Hey Friends!

I hope everyone is great. I mean really, really great. I’m just writing to keep in touch…

Hmmm… It’s been almost two months since I finished. What have I done? Um, not much. heh. I’m living at home in SF which is pretty nice. I eat well on my parents dime and have very low expenses. I’m trying to keep in good shape but the huge portions that I continue to eat are giving me a nice bit of pudge.

I really went through (am going through) a good bit of reentry regrets. Damn I wish I was still hiking. Lucky for me, I have no job so I do actually get out and hike. I went backpacking right away in the local oak woodlands (Ohlone Wilderness), did another backpacking trip out at the coast (Point Reyes) and went car camping down at this cool ancient volcano (Pinnacles). Keeping sane I guess. San Fran is pretty damn far from the Sierra though and I’m missing it badly. I’ll hopefully head up there soon. I’m still GPSing all my hikes. The first one I didn’t log and every time I got to a gate or a trail junction, it felt strange to not stop for a waypoint. Count another future CDTer here too.

Backpacker told me that if I submit some more trips, they’ll exchange my GPS for a GPS cellphone with minutes that I can use. That’d be nice. I spent a week in Boulder sorting through the data. The project has turned out to be pretty damn cool. And yes, you can actually see some of the times that I walked off trail to take a crap  Even funnier though is that the track is too damn big to be of much practical use. You can’t load it in to a GPS!! People, if they so choose, will be able to load sections but not the whole thing. But you can load it in to Google Earth and see the pretty detailed waypoints (turn left here, nice shady oak there, great views over that way, etc). It should be up online sometime in December on backpacker.com/hikes. It’s a pay website ($15/year), but you can sign up for a free trail and download the PCT during that time. There is also a little piece (“The PCT Project”) in the magazine introducing the map and myself. It’s going into the February issue (which comes out in December). I’ll spam the PCT-L and the yahoo group when it goes online.

In the “not great” department, my feet have stayed bigger. Meaning, many of my old shoes don’t fit! Damn it! Has this happen to anyone else? I’m definitely buying new snow boots but will try to hold off on the other sports. My feet are pretty unhappy in my bike shoes though.

On the job search front, there seem to be some cool ones in this world. I’m going for those. I haven’t heard back from anywhere yet though  I’m pretty much applying to most of the “core” companies and associations in the backpacking universe. I spend my days applying to places all over the country.

When you come to the city sometime in the future, drop me a line. We’ll do something fun!

Cheers,
Jack