Kim Stanley Robison: The High Sierra, A love story

[oldranger]

What wildhiker said said.

I've also seen them recommended on various "survival" TV shows which makes me wonder if that's why they are more prolific these days.

Although I have to admit, I once parked a rental car in a HUGE parking lot early one morning and upon my attempted return to said car had wished I put some cairns out to find it at the end of the day.

Hell Shawn that is me every time I visit Costco!

[erutan]

I'm enjoying the book. His stance on NEVER carrying water in the sierras comes across as absolutist, which is excessive.

To be fair, he does say you can carry up to 1/4 liter to wet your throat. Keeping water weight low lets him take nearly a pound of alcohol on every trip!

I totally agree that you don't need to carry 2L of water at all times like a boycout - my last trip I never carried more than 700ml unless heading to a dry camp due to water sources everywhere. I wouldn't want to go up little joe or the **** trail without 2L+ though.

I recommend the book to people and there are sections I truly think are great -his moment on top of Whitney looking at Tulainyo, his rant on acronym hikes, his description of marmots, the line about passes being to backpackers what peaks are to climbers, and the big about the sweet spot of glaciation forming basins was informative to me - something I kind of knew intuitively but couldn't say why this range and not others (the semi-arid aspect w/ snowy winters always made sense to me).

There's some subjective takes I disagree with, which are fine - we all like and dislike different things. Some of the stuff in the gear talk section is either meant to be tongue in cheek trolling, bad faith arguments, or are just not based in factual reality. My partner half joked he must have come up with his crankier ideas when dehydrated.

[rhetts_go]

Loved this book. Learned a lot, and it helped me find the language to describe why I like these mountains.