On Monday dozens of hikers were stranded in the Los Padres National Forest when a surprise rainstorm swelled creeks to levels too high to cross. An entire Sierra Club outing plus several more hikers required rescue. In all, 35 stranded hikers were rescued from the backcountry on just one day of the flooding. Additionally, two Boy Scout troops had to be airlifted from the same national forest after becoming stranded. As the storms keep raging, more and more require rescue: four from a creek bed, three on a cliff who tried a new route to get around the swollen creek. It’s getting crazy out there. At some point rescuers are going to have to stop trying to save them and just drop food and tell them to setup a camp city and wait for the creeks to go down. It’ll be like a Southern California version of Lord of the Flies.
Cesare Fiorucci of Italy is in the strange habit of documenting everywhere he travels in his Patagonia Stand Up Shorts by writing the country and date on the inside of his pockets. The first entry “Guinea Bissau 88/89″ ended up in a monument to the man and the shorts in the Patagonia Milan store. That’s right, Patagonia has a store in the fashion capital of the world. But in their defense, in that store, they have a plaque on the wall honoring Cesare, who once asked Yvon Chouinard how he was able to get so rich making clothes that actually last.
Anthony, when the Recording Industry Association of America calls you about your unlicensed use of Clapton in this video, you’re going to wish you’d stayed in the treewell. This video serves as a nice reminder of how serious treewells can be, and also how we all go through an Eric Clapton phase.
Brother-and-sister adventure duo Eric and Sarah McNair-Landry were dropped at the end of the Trans Canada Highway where they’ll begin their 1,864-mile kite-ski journey across the Northwest Passage. They began a few days ago, but winds have been light and they’ve mostly been cross-country skiing and hauling their heavy sleds. Though I suspect they’ll be fine - this is the same duo that made an overland trek to the South Pole while they were teenagers. Man, there must have been a lot of fights over who would get to use the car the weekend they finished their expedition.
Good news from Utah. This spring, you’ll be able to trade in your same-day boarding pass from your flight for a lift ticket at any of the ski resorts in Park City. I’m sure they intended it as a way for out-of-state skiers to jumpstart their spring skiing and save some cash, but what they’ll get instead are local kids printing out fake boarding passes at home, or more likely, running to the Salt Lake airport to try to beg some boarding passes off people at luggage claim. And with the present state of airport security, I’m sure NO ONE will call the police and suggest these kids are terrorists.
Thank god. If there’s a fate worse than hanging out in a nightclub for an evening, I haven’t found. All the terrible music, overpriced drinks and horrible service at one San Jose club will be replaced…well, it still might have bad service. The climbing gym Touchstone will rip out the club and put up some routes for the locals. Now we just need to do this to every other club in the country.
A new study has found that happiness and a sense of purpose means you’ll live longer and enjoy better physical and mental health. Researchers also found that paying for short term happiness did little to extend your life or affect your long-term health. This study does not bode well for my justification for buying a new mountain bike this year, unless I use it to ride to my “Save the Whales” meetings that so fill me with purpose. Thinking about getting involved in an environmental cause? Go for it, it could save your life (or just make it better and longer).
Scientists have uncovered evidence that sperm whales announce their presence to groups of other whales with a distinct and personal series of sounds. In other words, they shout out their name before rolling up on a group of strangers or friends. In the study, they focused on Caribbean sperm whales, because if you’re going to study sperm whales, the Caribbean is a much nicer location to do so than the Antarctic. My hope is that as we continue to study their habits, we’ll one day learn their language and be able to communicate with them. Of course I have no idea what we’d talk about. I hope they don’t all turn out to be jerks.
