In his 1958 novel The Dharma Bums Jack Kerouac's main narrator, Ray Smith, takes a trip out of San Francisco with fellow zen poet and general mountain-man friend, Japhy Ryder, to climb the Matterhorn in the Sierra Nevada. I read the book following a field trip to the
Yosemite Valley is simply the grandest example of vertical granite cliff faces to be found anywhere on earth. It is home to both Half Dome and El Capitan, iconic and instantly recognisable features, as well as innumerable other climbing objectives, hiking trails, and waterfalls. It is incised by the Merced
I quit smoking in January 2024 and barring one or two exceptions I have stuck to it. However, if there is one thing which will drive me back to cigarettes, it is the mosquitoes in California's Sierra Nevada mountains. One of the above-mentioned lapses was in the climbing
I am, at heart, a sea-level boy. I have lived nearly my entire adult life within an arm's reach of the ocean, never directly on the coast but always unconsciously dictated to by the tide. It is a big change to come to the mountains, real mountains, where
When you see a bear, the correct response is to stand your ground and yell loudly. Black bears can, in theory, be found all throughout the Pacific Crest Trail, however it is usually assumed that they do not pose a problem for hikers until the end of the southern California