One Down, What's Up Next?

I've recently discovered a brand new hiking tool. High tech, and you can almost use it without a manual. No, not a GPS unit, although I can envision that being very useful. But personally, I love the maps. Back in my past I did a little Orienteering, which is cross-country route-finding using maps and compass, finding waymarks hidden out there and punching your card with little unique punches to prove to everyone that you did indeed find the waymark. I guess that sport might be changing with the advent of GPS, for now they could look at your cookie-crumb trail to see where you had gone and if you had indeed gone to the right spots.

No, the new high tech tool is Google Earth 4. Sitting at my desk I can relive a trip by going back there with Google Earth and navigating over the same terrain. I just went back and looked again at the Paria Canyon trip, retracing the route up from its terminus at Lees Ferry. I had forgotten how much the canyon had opened up the last couple of days of the trip. It was more a valley than a canyon. But I could find where we had camped, and it was neat to be able to zoom out a little and to see the surrounding terrain. When you are following a river, you don't get to see much of the country beyond the riverbanks, which in this case were sometimes a thousand feet high. I had used Google Earth 3 prior to that trip, printing out a straight-down view so we could follow the many twists of the canyon. Ha! The resolution of the images was so inferior last year that it was almost useless. You cannot believe how many turns that river takes, and when you are in the river bottom, you tend to lose your sense of direction, especially when each bend is different, some 90 degrees, some 180 degrees, some 270 degrees, and most some subtle variations in between. Plus there is no sense of scale, and you couldn't be looking at the scenery and where you were stepping if you were charting your progress on piece of paper when the actual scale was a day's walk equals an inch or two. But now the Google images are mapped onto a 3D model, and the image quality is vastly superior. It is almost like being there.

I was surprised at how the canyon changed as I followed it upriver. Doing it with Google Earth takes minutes. Doing it on foot takes days. For a while I was "flying" at an altitude of a couple hundred feet, which worked great. But as the valley became more of a canyon, the shadows hid much of the detail. When a tree is photographed from above, its shadow heightens the 3D effect. But when a canyon wall casts a shadow, all the trees in that shadow lose their definition, so the images are less distinct. Plus as the canyon walls get increasingly vertical, satellite photographs don't show much detail. It is like taking a photograph of a wallpaper pattern with the camera held up in the corner of the ceiling and the wall and pointed straight down -- good view of the floor, but lousy view of the wall. So I had to settle for the straight-down view, and was amazed at how narrow the gorge became and how many twists and turns it takes. Then when you get to the junction with Buckskin Gulch, which joins it from the west, it is like looking at a crack in a large cement floor. Hard to look in those cracks. But that is what makes it such a unique place.

One other unique geographical feature of the area is "the Wave." Just Google "the wave, utah," and you will see what I mean. We didn't get to see it, as the rangers control very tightly how many people get to see it each day. As I recall, the number was 40, 20 of whom had their permits in advance, and the others got them in a daily in-person lottery at the ranger station. Hard to go that route, as you are pretty much out in the middle of nowhere, a difficult location to just "drop in" to see if you're lucky. But Google Earth shows you where it is (follow the Buckskin Gulch westward, and it is on the outside corner where it bends northward), which complicates the rangers' lives, as they currently only give directions to the chosen few.

But that was the first trip, and the question was what else could we do? Well, Melinda's brochure provided some possibilities. Like a trek to Nepal. No, too extreme. I mean you don't go from your first week-long backpack trip to a month in the Himalaya, do you? But we ended up making a jump of almost the same magnitude. The name Haute Route seemed vaguely familiar. Sounded like I should know about it. Ah yes, a trek from Mt. Blanc/Chamonix in France, through the tallest part of the Alps to the Matterhorn/Zermatt in Switzerland. There are actually two versions. The original is the more direct route, up and over and along glaciers. Serious stuff, roped up, ice axes, long and hard days. The second version is the Walker's Haute Route, which Melinda was offering. 180 kilometers of hiking, over 11 passes, gaining over 12,000 meters of height, losing over 10,000. Now the kilometers figure is deceiving, as that sounds like a long way, but is just over 110 miles, not exactly trivial, but 110 isn't like 180. But so is that meters figure deceiving, in the other direction, for that is over 39,000 feet. At any rate, a big trip. But the Alps! I've always been a sucker for mountains. And how long would this take? 16 days? 13 of them hiking? Oh, the potential agony of all of that. But that is less than 10 miles a day. Well, it was probably sold out anyway. What, there was room for two more? So with some trepidation we signed up. And discovered hiking as it SHOULD be done.

Long distance hiking, or trekking, is an entirely different activity in Europe, mainly because there is no need to camp. In fact, in Switzerland, at least, camping seems to be officially discouraged. Instead the model is to hike from one town or village to another, and stay in hotels, inns, dormitories, etc along the way. If your route is such that you don't come down to a town, they have cabanes up in the mountains that cater only to the hikers. Included in the price of your stay is a hearty dinner and a breakfast, so none of that food/stove/dishes bulk and weight to carry. No 4-5 pound tent. No sleeping pad/air mattress. No sleeping bag. We're talking less than 25 pounds of pack weight, not 35-40. And a whole lot less hassle. Warmth at night. Electric lights. Warm showers.

Now I have a new problem. How am I going to get fired up over the American hiking model when I have become seduced by the European model. Well, if I am going to be able to see the backcountry here in the U.S., I will have to learn to like it.

Meanwhile, Melinda has gone electronic, so her brochure has been recast to appear on the Web. While it looks pretty slick, her operation is very much a one person effort. All she is doing is trying to break even leading trips all over the West for the Sierra Club, and on her own in other parts of the world. An upfront disclaimer: this year I am helping her by leading a repeat of the trip we took last year. So look over her site: GoodwatersAdventures.com. And come back for a report on some aspects of that trip last year. Again, it has had a significant effect on me.