I grew up in the shadow of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County. I explored fire roads and trails, even sneaking onto the peak the night before high school graduation with friends and then toasting the sunrise with oranges and champagne before hiking down to the Mountain Theater for graduation. I also grew up in the […]
Get Out
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Running Your Own Race
The virtual 5K has been around since long before COVID. It’s a pretty simple idea, if you think about it. In this day and age, when you can have a robot vacuum automatically clean your house every day, or order all your groceries on an app and have them delivered to your car, why are […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
A Walk with the Departed
Mist floats along the grass, flowing around headstones and disappearing with a swirl as it meets the afternoon sun. Instead of searching for gauzy materializations down long hallways, I stroll local cemeteries for restless spirits. First is lumber magnate William Coleman Carson (1825-1912). If any house should be haunted, it’s his magnificent Victorian, the Carson […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Sea To Summit: Grasshopper Peak
The general consensus among most cyclists is that once you ride Grasshopper Peak in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, you can check it off your bucket list and not repeat it. But that’s not how it went for me. Earlier in the summer I had joined some friends to climb 10,000 feet in one day, which […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Trinidad Toil
Every day, locals and visitors wind up and down the trails to Trinidad State Beach. As I walked to the break in the red curb at the end of the parking lot off Stagecoach Road, I anticipated some killer views. It is Trinidad after all. What I did not expect was a close footpath that […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Sea to Summit: Salmon Mountain
My alarm went off at 3:30 a.m. I immediately questioned why I torture my heavy limbs and black hole of a mind in this way. Then I remembered that Lizzie Odell was sleeping in the guest room of our small house, and her dad Errin was waiting for us at Freshwater Lagoon. The plan for […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Get Out into the Fog
If someone had told me 20 years ago that I would come to love fog, to find solace in its soft and moist embrace, I would have dismissed the prediction. As a young adult, for 10 years I lived in Milan, which is located in the Po River Valley, land of impenetrable fog. During the […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
COVID Wraps Crabs’ Season Early
The 2021 Humboldt Crabs season has come to an abrupt end, with the final two games of the season canceled due to two positive cases among team personnel. The decision came Saturday afternoon about an hour before the team was set to meet for batting practice and it brought an early end to a memorable […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Slugging Toward the Sunset
Arcata Ball Park has seen its fair share of excitement over the summer and this week was no exception. A winning streak extended to 11 games, pitchers took to the field as position players, a player sang the national anthem and a home run record fell as the season started to wind down for the […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Sea to Summit: Signal Peak
My planning for Signal Peak began with, “Where is this?” I had never heard of Signal Peak before. It’s to the southwest of Black Lassic, sort of behind it as you approach from the northwest. There are several routes, all of them challenging. I didn’t want to go alone, but wasn’t sure who else might […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Sea to Summit: Trinidad
Sara and I are very different. The first time I met this gorgeous woman was at 2 a.m. in a wide pasture after a birthday party that was quite a celebration. She was almost silent and I didn’t think much about it. More time went by and Sara came to Costa Rica with three other […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Sea to Summit Part 2: Barry Ridge
Preparing for the next leg of the 10 Sea to Summit challenges, a series of human-powered Humboldt adventures starting at the ocean (“Sea to Summit Part 1: Bald Mountain,” April 22), I had to research the location of Barry Ridge, only to realize it was a short jaunt off my regular cycling route up Kneeland […]