Author: Rick Mc

Career gymnastics coach who loves the outdoors, and the internet.
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Trail on Kilimanjaro – part 2

Entertaining!

Its day three of Trail Magazine’s attempt on Mt Kilimanjaro via the Machame route, and things are starting to get tough. The mountain is getting seriously spectacular but the air is getting thin and exhaustion is kicking in. As midnight on the last day approaches, will it be a glorious dawn on Africas Highest mountain or a whopper of a disappointment? Join Trail Magazines Simon Ingram to find out…

Click PLAY or watch Part 2 on YouTube.


official website of TRAIL and Country Walking magazines – Live for the Outdoors

To see a 6min highlights clip of Day 1 and Day 2 of the Machame Route, click through to The Adventure Blog.

best hike – Kilimanjaro information page

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avoiding trailhead vehicle break-ins

From Rocky Thompson:

Colorado police arrested a four-person burglary crew that would run a smash-and-grab on cars parked at trailheads. The four thieves-who are kind of like supergroup combination of Bonnie and Clyde plus Thelma and Louise-would wait until hikers had left their cars before smashing windows and stealing credit cards to buy video games and electronics. …

car-broken

The Goat Hikers Targeted by Criminal Masterminds

I’ve tried just about everything over the years, including leaving an empty vehicle unlocked.

There’s no perfect solution. Each trailhead needs be considered individually.

In Hawaii last year I left my rent-a-car miles from the (reportedly dangerous) trailhead at a campground. Walked the extra distance to the trail, for security.

At many trailheads in Canada there’s no worry. Remote hikes in the Rockies are almost all safe.

Leave a comment if you’ve a strategy to share.

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Lost in the Yellowstone

Lost In the Yellowstone: Truman Everts’s Thirty Seven Days of Peril is a surprisingly engaging read. One of the best survival stories ever.

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One Amazon customer review:

21ea4q50hgl_sl500_aa180_Today, being lost in Yellowstone National Park is as simple as turning on the wrong road after you lost your complimentary map or you can not locate the restroom in the Old Faithful complex. For Truman Everts, being lost in Yellowstone was a struggle between life and death. Everts’s account details his 1870 adventure in Yellowstone after finding himself separated from his travelling companions.

The separation began Everts’s thirty-seven day struggle for survival in a pre-developed Yellowstone in which Everts had to find what little food and shelter he could just to survive.

Readers will find this account to be a real-life struggle for survival reminiscent of Jack London’s fictional work. The editor, Lee Whittlesey, does a superb job of editing Everts’s story by providing the reader with additional information and the historical background of the book.

The work is also illustrated with many early day photographs of Yellowstone which provides an stunning visual account of early-day Yellowstone National Park. This book will be appreciated by anyone looking for an exciting true-life adventure story as well as historians of the American West. People who have been “lost” recently in Yellowstone will also appreciate the book, even if their modern-day adventure pales in comparison to Evert’s

His bad luck was horror show. Everything went wrong. He was treed one a night by a cougar, for example.

Almost his only food for 37-days was the root of a plant commonly known today as Everts thistle or elk thistle.

It’s a shame he could not catch fish. (He did gulp down a couple of mineral tainted minnows.)

yell-early-anglers

Yellowstone photo from 1923 – National Parks Traveler

related – Yellowstone Park – Lost in the Yellowstone Wilderness: The Story of Truman Everts

related – guidebook – Yellowstone Treasures: The Traveler’s Companion to the National Park

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Travels to the edge with Art Wolfe – Patagonia


GreatOutdoors.com recommended a PBS TV show called Travels to the edge with Art Wolfe.

Art Wolfe, an internationally acclaimed photographer, invites you to experience the world with him as he travels and photographs Patagonia, Peru, Bolivia, Alaska, Ethiopia, Madagascar, India and South Georgia Island. Watch in HD (high definition) as Art captures images of majestic glaciers, expansive deserts, teeming rainforests, remote mountain peaks, and exotic tribal gatherings right on location.

A wonderful sample of the program takes you to the rarely photographed North Face of Mt. Fitz Roy:

Click PLAY or watch a 7min introduction on YouTube.

more videos in higher resolution – Travels to the edge

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camping with Tom Cruise

I knew if I lived long enough, the outdoors would be “cool“.

Celebrities are taking girlfriends on hiking first dates and climbing Kilimanjaro.

From Allie Comeau on the Sierra Trading Post blog:

According to reports, he’s taking Katie Holmes and their daughter, Suri, on a cross-country camping trip this summer.

Photo Credit: Vanity Fair, 2006
Photo Credit: Vanity Fair, 2006

… they’re bringing along a team of bodyguards and a Scientology advisor so they’ll be traveling in more of a troupe than a family (but at least they won’t have to worry about bears). …

Family Camping… with Tom Cruise?

Seems the story started with a post on Backpacker Magazine’s Daily Dirt.

Click through to admire Tom Cruise (the Stalone-like rock climber) in Mission Impossible 2.

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research – health benefits of hiking


From an excellent article by hiking author John McKinney:

“Walk out the door and find good health. There is no fever that a 10-mile hike can’t cure,” suggests Garrison Keillor, the wry host of National Public Radio’s Prairie Home Companion.

Millions of Americans who like to hike believe that hiking contributes to good physical and mental health. And yet, until recently, nearly all evidence offered for the benefits of taking a hike was anecdotal, and very little hiking-specific scientific research supported that belief.

hiking Mt. Washington, BC by ski lift
hiking Mt. Washington, BC by ski lift

In 2004, Austrian researchers announced the results of an intriguing study demonstrating that different types of hiking have different influences on the fats and sugars in the blood. For the study, one group hiked up a ski resort mountain in the Alps and descended by cable car, while the other group rode the cable car up and hiked down. After two months of hiking, the groups switched hiking programs and repeated the experiment.

As expected, hiking uphill proved to be a great workout and provided measurable health benefits. Unexpectedly, researchers from the Vorarlberg Institute for Vascular Investigation and Treatment discovered that hiking downhill also has unique benefits.

Both uphill and downhill hiking reduced LDL (“bad”) cholesterol. Only hiking uphill reduced triglyceride levels. The study’s surprise finding was that hiking downhill was nearly twice as effective as uphill hiking at removing blood sugars and improving glucose tolerance. A second study of uphill/downhill hiking was conducted this summer, but results have yet to be announced.

… read more – Miller-McCune – For Good Health: Take a Hike!

(via Backpacker)