Anyone else read this as a kid? I think maybe he didn't make some of it up, now.
Also thinking back to hiking on the Florida Trail. Walking through the waist deep water. Really I had thought of swamps as murky and dirty, but really the water was crystal clear, and while walking I looked down at my feet and saw leaves and twigs and a path, just like normal, just under water. Of course, at any distance couldn't see the forest floor, just the shimmer of the surface tension. Thinking about large predators that swim. Thinking that steel shank mountaineering boots were maybe not what to bring next time. The water in Groton a few days ago, pooled on the trail, was clean like that, anyway.
The question has come up. Can you make a path by painting lines? I wonder. I know I often say "trails are made in the mind of the user first, and then with stone and steel. If it's not a trail in people's heads, then nothing else you do matters". So . . . does painting bike lanes on the side of a road make a bike path in people's heads? And if it does, do you need to do anything more than that?
VYCC crew tries rolling down the window to cool off on a hot day.
Friday September 24, 2010
The Ravine
Headed out today to take a load of rubbish to the transfer station. Chipping away at this year's pile of stuff we pulled from the the ravine. There's always a ravine.
Didn't Ray Bradbury write a story about an elderly man who feels compelled to return to his childhood neighborhood, and then to climb down into the overgrown ravine behind his old house, and then into the hollow of a rotted tree, where he finds a bottle sealed with a note his 8 year old self had written and left for him to find eighty years later, to remind him of his hopes and dreams and other Ray Bradbury treacle type stuff? You can see from a sketch map he made, the ravine loomed pretty large in Bradbury's mind's eye view of his childhood landscape. I sometimes think that the kids who help out on Cross Vermont Trail projects each summer are going to be walking along decades from now, and come across a section of trail, and suddenly remember having built it themselves years before, and the feeling of the sweat drying on their face as they crested the top of the bank coming up out of the ravine, heaved the rusty wheel rim over the edge, and stepped up into the breeze, waiting there for them like the note in Bradbury's story. (But don't tell them I said so, they'll just make fun.)
Monday September 6, 2010
Swinging Hammer Vermont
Speaking of Yannick, he has a star turn at micro-fame for his role on the Cross Vermont Trail volunteer vacation page where there's a photo of him swinging a hammer.
I've been dabbling in website analytics. Wondering who visits our site, how we rank in searches and whatnot. The short answer is - we don't rank (yet). But if you're just micro-famous, it might as well be for a sleeves rolled up kind of thing. And as determined by Google analytics, that picture of Yannick is the third most viewed/linked/web connected item on our site, after the index page and the trail maps.
Swinging a nine pound hammer looks like real work, feels like numb wrists, smells like gunsmoke when it smacks the granite; and sounds a little something like this (between my ears anyway).
Actually what he said was "ola todos suite a notre arriver en turquie, nous commencons a mettre le blogg a jour, jetez y un petit coup d'oeil, n'hésitez pas a ajouter vos commentaires, et a faire passer le lien a qui vous voulez....
a bientot hi everyone, after two weeks biking, we've finally reached istanbul, we've started updating our blog, and there's some picture, (deleted, pardon his french) the french text and go have a look."
Wednesday March 17, 2010
We get - guarantee of multiple uses.
We trade away - the guarantee of speed.
The default mode on a shared trail is "yield." If in doubt, slow down, say hello, stop if needed, pass safely. Downhill yields to uphill, faster yields to slower. I recently had a chance to talk with folks from Gravity Logic. They build mountain bike trails at ski resorts out west. I was really fired up by their stories about using wooden trestle bridges to allow trail building in difficult spots. (More on that later.) I wasn't surprised when they said that, in their business, it makes sense to build single use trails. What really struck me, though, was when they emphasized that they work hard not only to make their trails single use, but also with only one direction of travel! In order to break free of the "yield" trade off, they basically end up building trails that work like bobsled chutes.
Friday January 29, 2010
No Chickens or Donkeys on Multi Use Trails
What I hear people say is - THEY don't mind multi use trails, it's just that they're conerned (and feeling chicken about sharing the trail) because OTHERS might be inconsiderate (and behave like, ahem, "donkeys"). Consider a typical example; this article is titled how to manage multi use trails, but ends up being preoccupied with conflict between users. Now here's the good news. Traffic engineers have been looking at this topic. They find that designing a travel way to be shared (rather than having separate uses in separate lanes that happen to be near each other) actually causes people to behave considerately towards each other. Of course, they get in each others way, too. More on that later.
