Backpacking, Hiking & Camping

Posted by Jeff Wetherington

In today's Internet atmosphere the emphasis is on interaction, especially social interaction between those who have similar interests but may be scattered around the globe. That emphasis is what drives sites like Flickr, MySpace and others.

EveryTrail is a free online web 2.0 platform that allows hikers, backpackers and other outdoor enthusiasts to visualize and share trail trips using GPS coordinate data, digital photos and location-based notes overlaid on interactive maps.

Once you register (FREE!), you can download the EveryTrail GPS Connector program (very small), connect your GPS unit and upload the coordinates, then upload digital photos that you can drop right into the interactive map along with notes about the pictures, trail or adventure under the Create Trip section.

But that's not all. You can also Browse Trips and enjoy the adventures that others have posted. At this point they have the following categories to browse: Hiking, Running, Road biking, Driving, Mountain biking, Walking, Trail running, Mountaineering, and Sailing. Right now, about 50% of the users are in the U.S. with 25% in Europe, 20% in Asia and the remaining users in Latin America, Australia and New Zealand, so you can truly browse entries from around the world.

The site creators have also recently added a blog to keep users abreast of additions and changes on the site, as well as related news.

I just got a Magellan Maestro 4040 GPS and a Nikon D40 digital SLR camera, so I'm really looking forward to adding my next trail hike to EveryTrail.com.

Posted by Jeff Wetherington

This Saturday, June 2, 2007, will mark the 15th anniversary of the American Hiking Society's National Trails Day. Events are hosted by trail and hiking groups, community service organizations, various public and private agencies, and businesses across the nation. Last year, a record 1,210 events were registered with and sanctioned by the American Hiking Society from coast to coast here in America.

National Trails Day takes place to encourage the American public to get off the couch and hit the hiking or walking tails in their area. Events will include group hikes, gear demonstrations, instructional seminars and the opportunity to take part in volunteer efforts to maintain, repair or clean up hiking trails around this great country. Events are scheduled to take place in all 50 states, as well as in Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands. Our neighbor to the north, Canada, is also taking part in the celebration.

Events will also include special activities for children (Girl Scouts can earn the "Get With the Land" patch) and for the first time this year there will be a National Trails Day Photo Contest, so be sure to bring your camera and send your best shot in for judging.

If you're an experienced hiker, this is an excellent opportunity to bring a friend who is new to hiking or trail walking and familiarize them with your favorite outdoor activity.

You can find all the events taking place in your part of the country by clicking on the Search for an Event in Your Area link on the website.

Get out this Saturday and celebrate National Trails Day 2007.

Posted by Jeff Wetherington

If you've spent any amount of time in the outdoors hiking, backpacking or camping, you know it's not unusual to be bitten or stung by various insects, plants or animal life. It goes with the territory.

But in certain parts of the United States, particularly the south central and midwestern areas, the Brown Recluse Spider is a part of the ecosystem you will want to avoid.

While living in Oklahoma I had a friend who returned from a camping trip with what she thought was a mosquito bite on her leg, just to the left of her shin bone. At first it presented as just a raised red area that itched, but over the course of a few days she developed a dime-sized hole that extended approximately a quarter-inch into her leg. It turned out that she had been bitten by a Brown Recluse Spider. The bite eventually healed under a doctor's care, but she was left with an indentation in her leg where the bite was located.

The Brown Recluse prefers to stay in dark areas, so in the outdoors they live under rocks, logs, woodpiles and debris. But if they get indoors or in sheltered areas (like your tent) they can be found in sleeping bags, boots, caps or items of clothing. That's another reason why it's always a good idea to get in the practice of shaking out those items before climbing into them or placing them on your body. The Brown Recluse is not an aggressive arachnid, but when finding itself between, say the inside of your boot and your skin, it will bite in self-defense.

While not poisonous (the venom is meant to paralyze its smaller prey), the bite's result on a human is necrosis or tissue death as the venom kills the affected flesh. In most cases, humans will not even feel the bite when it happens, but within 3 to 8 hours the affected area will itch, swell, redden and become pus-filled as the body's defense mechanism seek to fight off the effects of the venom. Though rarely fatal, the bite is painful and can possibly cause a systemic reaction in your body within 24-36 hours that may cause chills, fever, nausea, muscle weakness and joint pain.

Stay safe in the outdoors and avoid the Brown Recluse Spider.

Posted by Jeff Wetherington

The ubiquitous Google has teamed up with Trimble Outdoors to add an outdoor adventure layer to their popular software program Google Earth. This is a multimedia GPS content layer for outdoor adventure seekers that allows Google Earth users to view a variety of information about routes, GPS points, areas of interest, directions, descriptions, photos and even video and audio clips from the trail.

Usage is easy:

1. Start Google Earth

2. Go to "Layers" in the Sidebar on the left.

3. Expand the "Featured Content" folder under "Primary Database".

4. Click the "Trimble Outdoors Trips" checkbox and click as many details as you wish to view.

5. In the main window, pan and zoom into the area of interest to you until you see red lines and dots indicating Trimble Outdoors trips.

6. Continue to zoom in until you see little "Green Hikers".

7. Click on the Greek Hiker and a pop-up window will appear with a wealth data.

For instance, I decided to check out the Suwannee River Trail near White Springs, Florida. It's a trail I have thought about hiking on a future camping trip. Clicking on the Green Hiker icon gives me this information:

Contributed by: Backpacker Magazine

State: Florida

Length: 4.44 mi.

Activity:Backpacking

Difficulty: 5 / 10

Hike easy on a rolling 4.5-mile loop through bluffs and ravines to an oak hammock above this gorgeous riverway in northern Florida.

To Trailhead: Take I-10 W to US 41 N. After 8.5 miles, turn L onto Adams Memorial. Go .3 mile; trailhead is on R.



It also provides me with the option of sending the information to a GPS enabled cell phone, e-mailing the information to a friend (or myself), contributing my own hiking information on this trail (such as photos, videos or audio files) or viewing more information online. The more information online feature provides details such as where fences might cross the trail, where certain plant life may be found and exact GPS coordinates for each description given.

As always, on a Google Earth map, the lower left hand corner provides the GPS coordinates and the elevation of the location where the Green Hiker icon is located.

This Outdoor Adventure layer addition to Google Earth will allow hikers, backpackers, mountain bikers and running enthusiasts to access a wide variety of information on a new (or even a familiar) trail before ever stepping out the door.

Posted by Jeff Wetherington

Renowned film maker Ken Burns, whose works include The Civil War, Jazz, Baseball and Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as 12 other film documentaries, is in the process of producing and directing a major documentary series entitled "The National Parks" which is scheduled to premiere on PBS stations in the fall of 2009. As in his past productions, Burns will be using archival film records to make his documentary less of a nature or travelogue show and more of a truly American experience.

And for that he need your help.

Here is an excerpt from The National Parks Traveler web site, which has details on submissions and what you'll receive (aside from the thrill of seeing your home video in a Ken Burns documentary) if your submission is used;

"...it will tell the very powerful, human story of how the parks came into being and what they have meant to Americans for more than a hundred years. It will be filled with major historical figures - from John Muir to Theodore Roosevelt to Ansel Adams - but it will also tell the stories of many lesser-known Americans, from cowboys to immigrant artists, wealthy philanthropists to dirt-poor farmers who turned their passion for a part of the American landscape into crusades for their permanent protection.

To help them tell this story, they would like to collect home movies of visits to National Parks by families and individuals for possible use in the film. They are looking for home movies from the time period of the 1920s through the 1980s and are most interested in footage of families and tourists in the parks."

The proposed ten hour series will seek to chronicle the human history of five of America's most important and popular National Parks (Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Acadia, and Great Smoky Mountains) as well as the unforgettable Americans who played a role in their existence. Home videos made in these parks and taken between the 1920's and the 1980's will be the most sought after films.

This is your chance to be a part of a great documentary series and indeed, a part of what will become a piece of Americana.

Posted by Jeff Wetherington

USA Today recently ran an article about the latest outdoor craze being made available by tour operators and outdoor resorts; luxury camping known as "Glamping" or Glamorous Camping.

Yes, there are tents, but they have Persian Rugs on the ground and are more like cocktail party canopies. No sleeping bags, but there are extra-length beds with fluffy pillows, crisp, clean sheets and warm blankets. Electricity is standard. Some offer saunas and hot tubs. And meal time? Well there's no cooking over an open campfire. Instead, you can head for the mess tent and indulge that appetite you worked up by sitting in the jeep during the game drive by filling your bone china plate with haute cuisine and sitting at a table covered by a linen tablecloth.

All this can be yours for the paltry sum of $4,100 per person, double occupancy for a 3 day trip.

So, whatever happened to "roughing it" and "getting away from it all"? The lure of camping for me has always been the experience of leaving civilization (or most of it, anyway) behind to enjoy the beauty and allure of nature. There is also the aspect of a hiking or camping trip being a chance to exercise the need to be self-sustaining, at least in some small part. Granted, I don't hunt game and prepare it to eat, but I do erect my own shelter, prepare my own food, build my own fire, and sleep with not much more than a sleeping bag and pad between myself and the hard, uneven earth.

I hate to break it to these "Glampers", but while what they're doing may indeed be glamorous, it's definitely not camping.

Posted by Jeff Wetherington

As people who enjoy fresh air and being in the midst of nature, the opportunity to perform volunteer service for agencies or organizations in the great outdoors is a fantastic thing for us. That's just become a lot easier because online outdoor gear supplier REI.com has created a way for people looking for volunteer opportunities to search and sign up for available events in their own local area.

Partnering with VolunteerMatch, REI provides connection to more than 400 nonprofit organizations, clubs and groups that make conservation and outdoor issues their focal point. Here's how the system works:

Go to REI.com/volunteer and enter your zip code, then choose the distance to include from your zip code and your area of interest from drop-down menus. You also have the option of entering keywords and particular skills, as well as narrowing the search to certain demographic groups. Click search and watch the returns pop up. I was able to find 57 outdoor-related volunteer opportunities within 20 miles of my home.

Take advantage of REI's service to look for volunteer opportunities in your area.

Posted by Jeff Wetherington

If you asked most children today what their preferred activities are, most likely the majority of them would say; watching TV, being on the computer, surfing the Internet, talking or texting on a cell phone with friends and playing their X-Box or Nintendo. The one common factor in these activities is that they almost exclusively take place indoors with creature comforts close at hand. Sort of like that commercial where the tired and perspiring dad tells his son that he's finally finished building the treehouse, only to have the son, who is sitting in the comfort of the family SUV, ask if it has plush leather seats and a DVD player. When told "No" by the dad the son looks at his friend and the comfort of their surroundings in the SUV and declares, "I think we're good here".

Last year, the state of Connecticut, in conjunction with the State Parks and Forests and the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, created a program called "No Child Left Behind" and designed to help children connect with the outdoors and nature, with the hope that an effective result will be to create the next generation of environmentally and ecologically conscious citizens. Now communities and states across the nation such as Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area, St. Louis, Florida, Wyoming, Colorado and Texas have begun to institute similar campaigns. In addition, the U.S. Forest Service has begun a pilot program called "More Kids In The Woods", a direct response to author Richard Louv's 2005 book "Last Child in the Woods - Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder".

If your child knows more about computers than they do about camping, they're exactly the audience that the "No Child Left Behind" campaign is searching for and hoping to imbue with the wonder of discovering all the treasures of the great outdoors.

Posted by Jeff Wetherington

About 80 miles north of the Kennedy Space Center and the same distance south of Jacksonville, Florida on a peninsula of land that juts out into the confluence of the Tomoka Halifax Rivers is the Tomoka State Park. This 1800 acre park is named after the Timucuan Indians, a group of Native Americans who inhabited the area (as well as most of Northeast Florida) centuries ago. In the early 1600's Spanish Explorers found the Timucua living on this peninsula in a village called Nocoroco, which no longer exists. The most prominent reminder of this Native American people are shell middens; mounds of oyster and snail shells (a primary staple of the Timucuan diet) that can reach 40 feet in height at the banks of the rivers.

Today, visitors to this Florida State Park can hike, camp and picnic beneath the same shade of Live Oak trees (the largest stand of old growth Live Oak in Eastern Florida) that the Timucuans did. The Fred Dana Marsh Museum houses works by artist Fred Dana Marsh as well as exhibits on the ecology and history of Tomoka State Park.

Outdoor activities at the park include:

Camping - 100 campsites with picnic table, grill, electric and water.

Nature Trails - Trod the same ground that ancient Native Americans did hundreds of years ago.

Picnicking - 5 separate picnic areas throughout the park with covered pavilions and grills.

Boating - Caution is the word of the day when boating on the nearby rivers and tributaries because all of the waters in the vicinity of Tomoka State Park are designated as manatee sanctuaries. Idle and slow speeds are strictly enforced by park rangers and Florida Fish and Wildlife officers.

Canoeing - Rentals are available.

Fishing - 90 different species of fish have been identified in the Tomoka River.

Tomoka State park offers a unique opportunity to combine outdoor activities in a historical environment.

Posted by Jeff Wetherington

The Continental Divide Trail, at approximately 3,100 miles long and stretching from Canada to Mexico through the United States, is the most rugged long-distance National Scenic Trail in the country. On average, only 2 dozen hikers each year attempt to hike the entire trail which averages approximately 6 months to complete. The Trail crosses through five western states; Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico and as many ecological, topographical and climatic varieties.

In the February 2007 issue of Backpacker Magazine, Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Dorn writes in his Editor's Notes column that the CDT lacks one important feature of a long-distance hiking trail; an official map. In fact, more than one third of the CDT remains unsigned, undetermined and unmapped. Some portions that ARE mapped, are confusing in their directions and the presence of multiple trails running from one point to another.

And that's where YOU can help.

Dorn states, "We want to put readers on the CDT this summer and get as much of the trail mapped as possible...The goal is a Forest Service-approved map that eliminates route confusion and gives hikers a definitive document for trip planning. It's a unique opportunity to make hiking history."

Indeed, it is. Imagine being able to tell your grandchildren one day that YOU helped to map the Continental Divide Trail in 2007! Jeff, you ask, how can I get on one of these mapping teams? I'm glad you asked.

"Over the next few months", Dorn reveals, "We'll pick about 200 applicants to join Backpacker editors and CDTA volunteers for a week of hiking and mapping. We'll split you into teams, provide GPS units and training, load you up with free gear, and assign your team a specific section of the trail."

Here's how to apply: go to backpacker.com/cdtmap and fill out the questionnaire no later than March 30, 2007. Winners will be notified by May 1st. Maybe we'll see each other on the Continental Divide trail this Summer!