10,000 Miles

Ten years ago today, my then-girlfriend, now-wife Kelly and I went to Palomar Mountain State Park for a five mile hike. That hike proved to be the first five miles of what would eventually come a successful attempt to hike 1,000 miles in a calendar year. Today, I start a new decade after hiking my …

The Afoot and Afield Challenge

This week I tossed out the idea of an Afoot and Afield San Diego County challenge. When I say "tossed out," I mean I created a detailed spreadsheet with 100 routes that would give hikers a taste of everything great that San Diego County has to offer. In this blog, I'm going to lay out …

2020 in Review

2020 is over (thank god), and it's time to look back on another year of hiking. This was my ninth year of hiking since I began keeping track, writing about my adventures, etc. It's had its ups and downs, but with all of that, I still got to enjoy 678.5 miles on the trail. Here …

Mental Hygiene

In March of 2020, COVID-19 closures began altering our lives in fundamental ways. At the time, I was unusually active on social media in an attempt to clarify and distill information on what was open and what wasn't open anymore. During that time, I heard a common refrain among folks in the hiking community who …

Lorraine, the Entitled

I've been arguing on the internet again, guys. This morning, a lady on a Facebook group had some very strong feelings about ongoing closures at Yosemite National Park. This lady - let's call her Lorraine - was angry because she wanted to go to Yosemite, but the park has so far been vague on when …

Lessons from the Trail

By virtue of spending a mildly obscene amount of time on hiking trails over the last decade, I've had a lot of time to ruminate in the midst of an astonishing array of hiking experiences. Because I'm one of those people who seeks out patterns in everything, from which I often derive analogies, I've been …

Trip Report: Whale Peak

This weekend, I took a trip out to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park to take an overnight hike up to Whale Peak with my friends, Jim and Alex. As with any hike into Anza-Borrego, this was also an opportunity for me to re-scout a few routes (5, in this case) for a possible 6th edition. I …

Sequoia

When I was 19 years old, I worked in a grocery store that often kept me late hours into the night. Much of the time, I would be awake until 4 in the morning. On one of those late mornings, I found myself aimlessly rifling through the cabinets where my parents kept family photo albums. …

Trip Report: Indian Creek and Garnet Peak

Note: Most of these photos were either from January of 2015 or June of 2015. In early January, I re-scouted the Indian Creek and Garnet Peak routes from Afoot and Afield as part of an extremely casual re-hiking of the entire book. Of course, we'll see if I really re-hike the whole thing. Jerry Schad …

Trip Report: Long Canyon and Desert View

Note: Fall color photos are from November 2014. The photo of Thunder Valley is from June 2018.  In the most casual way possible, I've been re-hiking the 5th edition of Afoot and Afield in case there ends up being a 6th edition at some point in the future. I'm not approaching anything in a systematic …