I didn't even know he was dead (these several years).
From the obituary, a story illustrating why thinking about things doesn't really work. Two years later, to contemplate whether he should marry his girlfriend, Mr. Fletcher took a long hike -- from Mexico to Oregon. It inspired his first book, "The Thousand-Mile Summer" (Random House, 1964). The marriage lasted a few weeks.
The Complete Walker is a very enjoyable and informative read and I read the hell out of the 1984 edition. My first wife took it with her when she left me to go on a cross-country road trip with her best girl friend. Never did get it back. RIP.
My edition is also the third (1984) edition, which I read in extensively years before going on any hikes, much less backpacking trips.
His coauthor for the fourth edition has a rare combination of honors:
- USFS National Primitive Skills Award
- 1999 Poetry Prize from the Mountain and Plains Booksellers Association
- Stegner Fellowship
I read what must have been the 2nd edition of The Complete Walker when I was a teenager (borrowed it from a hippie clergyman). I have followed a lot of his advice over the years, though I never felt the same compulsion to use a walking stick, nor did I share his aversion to carrying a tent. I've also never followed his suggestion of hiking naked, though I suppose I've never hiked alone in a place remote enough to dare.
Thanks to the Complete Walker, my first camping stove was a Svea 123, and I still have the Sigg cooking pots my parents gave me for my 16th birthday. That book (gently) changed my life. And Chip Rawlins, the co-author of the last edition, wrote a couple of outstanding books about living/working in western Wyoming.
To OP: No.
Prose isn't always prosaic.
Uncles aren't always avuncular.
Humans aren't always humane.
I feel like I should have heard of this guy before, but I hadn't.
though I never felt the same compulsion to use a walking stick
I hiked for the first time with poles recently and man do they make a difference. I used to look on the people walking about with them as old lame-os but now I see that they're really quite useful (which means that I myself have become old and lame).
The Man Who Walked Through Time is a classic.
I've also never followed his suggestion of hiking naked,
A friend and I spent a few days hiking naked in the Ventana Wilderness above Big Sur. It was pretty liberating in its way, but not something I have done since. Didn't encounter a soul.
I hiked for the first time with poles recently and man do they make a difference.
You should have asked teraz. I'm sure he'd have been happy to accompany you.
||
Atrios sums up this Tom Brokaw "Anglo-Saxons who speak English are awesome" thing well, tom brokaw, at age 4, was the most decorated soldier of WWII.
|>
||
Cloudy here on an otherwise well-set up Perseid peak. Not that much of the US is having good viewing skies.
|>
16: Conditions are looking pretty good here right now. We'll see if that holds up.
Yeah, I wasn't including the asterisked parts of the US.
Not since Obama murdered the clouds, no.
Not the clouds! We need those for rain!
I can't remember if I've read any Colin Fletcher books, or even which ones I own. He seemed appealing, but then I stopped being a frequent hiker or book reader.
||
shiiiiiit I forgot about the toronado 25th anniversary do!
|>
hiking naked in the Ventana Wilderness above Big Sur
Holy poison oak, Batman!
"Buy our cheap plastic bird! It's just like having a real pet but easier!"
In Perseid news, it's clouded over pretty significantly here in the past few hours, so seeing anything is looking pretty unlikely.
The temples at Khajuraho are pornate.
29: Some people really know how to do religion.
19: As I said in 18.
24: Also thorns and other pokey things. It did lead to paying attention to foliage impinging on your intended route at a more detailed level than usual.
A friend and I spent a few days hiking naked in the Ventana Wilderness above Big Sur.
This post is useless without photos.
34, 35: Wow, you looked through those more thoroughly than I did. Actually, neither of us had a camera along.
It was kind of a pivotal trip for me, fall of 1986 and we had just had our first kid plus I had the job offer in Pittsburgh that I ultimately accepted. So took off to the hills with an old college friend to sort out my own feelings on it And despite being in such great surroundings decided I'd prefer to go back to P'burgh (my wife was also leaning that way).
I spent the night in a Super 8 in rural-ish Nebraska with broken wifi, no cell signal, and no beer and I'm still wondering why I live in Pittsburgh.
37: My favorite Great Plains motel stay was in the fabulous Iowa Suite in the All States Motel in Springfield, Colorado (before wifi and cells). It had some interesting architectural features including no lip between the shower and the bathroom floor--just a low spot with the drain between them (I have no idea). Also the lone TV channel seemed to only have Japanese women's wrestling (we got there sort of late). On an expense account*!
*I just realized it was on the driving trip cross-country associated with my move from California to Pittsburgh. And since I had induced two friends to come with** and they showed up on a motel receipt the company only reimbursed me for 1/3 of the cost of the trip...
**My wife had flown on ahead. One of my most vivid memories is of leaving her on the sidewalk at LAX in some kind of reverse-Okie/yuppie tableau with a 4-month-old, two cats in carriers, car seat and a pile of luggage for them to live a month with my folks. It was our plan; "No one will turn away a lady with a baby and cats", I kept reminding her. In the event it worked very well***.
***The car trip not so much, being characterized by breakdowns, madness and monotony.
37 reminds me, did urple ever have his meeting with the rural counsel?
38.3: that's funny. I did the same thing, sending Bonsaisue out ahead of me (with a baby and a cat) while I finalized my thesis before moving to dc.
41: Thank goodness it wasn't my other husband. Or something.
I tried hiking with poles for the first time just recently (note lack of capitalization). I didn't find them particularly useful on uphills, they were annoying when on anything that wasn't steeply inclined, but they were really nice on steep descents with poor footing though I was occasionally worried I'd pole vault myself off the path and over a cliff.
did urple ever have his meeting with the rural counsel?
--You fool! Urple is dead!
Now that I've been left in suspense by the ending of The Rural Counsel, I can't wait for the premiere of Part II: The Rural Juror.
Anyway, not that I've been thinking a lot about this naked hiking*, but I was wondering how it came about. Did you set off to hike naked, or just realise that there was no one else around and egg each other on?
*I have.
I don't know if you happen to be in the mood to want to punch a libertarian in the teeth this morning, but if so, this video will help you get cranked up. Fuck these people to hell.
I don't want to punch a libertarian in the teeth, I want to pretend that libertarians don't exist, just for a moment. I've spent the afternoon so far having an MRI* which was noisy and uncomfortable, and now I'm having to throw away a lot of once excellent beer which has gone a year past its sell by date**. I think I shall find some more recent beer and head off to a libertarian free universe.
*On the way I think I saw an Olympic gold medalist wandering along, hands in pockets, looking ineffably bored.
**First world problem.
The gist of it is that, see, Asher Roth wrote a rap about drinking in college, and sometimes people don't finish in exactly four years or less, so Obama's higher education funding is just foolish. Let 'em pay for it! One guy cites the adorable statistic that the average undergraduate debt is only $19,000. Why so much fuss about a measly 19 grand?
At the teaching conference I went to recently, there were a lot of people singing the eternal complaint that undergraduates won't major in the humanities because they are just narrowly interested in making money after college. I repeatedly pointed out that they are graduating with a lot of debt in an economy that is increasingly stratified between rich and poor.
People looked at me like I was Fred Phelps at a gay pride parade. One person specifically quoted the $19k figure at me.
49: Hope the MRI went well. You can mail me any expired beer.
I hate $19,000 too if I owe it. It's a fuckton of money when you're 22 and anybody who thinks otherwise has had the bad kind of brain surgery.
Part of the problem is the way people's personal success distorts their impression of their own past. One person, a very successful academic, said to me, "I graduated with about that much debt. I paid it off. Its not that big a deal."
You can't put a price on the college wage premium! Well, you can, that's the entire point, but it's more than $19,000! Assuming that you can just wait until you retire and then pay the $19,000, of course. If you had to start making payments right away that might be bad.
47: Did you set off to hike naked, or just realise that there was no one else around and egg each other on?
Did not start that way, especially at the trailhead which is fairly well-traveled. But when we were leaving Sykes Hot Springs (~9 miles in) after an early-morning soak (so already naked, you can google more naked pictures of others under "Sykes Hot Springs") my friend (who is more unconventional than I in such things) declared he was going to proceed in the buff and I joined in. We were heading further away from the trailhead and up the ridges mid-week in October so did not expect to meet many people. In the event, we saw no one else for the few days we were up there. I forget where we re-robed on the way back down. For most of the time we were a couple of thousand feet or so above a solid cloud bank. A memorable hiking trip all-around (and driving home we helped a couple of guys get their car back on the road after they had partly driven it over a steep incline.
Did your nakedness extend to your feet, because that would be the deal breaker for me?
OT, but here we go again: Multiple people shot near Texas A&M University
58: No, hiking boots and socks--not barefoot country one bit.
59: Being mid/late October definitely helped mitigate that.
Actually, I don't recall specifically whether we put clothes in the evening and early morning, but I think once we started we stuck with it in a semi-macho kind of way.
So when the pants came off, did you feel a quiet, inward pang of jealousy or superiority?
Old college roommate and someone who had been a close friend after that for years. We had seen each other naked many times previously in a variety of circumstances including more public ones such as skinny-dipping at the rock quarry near Chapel Hill, so any genitalia comparison issues* were long in the past if htey ever existed. He was generally more ready to drop trou than I, but it is only in retrospect that I am identifying this as a "thing".
*I'm trying to recall which Vonnegut book (or was it Heller in Something Happened?**) where a father is talking about telling his son about the effect of foreshortening on perception of your penis compared to others.
**Something from the pre-mirror era, presumably.
I've run across naked hikers in the Sierras more than once. Along the glacier-scoured granite, you'd have less poison oak exposure. I've hiked terrain like that in a swimsuit (and hiking boots) and might consider naked hiking--if there weren't such an excellent chance of meeting other people.
66.2: there's also that bit in A Moveable Feast
There's a link to me sitting naked in a backcountry hot spring in TFA. As, also, a short anecdote illustrating the dangers of skinnydipping in cooler water where one might encounter near strangers. No known photographs of the latter, thankfully.
The year after I left Deep Springs there emerged an annual Naked Death March tradition, in which students hiked the rim of the valley in just their boots. The valley is about the size of Manhattan, FYI.
66.2, 69: Ah, it was Heller in Something Happened:
He probably will not want to swim nude. I know I didn't. If he is like so many of the rest of us, he will think that his cock is small and in danger of vanishing. I will have to tell him, if he lets me, to stare at it in the mirror if he wants to see it look as large as it appears to other people. I will not go into the phenomenon of foreshortening, unless he asks me.
And having just mowed my lawn, IYKWIM, I was noticing* that it is basically the same optical phenomenon which is surely at the root of "the grass is always greener in the other lawn".
*Observing the waxing and waning of the few remnant drought-induced brown areas of my lawn as I approached and withdrew from them.
I've never tried hiking naked, nor do I really feel inclined to try. I have scrambled around naked on steep, sharp rocky 'beaches' on various Mediterranean coasts. Swimming naked is nice and you had to get to the water somehow. So it was just a means to an end.
the glacier-scoured granite
My kind of landscape.
the glacier-scoured granite
My kind of landscape.
Then global warming should be great for you. It brings you lots of new glacier scoured rock with an extra bonus helping of unstable scree.
The scouring of the granite, the nivation in the cirques.
