Outdoor Adventures

[Gorgeous Undertow]

Ah yes, how did I know someone would bring up dogging? If my British slang is correct Bob, that would be "cottaging" for some, yes? ;)

Thanks everyone for your pictures and stories, I love to hear about/see beautiful places. I'm curently reading Robert McFarlanes "The Wild Places" and longing to get back to the UK to see some of the areas he's exploring in the book. Not that I don't have enough to do out here! Saturday I made my first attempt to reach the fire lookout at Gobbler's Knob (insert more dogging comments here) on Mt. Rainier. However I forgot to check where the snow elevation was before departing and subsequently came around a corner of the trail into a two foot snowbank. Without my snowshoes it would have been quite a slog to the lookout so I decided to save it for another day. Forgot my camera anyhow.

[bob falconscotch]

Sorry for hijacking your thread with such base carnality Undertow - if you stick around,you'll find it happens on a not irregular basis!
I must just ask though - is Gobbler's Knob anywhere near Brokeback Mountain?
Jesting aside,thanks for the input - as an avid walker myself its always a pleasure to share favourite places with other forumites and,yes,I appreciate that is yet another double entendre.
Hopefully this thread will become an ongoing one,in the same way that 'bird of the day' has.

[Gorgeous Undertow]

Base carnality is a-ok with me Bob...don't worry! I work with construction workers, I've heard it all by now. I'm tickled that you're all enjoying the thread.

[No Paranoia]

NY State is fucking gorgeous.

Agreed. I was an au-pair in the Finger Lakes area, beautiful scenery. Autumn was sensational, a genuine Indian summer.

Has anyone here tackled the Appalachian Trail or parts of it? That's one of my dreams, although I am afraid my back would not master this challenge.

Abroad, I have tremendously enjoyed several extended hut to hut walks in the Austrian Alps. The Austrian huts are a wonderful legacy of the German culture, each one generally funded by the Alpine club in the city whose name it bears.

They enable walkers to spend entire weeks and fortnights trekking from hut to hut amidst some of the most spectacular scenery the world offers, enjoying reasonable food, beer and accommodation in the evenings, and without ever having to descend to the world of roads and cars. You can join guided groups from some of the huts, to enable you to get up to places you'd never reach without assistance.

Interesting point. I have in fact never considered the Alps for exactly that reason. It sounds so genuinely German: organized, tamed, civilized, structured. So far I have more been looking for the remote and deserted. But I'm open to reconsideration.

[Lancashire Fusileer]

Found Tyrol & Salzburger Alps great tbh and certainly very wild in places. And you can't beat stopping off for a beer & a sausage 1800 metres up

[fiveflags]

Has anyone here tackled the Appalachian Trail or parts of it? That's one of my dreams, although I am afraid my back would not master this challenge.

For reasons better left unsaid I have hiked from the Great Smokey Mountain National Park all the way to White Sulpher Springs, West Virginia. Man. That is one killer of a hike. It's mindnumbingly beautiful when you get to the peaks of the mountain, but depressing as hell when you actually get to the destination. My college roommate and I were looking for a couple of cheffing interns with famous chefs. One was located at a place called the Inn at Blackberry Farm In Knoxville, the other was called The Green Briar in White Sulphur Springs, WV so we decided to hike between the interviews, both to sort of get some time with nature and also because it was likely an opportunity to hike the appalachians we'd never have again. Could a person with a weak back handle it? No. Heavens no. Do not attempt. It remains to this day the most beautiful and most heartbreaking thing I have ever seen. Knoxville was fine it's a gorgeous town. White Sulphur Springs on the other hand, contains ONE monstrous hotel (and I mean huge, white and vacation home to the upper echelon in our government) but the town itself was in a state of poverty I am never seen on the North American continent. We go into the inner cities and feed fat kids, but we completely over look the plight of the poor men and women who sacrifice their lives at the hands of the coal mining industry. What I saw there made me cry and I met a church there that I have since started a local fund for with my church where we can get money and things these people need directly to them. They live a terrible existence. I am glad I saw it.
In closing the Appalachian trail is absolutely gorgeous. Probably better if you stay to the tourist trails though. That heartbreak I experienced was enough.

[No Paranoia]

Thanks for the story, fiveflags.
(off-topic: Two years ago I went from New York City to Washington DC by train and what I saw while traveling trough the outskirts of cities like Philadelphia, I found very, very disturbing, even though it was only a few glimpses.)

[Gorgeous Undertow]

Had an interesting long weekend seeing as Monday was a holiday for us here. Ended up hitting three state parks in one trip through south central Washington.

Olmstead Place: A working pioneer farm circa 1875. I now know how to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Yakima Sportsman: A lovely little trail through a riverside marsh.

Maryhill: This is where we camped. It's an area beside the Columbia River that eccentric entrepreneur Sam Hill set aside to build a Mormon agrarian community. It boasts a full scale cement replica of Stonehenge dedicated as a WWI memorial, a serpentine test road that is only open for hiking/biking/skateboarding, and an art museum full of Rodin sculptures, chess sets of the world and furniture designed by the former Queen of Romania. It is also situated amidst a large wind farm. So it was not the most rugged of outdoorsyness, but it was quite interesting. The Columbia river gorge is just breathtaking...pictures to follow...

[Gorgeous Undertow]

Here is a link to my photos if anyone wants to take a peek. http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=50106&id=1577527244&l=f159f2b75e (I'd like to post a picture that one can click onto see the rest, like Rabidbee does, but for some reason I can't figure that out!)

[TheAlex]

I love camping and wilderness. I was in Snowdonia last week, and went walking around the South Wales coast, which was beautiful, and the Isle of Arran in Scotland last year. I did a bit of wild camping on Arran, which was awesome.

Some great photos posted, I don't put many online but here I am in the Isle of Arran:



And my favourite place in the world, Iceland:



And it might be in my signature but there are few of my favourite photos from walks I've done here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tsg

[avocetboy]

I love camping and wilderness. I was in Snowdonia last week, and went walking around the South Wales coast, which was beautiful, and the Isle of Arran in Scotland last year. I did a bit of wild camping on Arran, which was awesome.

Some great photos posted, I don't put many online but here I am in the Isle of Arran:

Glen Sannox or Glen Rosa?...Looks stunning. I have recently returned returned from a week in Coigach, overlooking Loch Broom at the foot of Ben More Coigach, one of the most beautiful places I have ever been to.

[TheAlex]

I'm not quite sure. If I remember rightly, Glen Sannox faces eastwards to the coast, so in that case the above would be Glen Rosa. I did intend to mark all my photos from the OS map when I got home, while I still remembered where they all were, but I never got around to it.

I'm off for some exploring in Transylvania in October. :D

[clothedtoyou]

Would definitely recommend Clare, beautiful scenery in the Burren and Cliffs of Moher of course (beware, they charge you to look at those now though.

[Jade Webster]

One of my favorite pastimes is getting out and hiking/biking/camping amongst the spectacular scenery here in Washington state. I was wondering who else likes to get out to the wild and where your favorite places might be. Last month I went to an interesting area called Peshastin Pinnacles near Wenatchee in the midlle part of the state. East of the Cascade range Washington is mostly arid plains and the pinnacles are odd rock formations stuck up in the middle of it all. Here are some photos from my trip:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=48609&id=1577527244&l=ce761eb4d9

Went to three state parks on this journey, my goal is to hit all 100+ at some point. The photos start at Lincoln Rock, where my cabin was.

I just like walking in woods.

[fiveflags]

I like walks in the woods, too, but I am a bigger believer in the restorative proerties of long walks on abandoned beaches. I was blessed/cursed to grow up in the most beautiful location. There were no tourists then, we had a one room schoolhouse for the 10 or so kids on the whole island. It was days and days of sugar white beach boredom. Then Hurricane Ivan wiped out everything. Every house, every dune, every everything. The big hotels came in and have made a tourist spot of my secluded home. But I guess now that's all over too. I imagine all the crude oil washing ashore and just cry.