Thursday, April 14, 2011

Consider a cup.

A cup is a roughly hemi-spherical container with a device attached for easy grasping with the hand. A cup can contain water, lemonade, tea, hot chocolate, cold pudding (or if you mix up the packages, cold chocolate and hot pudding), hot gelatin, solidified gelatin, noodles and cheese, petit fours, caviar, dirt, or African Violets. A cup can be made of plastic, metal, paper, waxed paper, bone china, stoneware, or chain link fence (for very fast drinkers). The sides may be striated with 1/4, 12/ and 3/4 cup marks. Then you can see graphically the small rations you must exist on. You can also measure accurately the ingredients for various dishes. However, since most of the time you do not bring the box with the directions written on the side, you end up doing things by guess and by golly anyway.

Plastic cups are advantageous because they do not break, no not get hot, and you can drill holes in the handle to tie the to your belt. You can scratch your name in the bottom (and if you scratch too deeply you can reduce your intake of liquid enormously) and if you heat food in them over the stove you can suddenly find yourself with one less thing to carry out.

Metal cups are nice because you can polish them and use them to signal Search and Rescue, you can drop them over a cliff with nothing but a few minor dents resulting, and you can heat things over the stove with them and permanently brand yourself when you try to pick up the cup by its hot handle.

Which leads us to that paragon of cups, the Sierra Cup. The Sierra cup is cleverly constructed so that the lip of the cup stays cool while the contents are boiling hot. This way you do not burn your lip when you drink from it. Instead the boiling liquid enters your mouth to burn your tongue, larynx, esophagus, and stomach lining.. Sierra cups are, above all, perfectly shaped for panning gold. Older Sierra Club members were allowed to carry a Sierra Cup with the proud embossing of “Sierra Club” on the bottom. However, if you have ever tried to clean a cup with the aforementioned legend so embossed, you may be tempted to pay dues to the Wilderness Society instead.

Cups can be used to get water out of a creek for transferal to a canteen, to catch pollywogs, to start an ant farm, to throw water at someone, as an emergency jai alai scoop, to plant an organically grown carrot in, as an emergency hat, as part of a first-aid kit to catch blood if you cut yourself, to dig an elephant trap, and to drink out of.

Why deprive yourself of this benefit to humankind any longer? Why deny yourself a position in the ranks of cup owners? Why drink scalding hot tea out of your cupped hands for another second? Run out now and get a cup.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Consider a sock.

Socks are worn on the foot. They are used to reduce friction, separate bare tootsies from hard leather, keep feet warm, dry, and full of lint. Socks are made of nylon, wool, or cotton. They can be half socks, ankle socks, knee socks, leotards, or body stockings. Socks can be pulled up on the leg so they will creep back into your boots, or folded over the top of the boot so rocks can get inside. They can be of subdued color or fluorescent green. The latter is preferred so if you get lost you can stand on your head and attract attention by waggling your feet.

Socks can be used for a wind stock, pulled over the head and used for a disguise, pulled over the hand and used for a mitten, or filled with rocks and used as a blackjack (could this be known as socking it to someone?) They can be unraveled and knitted into a dickey or crocheted into a doily. One sock can be used for a hat. They can be filled with water, placed in the refrigerator, and used as an ice tray. They can be nailed up on the mantle for Christmas. They can be filled with paperbacks and used for a book bag. They can be equipped with a drawstring and used for a purse. They can be cut into strips and woven into potholders. The toe can be cut off and used for a nose warmer. The heel can be cut off and used for an elbow warmer. The ankle can be cut off and used for a wrist warmer. If your feet are getting cold by this time, cut up an old glove and use it for a foot warmer.

With this wonderful world of new and exciting things to do with this fantastic product, how can you longer resist running out and buying 63 pairs of socks? Wonderful things can be done with 126 socks. If you ever find a 124 footed mastodon, you can outfit both it and yourself at a moment’s notice.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Consider a hiking hat.


A hiking hat is an object that covers the head, more or less. It keeps the sun out of your eyes and the hair out of your face. It keeps 5% of your body heat from escaping and protects your part from sunburn. It is also a good place to carry feathers, headbands, notes to your girlfriends, fleas, safety pins, and trail markers. It can be used to hit people, to scoop water up in, to hold rocks, as a table, to fan a campfire, to fan yourself, as a Frisbee, or to plant ivy in. It can be made of straw, plastic, felt, paisley corduroy, wool, canvas or old newspapers. It can be cowboy, mod, bush Australian, French, Swiss, Dutch or Cossack.

To keep a hat on you can tie on with string, keep it jammed down over your ears, pit in it your collar, glue it on, stick it in your pocket, or hike where there is no wind and/or people to snatch it. A hat can lead to jolly companionship and fun games like “see how long the hat will sit on the fire before it catches”, or “see how long the hat will stay in the river before it sinks”, or “see how long we can keep the hat before the owner decapitates us”. People have been known to become so attached to hats that they will scale cliffs to recover them, walk ten miles with both hands on their head to avoid losing them, and kick people in the Cheetos to keep them from being stolen.


If you happen to buy a new hat, you must first break it in before you take it on a hike, else it be broken in for you. To do this it is advisable that you step on it a few times, drag it for five miles behind your vehicle, soak it in a muddy river, bury it in the dirt, singe it in at least three places, knock it out of any shape it make have fool heartedly once held, and stick a feather in it. Shooting a few holes in it is acceptable, but must not be overdone lest you attract target practice while it still resides on your head.

A hat should ideally not be bought, but found in a ditch, at the side of the road, on top of the Peaks, or on someone else. In extreme cases one may be purchased at Goodwill.


Hats are useful for prestige, for keeping rain off your roof, for protecting your head in caves, for making people mistake you for a hippy, and for throwing into the air in moments of exultation. They can be thrown into a ring, eaten, tipped, or pulled down over your eyes so you can sleep during meetings. A hat can be love, beauty, and truth. A hat can be the ultimate trip. So don’t just sit there, let a hat be your guru. Discover the wonderful world of hats.

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Consider hiking food.

It is broken down into several sub-sections: breakfast, mid-morning snack, lunch, mid-afternoon snack, dinner, after-dinner snack, and before bed cocoa and cookies. A pre-breakfast snack is optional.

Breakfast can be composed of gooey oatmeal, lumpy Instant Breakfast, stale doughnuts, burnt biscuit mix, rubbery pancakes, or quickly gobbled noodle dinners. If this does not appeal, one can always skip the hike and eat at IHOP. On second thought, what’s the difference?

Lunches are composed of stale bagels, peanut butter (either frozen or melted, depending on the locale) moldy cheese, strangely smelling bologna, liquid candy bars, lumpy instant pudding (and hearken unto thee, it is not the pudding lumps but the instant milk lumps which cause strong men to cry and strong women to quietly have hysterics) graham crackers, chocolates, raisins, rye krisp, and a dram of instant lemonade. Or the affluent may purchase at exorbitant prices a Trail Pak lunch from a major retailer comprised of graham crackers, chocolate, raisins, rye krisp, and a dram of instant lemonade.

Dinner may be composed of Lipton Noodle Main Dish Dinners (noodles, sauce, and meat), Betty Crocker Noodle Dinners (Noodles and sauce), poor but honest hiker dinners (noodles, butter, sausage, bologna, or mystery meat), or absent-mindedly-packing-for-the-hike-dinner-10-minutes-before-you-leave dinner (noodles). Or one may cave into the materialistic hiking store procurers and purchase freeze-dried repasts such as Turkey Tetrazini, Lasagna, Chicken-a-la-King, or Kung Pao Chicken, most of which taste a lot like noodles, sauce, and stringy mystery meat.

Meals can be cooked in a pot. In fact, it is highly recommended that noodle dinners be so cooked. A pot can consist of the saucepan section of a mess kit, a coffee can, an empty glass jar, a hallowed-out rock, or a bandana, if you cook really fast. An emergency pot can be constructed from a tube tent, cut up and folded into shape, in which you place hot rocks in it to boil the water. Such an emergency might occur when you use your pot for an open canteen, a hat, a daypack, or hung from your belt to conceal holes in your pants.

Snacks are inclusive of M&Ms, lemon candies, mints, nuts, lemonade, limeade, orangeade, apples, cookies, kippered herrings, petite fours, lobster Cantonese, and pheasant under grass (glass will break). Snacks are useful for resting, waiting for lost hikers to get un-lost, puzzling over topo maps, picking up rocks that you can’t carry out so you just take close-up pictures of, and luring yourself along the trail by promising your weary bod a rest and sustenance if it can only drag itself along to the top of the next butte.

Meals are good times to dispose of extra weight in your pack by consumption of food. They are also good for reviewing all the fantastic, beautiful, rare and wonderful things that everyone else saw along the trail, but you somehow missed.

As any hiker will tell you, after 14 miles on the trail, food is more valued than precious gems, exotic furs, cold cash (even before taxes), a Rolls Royce, or a 900-power down sleeping bag. Uncrushed potato chips are worth all these and your first-born child.

Alternatively you can skimp on food and when others find they brought too much and offer to share, produce a grasping hand and an eager happy-to-help-out smile. If they do not offer to share, adopt the classic Puppy Dog Eyes, and begin to drool discretely into your boots. In any case, food is rightly one of the ten essentials. One may live 30 days without food, but one becomes an undesirable and testy trail companion about 29 and a half days prior to this extreme. So do yourself and your hiking buds a favor and invest in trail substance.

Friday, April 1, 2011

It is not until some uninitiated tourist asks me, “why do I hike” that I realize how little I really know about hiking. I have equipment that satisfies me, almost, and I can get food that I like, usually, and I can amble along a trail without watching my feet, most of the time, and somewhere I have a journal full of details on most of the trails I’ve been on, except every time I go there I find things to add on the list.

But not only does memory sag and lag, and the mind conveniently blank out nastier portions of the adventure, and the trails change with every rainstorm, and the camps change with every passerby, and the seeps change with the snowmelt, but the hike itself depends on the weather, muscle cooperation, water, rocks, animals, wind, blisters, a knee that decides to conk out, mice that eat your apple, lemonade that leaks and sifts throughout the pack, and a thousand other variables.

Then I stare in perplexity at a place that I remembered as Xanadu, and now find to be part of Dante’s Inferno. Or a place that never really ranked outstanding in my mind suddenly grabs my attention with both hands. And then I hear the ghosts of the old explorers who came before me and laid down the path I walk on, laughing down the wind as they sit on some butte and watch us stumble through their old stomping grounds. The grandeur of wilderness reduces us back to our proper place in the perspective of things as that of busy little bugs scuttling about pushing things around.

The faded footprints of the first travelers remind us that we have a long way to walk before we really learn anything. The rolling majesty of clouds, of rocks, of canyon buttes, that were old before time started to mean anything to us, humbles our lives into bursts of music down an undisturbed street, and the ageless wisdom of delicate balance and endless cycles reduces any learning we may profess to have to its less than exhaulted portion of tiny crumbs of facts out of a world of knowledge.

If that is the case, then why frustrate ourselves by trying to find out anything about hiking, or anything about anything? The wisest man in the world knows very little of all there is to know, and if he is wise enough, he may realize this. Ill never climb K-2, or achieve the first decent of a river. I’ll never hike every route in the Grand Canyon. But I ‘m happy with my crumbs. I’m satisfied to just hike in a place for the first time in my life, if not for the first time in the ageless eons of time. I'm glad to know just one part of one trail for certain, if not every inch of every trail in the world. I’m glad to get one insight of myself, if I can’t know everything about people that anyone could know. And if I can so satisfy myself by hiking, then maybe that’s what I ought to tell that tourist.