Writing and Driving: Notes from 1000 RPMs

We'd picked up a hitchhiker on the way out of Mammoth. He was wearing a dark suit, a pressed white shirt and tie, and a porkpie hat. He held up a document folder on which he'd written: INDEPENDENCE (THE TOWN).

Read the whole story at The Traveler's Notebook...

How to Make Your Own Skis (and why there might be a revolution in it)

Christian Pondella photoAS PART OF A TYPICALLY GRANDIOSE AND SPLASHY roundup in Skiing Magazine entitled "The Future of Skiing: The 28 people, products, and inventions revolutionizing our sport," writer Rob Story summarily dismissed "that mohawked dude in the Mammoth parking lot who’ll fire up power tools and cut you a pair of skis during lunch if you slide him $300."

Here's why we think Mr. Story missed the point.

And hey, if you missed it in the print mag, here's my feature from the winter issue of Eastside on the time I went down to Olancha to meet Michael and try the whole thing out for myself.

Twilight of the Travel Guidebook?

Flickr photo by AltemarkARE GUIDEBOOKS STILL WORTH THE PAPER THEY'RE PRINTED ON?

Maybe. Fact is, they're still considerably cheaper to start a fire with than an iPhone.

Here's the thing: my publisher, Countryman Press, wants to do a 2nd Edition of Yosemite, the Southern Sierra Nevada and Death Valley. Which is good news, of course. But the question arises: in the age of GPS, Wi-Fi, googlemaps and lithium-ion batteries, what makes a travel book worth the cost of the paper it's printed on?

Read more about what the next incarnation might look like at The Traveler's Notebook. Your honest input sincerely appreciated.

Early Spring, Eureka Dunes

A STURDY WIND GUSTED IN over the Saline range, stirring up the dunes on the west side of the basin. The boys lounged in the lee of the truck while I unloaded and pitched camp. A few road warriors gunned by on dirt bikes, in full, dust-caked body armor, on their way to and from Steel Pass and the road to the springs. Otherwise, we had the whole of the basin to ourselves.

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Yosemite from the Air

Flickr upload by Mike Wiacek.This one comes to us by way of our friend Steven Bumgardner. Note the Long Valley Caldera and the White Mountains in the upper right-hand corner. Click the photo to download a big high-res version.

On Promoting Our National Parks

Toward an appreciation of Half Dome. Yosemite LocalIt will be objected that a constantly increasing population makes resistance and conservation a hopeless battle. This is true. Unless a way is found to stabilize the nation's population, the parks cannot be saved. Or anything else worth a damn. Wilderness preservation, like a hundred other good causes, will he forgotten under the overwhelming pressure of a struggle for mere survival and sanity in a completely urbanized, completely industrialized, ever more crowded environment. For my own part I would rather take my chances in a thermonuclear war than live in such a world.

— Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 1968

YOU'VE PROBABLY NEVER HEARD OF THE NATIONAL PARKS PROMOTION COUNCIL. I hadn’t either, until the other day, just a few weeks before National Parks Week, when I received a press release, ostensibly from Washington D.C. (but sent from the email address of a California-based independent P.R. professional, the "Interim Executive Director"), proclaiming the formation of a “new organization to promote America’s National Parks.”

In anticipation of the busiest summer in the history of the national parks, read on at The Traveler's Notebook...