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The Ossipee Pine Barrens are New Hampshire's "last intact pitch pine–scrub oak woodland natural community, a globally rare forest type." The pitch pines need fire to reproduce and The Nature Conservancy does a good job with its controlled burns. They have a few miles of hiking trails through...

I saw Infinite Storm this afternoon in a downtown Boston theater with a huge screen. There was one other person besides the two of us, so ideal viewing. If you can suspend your disbelief, you may find it affecting. We did. The Slovenian Alps, unsmoothed by glaciers, don't much resemble the...

That description is seriously out of date. That view earned Mt. Wolf a spot on the 52WAV (With A View) list, but it had already largely grown in 10 years ago and is unlikely to be better today. That "summit ledge" isn't at the summit, incidentally, which is wooded and off-trail. Makes no...

Congratulations! Welcome to the world of midweek hiking and lots of other excellent midweek activities that beat working. You celebrated most appropriately. Sentinel is indeed a great little view hike on a sunny day.

An avalanche on Going-to-the-Sun Road on Memorial Day stranded 8 cyclists for 8 hours. The linked article also says that the earliest predicted opening date is June 22, which was last year's date. Someone also sent me a 4-second clip of an avalanche about 10 yards from a viewing area on GTTS...

Last year, Going to the Sun Road opened on June 22 - four days before we got there. It is well worth waiting for, and the NPS website gives current status. We spent the better part of a day driving to and from and hiking around Waterton Lakes National Park, which is simply Glacier NP on the...

Our experience is first-hand, as we hiked around there for three days last summer, although not on the trails you name. The trails near the Lake offer great views. John's Lake Loop is a "local favorite" that offers a variety of great sights with slight effort. Avalanche Lake is another justly...

Many great hikes and views around Lake McDonald, near the west entrance. A big forest fire in '17 denuded lots of that area but that adds to the visibility and there are areas that escaped. You can also catch a boat from the Lake McDonald Lodge, which is nice. Here is a link to the NPS...

Hiking yields friendships that are strong, if brief. My hikes with Pierre, who typically would have driven from Montreal through an ice-storm to sleep for two hours at a trailhead, never varied. He was and probably still is the Energizer Rabbit, buzzing away at all times.

Well, you juxtaposed them. What the hell's the difference? You also threw me off. I read these things casually and mistakenly thought you were referring to a contemporary hike, not something during the extraordinary Sandy shutdown. You're ranting about a hurricane when there is none. No...

We the people own Federal lands, the Federal Government in effect acting as our trustee. The fact that some of our trustee's employees may not be working, per se, is irrelevant to our going on those lands. The OP's equation of cutting Joshua Trees with a hike on the Ammonoosuc Trail baffled...

That Halls Ledge view appeared to have been fairly recently clear-cut on my 2012 hike, and not by a stray public benefactor. (I agree with you on how those tend to be thanked.) You may be right about the Hutmans ruined hut, but I don't think I was just guessing. I had some reason for thinking...

Motivated both by red-lining and by obscure trail-sign curiosity, I hiked the Hutmens/Halls Ledge loop on a sunny day in June 2012. The Old Hutmens Association was (is?) the alumni group for the generations of hearty youths who have staffed the AMC White Mtn. "huts". They had a cabin on the...

Freezing degrades the material, in my experience at least. After wrecking a couple of bladders by freezing them repeatedly I settled for getting them as dry as I easily could, then forgetting about them. That has worked, with no mold in quite a few years.

Columbus weekend always seems to be great at Baxter. I've spent all but two of my last 15 there, joining a group that has been doing that for 40 years. This year, half of the group did the Hunt-Abol loop to Baxter Peak on Saturday, so they may have passed you. The rest of us did the Doubletop...

A pair of smallish black bears scampered across the Scudder Trail - one of those relatively obscure Randolph Village Trails - about 20 feet ahead of me, four summers ago. My only concern came from the possibility that I was wrong that they were adolescents out on their own, not mere cubs. So I...

That radio from the wreck was on the summit cairn on my first visit in '06 but gone when I returned in '11. For a solemn place like that, where the wreck is a memorial to the seven men who died there, souvenir-hunters are a bane. It may be my imagination, but I seemed to see fewer small...

Have you ruled out a monopod, as an attractive compromise for such uses? A multi-stage collapsible unit will fit in any pack and give you much of the benefit of a tripod. Better than those flexible "GorillaPods" because it gives you the option of various heights - over five feet on the one I...

Only an extremely fit hiker could make it up to the North Rim and back from the River in a day. The only Trail - North Kaibab - is roughly twice as long as the two from the South Rim, at 14 miles one way, and 1,000 extra vertical feet - 5,850'. Halfway up to Cottonwood Campground could be...

I'm sorry they had to close it but not surprised. When I hiked it in October 2014 one sign said it was "Closed" even then, but there was no barrier of any kind and a second sign said "Experts Only," so the first sign wasn't really serious. The majority of the Trail was an all-fours scramble...