonderful reminder of how alive the woods really are.


At that moment I decided I had to name something 'squeaky trees' because it sounded cute and it meant something to me. Maybe 'singing trees' would have been nicer, but I like squeaky trees better! I'd been toying with the idea of starting a blog to hash out my hiking & outdoor adventures, so I went home & did it right away. After posting twice I did forget for a while, but especially when the season was over, I wanted to keep up with my adventures, so I fired it up & intend to keep it going! I'm still working on ironing out my graphics & layout here, but I really like my name :)

(photo - me on the trail in Vermont on the trip that inspired Squeaky Trees)

Flickr gallery

I've created a Flickr gallery to host my hiking photos. I have a few different albums of my pictures scattered over the web, but this gallery will be just for relevant photos to link to this blog.

Squeaky Trees Flickr gallery - I've organized the photos into sets by year for now. This is just a sampling of the many photos I take while out hiking. I really love photography and taking pictures even though I'm entirely self-taught and have no training, so I'm always looking for critiques or advice or anything. Enjoy!

2010 Recap & 2011 Resolutions

Happy 2011! We were away in New Jersey over the weekend, and I'd really wanted to try and do a walk or hike on New Year's day. We were exhausted & decided it'd be cold, plus there was snow on the ground & we don't have proper footwear for that - but we woke up New Year's day, and it was sunny and a balmy 50 degrees :( so I was a little bummed. Next year!

Although I'm itching for a hike, I probably won't be able to do any trips for at least a few weeks, due to my schedule and the fact that I don't have the right footwear for hiking in snow. I've thought about trying out some traction thingies (very technical, I know) for my boots for snow & ice, so next time I'm at REI or EMS I might check some out. We will also be doing some snowboarding soon hopefully, although none of us are very good so we may just go to a local golf course with good hills before going to an actual mountain.

In 2010, I did 6 more of the New England 4000-footers, one in VT (Killington, 4241') and five in NH: Flume, 4328': Liberty, 4459': Tecumseh, 4003': Pierce, 4310' and Jackson, 4052'; I also did Monadnock (3165') in April as we do every year, Pico in VT (3957'), Great Blue Hill at 635' in Milton, MA with a great view of Boston (the Blue Hills Reservation is a great park with miles of really nice trails), and Mount Wachusett (2006') in central MA. Two trips were overnights - Killington/Pico, and Pierce/Jackson. Mileage-wise this year I did about 53. Altogether not a bad season, I did more this year than I did the previous year so I was happy!

I've thought about what I'd like to do this coming season for hiking. One thing I want to do is more backpacking - I recently got the Sea to Summit Mosquito Pyramid Net Double Shelter on clearance from LLBean and I think for the warm months, it'll be a nice lighter alternative to hiking with a tent. I'll review it when I try it out for the first time! Trip-wise, I'd like to do a hike or two on Franconia Ridge with the boys since they've never done anything there, and I want to do Mount Greylock, Massachusetts' high point at 3491'. I want to do that one as an overnight, and I do want to hike more in MA this year. It's kind of stupid that I hike more 3 hours away in NH than right here in my own backyard. Since I knocked off 6 4000-footers this year, I'd be happy if I could do that many again next year. Some I've looked at are some of the southern 4000ers like Whiteface, Passaconaway, and North & Middle Tripyramid, the Hancocks, maybe Carrigan, and maybe some in the Pemi wilderness, like Bondcliff/Bond/West Bond, Galehead, Zealand, and the Twins. (yeah, ambitious list I know!) We will start our season in April with Monadnock, as we've done for the past 3 years, and go from there. My friend Meg, who I've done Memorial day hikes with in Vermont for the past 3 years, will be in DC this year, so I'm going to go down there and we'll find something to do for Memorial day.

Besides my hiking goals, my other resolutions for this year are to finally lose 10lbs, take rock-climbing lessons, go back to yoga, and canoe more! We have a canoe we got off craigslist 2 years ago, and this summer we went out a fair amount but always to the same place. I'd like to explore some more local canoeing spots next summer.

So, those are my plans in a nutshell for 2011. I'm also getting married this summer, so my hiking time may be cut a little short, but I'm going to do as much as I can. I realized this year how happy it makes me to be out on the trail, and for my own peace of mind and mental & physical well-being, I've come to view hiking as a necessary component of my life. Happy trails in 2011 to all!

Book - AWOL on the Appalachian Trail

About 2 years ago, I read "Into Thin Air" by Jon Krakauer, and got really into mountaineering books. I read a few more similar books, though none were quite like "Into Thin Air", then this spring I picked up Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods". I REALLY ENJOYED IT! Except... he didn't finish the Appalachian Trail (AT), and that made me sad. Bryson's descriptions of the trail and his toils and triumphs while on it are fantastic, and he kept me engaged and chuckling through the whole book.

I went looking for books of the same vein, and came upon "AWOL on the Appalachian Trail" on Amazon. Published in October, it is thru-hiker David Miller's 2003 tale of his completion of the AT. He decided to quit his job and hike the trail, obviously not without doubts and concerns. Leaving his wife and three young children at home, Miller began the trail at the southern terminus at Springer Mountain, Georgia, and travelled north. He began the trail at the end of April, and had to finish by mid-October, when Baxter State Park (home of Mount Katahdin) at the northern end closes for the season. Miller intended to do the trail quickly and finish in 5 months.

As his journey unfolds, Miller faces obstacles such as injuries, rain, doubt, and in some instances other hikers, and reflects on his inspiration for attempting the trail. In his life prior to the trail, he was a computer programmer and felt trapped in a cubicle. He decided to attempt the thru-hike as sort of a mid-life crisis, with his boss even asking why he couldn't just get a Corvette. Right off the bat he starts to have some knee problems, which come and go, and ends up seeing a doctor for an infected bunion on one foot early on in Virginia. Later, Miller sprains an ankle right around the half-way point of the trail and spends almost a week off the trail. He continues the trail with an aircast on the ankle.

He spends time in the book talking about hiking gear and shoe selection (he went through many pairs of shoes during the trek), and a lot of time on the other hikers he meets. This is one point of the book I particularly like - the encounters with other hikers: thru-hikers, section-hikers, and day-hikers. There are some folks he spends significant time with on the trail, some he sees periodically, and some are one-shots, but for me, the camaraderie is one big appeal of a journey like this. The stories are good and a lot of the people he meets are great characters. Not all his encounters with other hikers are pleasant, but the vast majority are.

Miller obviously encounters a lot of wildlife on the trail - deer, bears, mice trying to eat his food, bugs, and more. Early on, he spots a Luna moth and includes a picture in the book. I thought this particularly was cool because we saw a Luna moth on a hike in NH a few years ago, and I guess it's pretty rare to spot them.

(my Luna moth, Sandwich Range, NH 2008)

The descriptions of the landscape are one of the things I like best about this book and "A Walk in the Woods". I love walking the trail in my head while reading the book (makes me want to get out there!) While Miller was in NH I was able to actually follow some of his progress through the White Mountains, since I've hiked there so much. Another fun aspect of this book was the time he spent in hostels and trail towns. Hitching is (was? do people still do that?) a big part of hiking the AT - the trail crosses roads, but you aren't always close enough to walk to your destination for the night. I gathered from the book that the biggest things about being off the trail in town for a day are laundry, real food (buffets are golden), and phone/email to get in touch with family (Miller also wrote for a local paper & I think blogged his trip).

Miller triumphs and completes the trail September 17, just less than 5 months after he started. The book says the average thru-hike takes 6 months at about 12 miles a day; Miller was doing 20 mile days at some points. When I had started the book, at first I'd been expecting to be reading another Bryson, which this is not, but in some ways I liked "Awol" better. I feel like this book gives the lay-reader a much better idea of how life actually is on the trail, whereas Bryson is much more about the philosopical aspect of being on the trail (which I also loved).

This was a great book for me to read during the off-season and I will be looking for more like it to get me through the winter. "Awol on the Appalachian Trail" is available on Amazon.com - I definitely recommend picking it up.

Winter... hiking withdrawl.

Wow, long time no post. Even though it's almost Christmas, I am still planning on trying to stay active outdoors during the winter, despite my intolerance for cold! I will definitely be snowboarding during the winter (I'm not very good though), and hoping to try a little light winter hiking close by. I will keep posting throughout the winter!

After my Flume/Liberty hike this year, I did do a few more hikes. Myself, my brother, and another friend of ours (both members of Team Badassa) hiked Mount Tecumseh in New Hampshire in August. Tecumseh is the lowest (and I think the furthest south) of the 4000-footers in New Hampshire at 4003', and is home to Waterville Valley ski area. The hike roundtrip was 5 miles, so a nice short-ish day, and very enjoyable, although with limited views. The summit isn't totally exposed but there were some views, and popping off the trail onto a ski trail to check out the surrounding scenery was nice, although muddy. Another nice thing about this hike is that it was a little closer than most of our White Mountain hikes are - only about a 2.5 hour drive.





(top: view from a ski trail on Tecumseh - bottom: brother at the summit)

My last group hike of the season was an overnight in the Presidentials. My fiance and one of our friends (again, all members of the larger Team Badassa, who can never all get together at the same time!) hiked mounts Pierce and Jackson. We started out on the Crawford path in Crawford notch and hike to the AMC's Nauman tentsite, where we would spend the night. We dropped our stuff off and headed up to summit Mount Pierce, a 4310' peak about 5 miles south of Mt. Washington. It was close to sunset by the time we got to the summit and the view was absolutely spectacular! Washington was a bit clouded in, but I still got some great pictures.



(top, on the Crawford Path: bottom, view of Mount Washington [clouded in] from Pierce)

The overnight at Nauman was pleasant, and mostly dry, but a little chilly. The tentsite is adjacent to the AMC's Mizpah hut. We broke down and headed back up to Mizpah cut-off, then south on the Webster Cliff trail to Mount Jackson (4052'). The weather was gray and it drizzled on us a little, but we had some decent views from Jackson.

(above: the crew at Mizpah hut)

As we hiked down from Jackson, the sky cleared and the sun came out, making for a real nice trip down. We took a short side trail up to an amazing overlook of the notch (photo below). This trip was awesome and really made me want to do more overnight trips, so I'm making it a goal next summer to do more backpacking trips.



I did one more hike this fall, a solo at Wachusett Mountain state reservation. I'd always wanted to hike Mount Wachusett (2006'), and I had Columbus day off and no plans, so I figured I'd hike it myself. I thought I'd have a nice solitary day, but there were TONS of people on the mountain. It was great though - the foliage was in full swing, views from the top were great (Boston and Mount Monadnock are visible from the summit), and I realized I enjoy hiking solo, despite all the other folks on the mountain that day. Risking sounding cliche, it was a very zen experience to hike alone & I hope to do it some more.


(view of Mount Monadnock from the summit of Wachusett)

I took some really nice photos on the trails at Wachusett, here's a sampling of them:




That was my hiking season in a nutshell. I do hope to do a little hiking over the winter, but primarily I'll probably snowboard/snowshoe when I can. I'm hoping to be able to do a hike on New Year's day, but that depends on what New Year's eve brings, lol. I'm already starting to think about Team Badassa's yearly Mount Monadnock hike, which will probably happen in April sometime. Can't wait! We've done Monadnock for the last 3 years as the kick-off to the hiking season.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and happy holidays to all!