Year: 2026

Bear Lakes Basin Traverse: Part 5

August 31, 2026

Part 5: the loop closes—down through Granite Park and past Honeymoon Lake to the Pine Creek trailhead, full circle.
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Bear Lakes Basin Traverse: Part 4

August 30, 2026

Part 4: two high passes in a day—Dancing Bear and Italy—over car-sized boulders, then down into idyllic Granite Park to camp.
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Bear Lakes Basin Traverse: Part 3

August 29, 2026

Part 3: the crux day—up and over Class 2 Feather Pass into the Bear Lakes Basin, the remote heart of the High Sierra, with Seven Gables beyond.
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Bear Lakes Basin Traverse: Part 2

August 28, 2026

Part 2: over Pine Creek Pass and down into French Canyon to Merriam Lake, where a day and a half of rain finally breaks in a red sky.
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Bear Lakes Basin Traverse: Part 1

August 27, 2026

Part 1 of an off-trail traverse through the Sierra’s Bear Lakes Basin: up Pine Creek in the rain, to a first camp below Upper Pine.
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Backpacking to Heart Lake and Chickenfoot Lake

August 16, 2026

For the two older kids, this was supposed to be a breeze of a trip—one to two mile days, relatively flat, and many rest breaks. I intentionally picked this short flattish trail, because while Rakesh and his kids, Noah and Siri, have gone backpacking before, to Hilton Creek Lakes on a moderately strenuous hike, this…
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James Peak Wilderness

August 3, 2026

Planning This trip can be considered a twenty-year celebration, when in 2006, Brad first joined me on a backpacking trip. The other special thing about this excursion is that I chatted with artificial intelligence to plan it. From the beginning, I asked Claude.ai for suggestions for a loop or in-and-out trail within two hours of…
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Mapmaking of the High Sierra

May 29, 2026

I asked Claude.ai to help me, and in doing so, I learned to use QGIS, downloaded tiles and layers from the USGS, and manipulated them. With Claude’s help, I merged tiles, generated raster files, extracted DEM (digital elevation model) to create new contour lines, and added hillside shading. Then, I grabbed place name labels, shapefiles…
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First Utah Ski Trip

February 14, 2026

We’ve heard a lot about this place called Brian Head in Utah. Everyone tells us that it’s family-friendly, and we finally ventured out there. It’s only a little farther than Mammoth. Because Mammoth is in California, and getting to Brian Head involves crossing three state boundaries (California to Nevada to Arizona to Utah), it sounds…
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Black Rock and Jumbo Rocks at Joshua Tree

February 1, 2026

Getting a campsite reservation in Joshua Tree National Park is fairly elusive, especially on weekends for this time of year. A few weeks ago, at the nudging of the kids, I started browsing for sites, and to my surprise, a single site was available in Jumbo Rocks, so I grabbed it. We decided on two…
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