Matthew Alan Thyer's Blog, page 14

Top Five for Hiking with a Six Year Old

I think, if it were possible to write a guide about how to get *any* six-year-old out on the trail with a minimum of hassle or complaint, I would have already written the definitive tome. This activity, as we all know, requires subtlety and nuance; you’ve got to have the right touch at the right time in order to make it happen. Success is fleeting, but I’m here to tell you that getting to the point where your kid finishes a hike and immediately asks when the next one is going to be is possibl...

Everyday Dissonance

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Why do we measure displacement on US made trucks in liters, and literally everything else in SAE?

Hiking with a Six-Year-Old

Yesterday, AralBear and I made our way up into the Cascades to spend some time walking. This is not the first time we’ve done this, but he did amazingly well.

We ended up hiking Snow Lake Trail 1013 despite seeing the parking packed with about 30 cars; more than expected for a Friday, but most parties were small and spread out along the whole distance.

Trail Conditions

By and large, the trail is good repair. There are a number of locations on the climb up to the pass between Chair Peak and Sn...

WTA Hike-A-Thon 2017

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It’s that time of year again. I can hear the high country calling. Don’t worry I’m not going to run the whole month away and rack up tons of miles. This year will be the first time Aral and I do this together, so we’ll be hiking at a reasonable pace with lots of time to stop and soak in the scenery.

This is the same project I was working on back in 2009 when I ran into a Pacific Crest Trail hiker that had fallen near Alaska Lake. The Hike-a-thon is a big deal to me because trails are and hav...

Welcome Back

I’m living proof that while you can go to the place where you grew up, you can never go back home. Situational distance, temporal dissonance, or the relentless march. I tried to go back home and what I found was a place “almost, but not quite entirely unlike tea.” This is the way of things, a truth from which we cannot escape.

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This morning I woke up to clearing clouds beyond my cliff-side abode to discover that a critical element of my youth has been resurrected just...

The Bad News

Yeah, so all has been quiet on this front for some time. The reason for this is pretty straightforward, I’ve been experiencing intermittent issues with the keyboard on my laptop which became catastrophically worse late last week. Look at yours right now. See all the letters between W and P? None of them on my laptop’s keyboard work any longer and most of them get used all the time to write simple sentences.

Today, after much hullabaloo on the phone with Apple, I drove to the mainland specific...

Doomsday Giveaway

This is Matt. He’s got a pile of books he purchased last January that no one picked up. Matt is sad because books without readers are indeed a depressing fact of life. But there’s a silver lining to the cloud that hangs over Matt’s troubled head.

You can pick up one of these excellent reads. Doomsday Chronicles is an anthology of short stories that reads like a laundry list. That’s if your laundry is, in this case, some of our time’s best genre writers.

You can click on the picture of the bo...

Write For Yourself

This is Matt. He just wrote a chapter of a book he doesn’t need anyone else to approve of. This is the first time he’s done this in quite some time. He understands that there will be critics. The critics will likely read this chapter and say critical things about it. That’s what critics do, but Matt doesn’t care. He likes the chapter. It made him feel pretty good to write it.

Tomorrow morning Matt will get up and do things. Let’s hope that when Matt does writing he doesn’t become his own crit...

Name The New Ride

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Help me name the new ride

That’s right, above is the new 700 x 47 CC Surly Long Haul Trucker (in Blacktacular) I recently purchased for some long-range, self-supported action I have planned. As is the custom in my house I need to name this ride. The bike it replaces is an elderly gelding that has been rolling for almost as long as me. It was named Scout after Tonto’s horse.

I’ve since stopped naming bikes after famous horse (although Mr. Ed has occurred to me). Its companion, a plus-sized ver...

Ten + One Wilderness Areas

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Because everyone is doing it: Ten wilderness areas that I’ve been to and one that I have not.

Alpine Lakes Wilderness Norse Peak Wilderness Pasayten Wilderness North Cascades National Park and Stephen Mather Wilderness Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness Goat Rocks Wilderness Flat Tops Wilderness Collegiate Peaks Wilderness South San Juan Wilderness Okefenokee Wilderness Passage Key Wilderness