Mount Tamalpais and Muir Woods

Short Version:
We're camping again! And running rings around Amerikans. I learn some things.

Long Version:
Our first morning in the Tamalpais State Park started with a nostalgia trip: cereal with blueberries. Hadn't realised how much we'd missed it during our Baja excursion until we started in on it. As Janine said: "Just as well we like it - it's breakfast for the next several months."

We geared up and set off for a hike, which quickly became a trail-run, and stayed that way for the twenty or so minutes we had before we hit pedestrian traffic near the boundary of the Muir Woods National Monument. The sheer number of people made running unfeasible, so we slowed to a walk which still had us passing most of our fellows, many of whom looked very much like the 200 feet of paved trail at the heart of the Muir Woods was the only outdoor exercise other than a grudging and labored walk from their car to Wal-Mart and back that they were likely to have this year. Even the skinny ones looked flabby, which is quite a feat. The exceptions were largely from elsewhere, based on their accents - the Polish family were a particular favorite, and not just because of the androgynous teenager's incredibly trendy and completely ugly tight-legged baggy-crotched purple jeans.

The reduced pace had at least one advantage, in that we saw a Winter Wren, which we'd otherwise have bypassed unknowingly as it was tiny, and was hopping around near-silently in the bushes off the side of the trail. Eventually, though, we were through the traffic, and Nene kicked up her heels and disappeared off into the distance. My attempts to catch up were foiled by the fact that we were now heading uphill, which isn't my favorite altitude adjustment. Luckily, my lovely wife was nice enough to wait for me at scenery-enabled locations instead of indulging her usual, incredibly irritating practise of running back to check I'm still following, then running off again, repeatedly. This may be partly attributable to the fact that our last run was the Oregon waterfalls shenanigan, a month or so back, and that our last intentional run was even further into the past; Vancouver for me, Karaka Bay for Janine.

The Muir Woods National Monument* is named for early environmentalist writer John Muir, who climbed at least one mountain with US President Theodore Roosevelt**. It's conceivable that this link was pertinent at the point where US Forest Service head Gifford Pinchot*** was lobbying that same President Roosevelt to have a chunk of forest set aside as a wilderness preserve, named for John Muir, in the face of attempts by a power company to requisition the region for a series of power-generating dams aqnd reservoirs. It's now one of the last remaining significant old-growth Coastal Redwood forests, and contains some pretty awesome trees. Even the medium-sized ones are really old, and some of the old ones are ancient. One which fell in the 1930s had slices taken from it and preserved in the park, with accompanying documentation pointing out features in the visible rings which coincided with important events in human**** history. The earliest of these were well over a thousand years ago. That's pretty cool. So is the fact that Dan Simmons references John Muir heavily and unusually in his Hyperion novels, which are rather good.







* = Initially I thought that the stupid Americans were at it again, using words incorrectly, on the grounds that a monument isn't a big chunk of land, it's a thing made of stone or similar substance, formed by humans into an aesthetically-significant shape, or, if naturally imposing, placed somewhere special. The obelisk on No Tree Hill, for instance. Then I started to wonder if maybe they were actually right, and whether the restriction of monuments in NZ to comparatively small-scale objects actually came down to NZ's comparative poverty. Mr Google says both are right, but that the Amerikans are against the etymological grain on this one

** = I'm pretty sure he's the one that teddy-bears are named after. Nice to know he had a penchant for the outdoors.

*** = One of the trees in the Monument was named the Pinchot tree, but there's no need to feel bad on his behalf for the slight implied by lesser recognition; he has his own National Forest, which covers a vast area of Washington State including the Mt St Helens Administrative Area.

**** = Amerikan