EISPIRATEN

A friend and I had planned a hike to Gobbler’s Knob but were thwarted by closures in the area. We visited the Lytle Creek Ranger Station to get details and I wanted to pass them on here. We were told that the closures were caused by forest road issues following a fire near Gobbler’s Knob and the rec...

Thanks for the post. That's a fantastically beautiful area, amazing views. I rode Refugio several years ago and enjoyed it, but for a long time it hd been securely gated with ominous looking warning signs, and it was hard to get closure info without actually going there. Finally I thought to just ca...

Sean, other people have had the same idea about the foot carvings, and that might be correct. The weird thing is that some of those Apsara carvings do show the foot in the correct angle and look right, though the feet have been sort of foreshortened and don't stick out 6 inches or so, like actual fe...

Angkor Wat is the most amazing man-made place I’ve ever seen, though one could easily imagine it was created by the Gods. In Southeast Asia, Bagan in Myanmar comes close and some people might vote for Borobudur in Indonesia, but Angkor and the other temples around it are more vast and mysterious. Vo...

Give me a couple days; I'm going to do a TR about my Angkor Wat bike ride so you can see another (very different) side of Cambodia.

(Edited/expanded after thinking about this some more.) We're all different. My father was a holocaust survivor and for him it was important to take my brother and me to the camp in the Czech Republic where some of our relatives had died, to better understand the history. The Cambodian genocide was p...

More photos.

This was one of my strangest journeys ever. As a serial SE Asia traveler in the early 80’s I was very interested in news from that part of the world, especially Laos and Cambodia — the latter because I very much wanted to see Angkor Wat and for years was looking for a way to get there, though the ci...

Wow, great write up and photos, and it looks like an amazing area! Did you feel any altitude sickness or limitations? What do you think was the average cost per day, or the total cost in-country? Is it far from the nearest airport? What were your meals? I like your term "cloud forest"! Hav...

Dima, this was sort of a "greatest hits" ride since it included a little bit of most everything, which was why I chose it for the TR. It was a fairly typical ride for northern Thailand in terms of sights, sounds, and people, but the climb (4500') was more than I usually take on. Yes, Thail...

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More photos.

On the EP anniversary hike last year I told Sean that I lived in Thailand part time, and he asked me to send a trip report or two next time I visited, so here goes. I’ll try not to ramble too much but it’ll be hard because it’s so different and fascinating here, and I want to include a lot of backgr...

Thanks everyone for the hospitality and companionship this weekend. It was a great hike and I was really glad that Dima thought to invite me. My wife and I had spent 2 nights camping at Carpinteria Beach and I'd just finished unpacking everything when I saw his email so in that respect the timing wa...

Thanks but can't wait that long. If you see a guy riding down Foothill Blvd. next week on an orange/yellow road bike with 2 rear view mirrors, that'll be me.

Thanks for all the replies. I should have done more research before posting here. I didn't realize that that southern front country area was part of the fire closure. Maybe we'll just have to bike from 39 / East Fork through town to some trailhead past the closure area, and then continue on foot. I'...

As I’ve mentioned before, most of my SG hikes this past year have been part of a clockwise circumnavigation of the range, starting from my buddy’s house in Glendale. Most of our routes have involved car shuttles. Though we still need to do the North Backbone route from Blue Ridge to Baldy (waiting f...

I guess I haven't either, though sometimes I see lengths of railroad tie used that way. Are steps like that considered harmful to the land for some reason? Trails in the mountains of Asia sometimes have very long sections of large steep steps, often chiseled into rock and worn smooth from decades of...

⇈ ဒါကတကယ့်ကိုတိုက်ဆိုင်မှုပါ။

အကြှနျုပျ၏တုံ့ပြန်မှုအတိအကျအတူတူပင်ဖြစ်ခဲ့သည်။ ?

Thanks for the report. Last Saturday my buddy and I rode from Manker Flat to the East Form / 39 junction and I was wondering about those gooved sections in the road. Until we got there, we didn't know that GRR was closed to cars for the 4th of July weekend. That made it an even better ride but wow, ...

Yes, I think so. We headed south from the flag, but there's also a ridge route going east to Lukens from that summit. The friend who told me about this hike sent a link to this excellent video, made by the guys who planted the flag there. It includes part of an old Woody Guthrie song about a big flo...

A friend suggested this loop after seeing my Strawberry hikes on Strava. It was good fun, certainly reminded us of Strawberry, and was a short drive from the house. I couldn’t find any previous discussion here so maybe it hasn’t come up on EP before. We headed out two Saturdays ago, leaving Glendale...

Correct sir, or at least very close. The local I spoke to actually called it an ice house but indeed it was a cool (relatively speaking) underground room for storing perishables. In the colder months ice was bought from suppliers who brought it from the rivers and mountains, and used to help chill t...

Sorry, no.

Not even close, but you knew that of course. It's about a hundred years old, which might be a clue.

Mt. Islip trail???

Edit -- oops, was on page 3 and didn't see the previous reply till after I posted. If we're correct, HikeUp gets the ribbon.

(This write up involves very little walking and no riding, but I hope it’ll be of interest.) Heading home from a 3 week road trip to northern Idaho, I really wanted to spend a night in Gerlach and explore the surroundings. This is Burning Man’s home, though the event has been on hold for two years. ...

Amazing ride and trip report! That's a fantastic area. I've just been as far as Bristlecone (which is well worth seeing) but that's quite a road, and I really enjoyed seeing your photos of the rest of it, up to White Mountain. Don't think I could ever make it to the top but I'll keep the downhill ri...

Thanks for your thorough report and all the photos! It brought back great memories of winter hikes along that section. We were going the opposite direction and the landscape looked different then but I remember a lot of those views. You might consider continuing north on the PCT, though it would be ...

We've used walkie talkies on 4 or 5 hikes so far and they've worked out really well. We wear them on neck lanyards. They're almost always used for fairly mundane things like when to take the next break, do you see the deer on that hillside, I'm stopping for a few minutes; keep to your left at the ne...