Our many, many hikes together

Vasquez Rocks, April 2011

This week I released my third book about hiking, "Headin' to the Cabin" (It's all about hiking trails in northwest Wisconsin and is dedicated to you!)). I always enjoyed taking you hiking with you when we lived together in California, and hopefully soon we will go hiking together across Wisconsin, Minnesota and many other states!

The first hike we ever took was when you were four months old. We took a trail on a ridgeline behind our house through a redwood forest.

When we lived in Lancaster, we usually hiked in the desert during spring and autumn but then when the temperatures got hot in summer, we'd hike in the mountains of the Angeles National Forest near where we lived.

Your favorite place to hike was Vasquez Rocks (You called them the "Kirk Rocks"), and you often asked to go there. You also liked just about any place that had sign posts so you could find and count the numbers!

My email to you for April 6, 2013

Here is my email for you, sent April 6, 2013, just in case you don’t receive it:

Dear Kieran,

How are you doing? I am doing fine, with the exception that I miss you very much. I have great news, though: We get to see one another a couple of times this month! We will be getting together the afternoons of April 12 and April 26. That’s next Friday (April 12) and then just two weeks after that! I can’t wait to see you again!

The snow is beginning to melt and the weather to warm up, so I think I am done snowshoeing for the year. But that means I’ll soon be able to start hiking again! I always enjoyed the great hikes we took to the tops of mountains, through desert canyons, and to cool places like Vasquez Rocks (You always called them the “Kirk Rocks”!).

Speaking of the Kirk Rocks, did you know that there is a new “Star Trek” movie coming out? It will be released in May, and you even can see it in 3D at IMAX theaters. I can’t wait! In the meantime, I’ve been reading lots of “Star Trek” books to satisfy my hunger for Captain Kirk’s adventures.

How are your reading classes going in school? You must have gotten through most of the alphabet by now. Have you read any interesting stories? I always liked reading to you when you were a preschooler. You’d curl up on my lap in the comfy living room recliner, and I’d read to you a whole bunch of books we got at the library and a few that we purchased at the book store. Some books you liked so much that you wanted me to read them over and over! You always enjoyed flap books, too.

Grandma and Grandpa Bignell say “Hi”, and so do Uncle Chris and Aunt Susie. They all have some Easter gifts that I had planned to give you March 29 when we were to last get together. But since the date for Easter changes every year, what’s the difference if you get them on April 12 instead? J They all are looking very forward to finally being able to meet you in person and enjoy looking at old pictures I have of you.

On Easter, Grandma Bignell gave me a whole bunch of old pictures she had of you when you stayed with them in 2008 and of when you were a baby. I’d never seen most of the pictures before! I’ve scanned them all into my computer and will have to show them to you sometime.

I recently read a very good book that had a lot of very pretty pictures in it. It was called “Bear Wants More,” by Karma Wilson. One day Bear wakes up and realizes that he slept all through winter and that it’s now spring! And you know what a bear who has slept all winter is when he wakes up? He’s HUNGRY! So all of the animals of the forest try to help Bear find enough food to eat so he won’t be hungry anymore. Do you know how they do that? You will have to read the book and find out! Maybe you can find the book at your school library or at the city library when you mom takes you there.

That is all for now. I miss and love you very much and can’t wait to see you next Friday!

Love,

Dad

Remember hiking into a volcano?

Do you know where you were standing four years ago on Monday? You were in the middle of a volcano!

We went on a hike to the Amboy Crater, a famous extinct volcano in the Mojave Desert near the historical Route 66. As you were very young, I took you up into the volcano on my back in a child carrier, and when we got to the middle of the it, I let you out. The picture at above right shows you playing in the cone.

The black rock is called basalt and was lava that flowed out of the cinder cone and hardened. Lava last flowed out of the volcano some 5,000 years ago.

Here's a whole bunch of photos from our hike!

Our hike across 'another world'

Three years ago today we hiked through a very alien setting, but one that's right here on Earth: the Trona Pinnacles!

The pinnacles are mineral spires that sat at the bottom of a lake during the last Ice Age. Several science fiction movies have been filmed there.

You wanted to walk through it, so even though I had a child carrier on my back, I let you down for most of the hike. The air was very dry and had a distinct alkaline scent.

Here's a whole bunch of pictures from our adventure!

Our hike of Red Rock Canyon State Park

I bet you don't remember this hike - you were barely two years old at the time! It's the first big hike we took after moving to Lancaster, Calif., and we did it four years ago today.

It was to Red Rock Canyon State Park, north of Mojave, Calif. We walked through some areas where the canyon walls were made of pure black lava rock - it was quite a sight!

During a rest stop, I let you out of the child carrier that I had on my back, and you sat on a boulder of lava that is about 13 million years old. That's what the photo at left is of. The cool dinosaur T-shirt I bought for you in Green River, Utah, a few months before. I still have your hiking hat shown in the picture!

Here's a whole bunch of pictures from our expedition!

Recall our hike at the dry lake bed?

Two years ago today, we hiked across the El Mirage Dry Lake Bed near Palmdale, Calif. It's a low point in the desert where water collects in spring as snow melts off the mountains, but it quickly evaporates in the heat and dry air. At one time, when the climate was more wet, it probably was a real lake.

There was a neat nature center at the dry lake bed that we went to before going on the the hike. I purchased a roadrunner stuffie for you there! You loved your roadrunner and often took it many places with you.

You were just getting old enough that you liked to walk on our hikes, so you went all the way out to the dry lake bed on your own. I was so proud! But alas, that really tired you out. I wore the child carrier on my back, however, so I hauled you back to the nature center (which we then went into to buy the roadrunner stuffie!)

Here's a whole bunch of pictures from our hike!

Hiking Red Cliffs Trail in the desert

You at Red Cliffs Trail parking lot
Oct. 7, 2010

Two years today we hiked and explored towering volcanic deposits left in the Mojave Desert more than 12 million years ago. They were the red cliffs at Red Rock Canyon State Park, California, along Highway 14.

This probably was the first hike where you really got interested in rocks and actually started trying to remember their names when I pointd them out! The three main kinds of rocks there are basalt (black), volcanic ash (white), and sandstone (red). You thought it was really cool that the black rocks came out of volcanoes!

You even picked up some of the rocks and brought them home! I have them in a box and will give them to you when you're older.

This wasn't our first visit to the state park, but it was to that area of the park Some of the red cliffs stood more than 20 stories over our heads!

Here are a bunch of pictures of our hike.

Excerpt from essay I wrote about hiking, fatherhood and you

I've been going through my files and found a wonderful essay, "Leap into the Void," that I wrote in January 2010. It is to be the lead essay in my book "Trails and Trials: Tribulations of Being a Father" in which various hikes I go on with you serve as metaphors or analogs for the insecurities and growth one undergoes in fatherhood.

Other matters have sidetracked me from working on the book, but I have each of the essays outlined; this is the only one that is finished. I plan to eventually complete the other ones. For the moment, though, I'd like to include a bit of it here for you:

We stepped over boulders that diverted the creek away from the cliffside, then headed right up to the wall. I placed my hand upon it, realized how delicate the formation really was as sandstone rubbed off beneath my palm. Wind and rain – though more of the latter than the former in the desert – over millennia had picked holes in the Narrow’s walls, like my hand hollowing out the canyonsides a few grains at a time. I grinned like a child making a new discovery. Up close, the rock really was more gray than white; the gleaming bright walls were another optical illusion. Still, there were plenty of white splotches, or leached calcium carbonate, which water easily had flushed between the formation’s individual sand grains down through the ages.

Kieran pressed against my back, stretched his hand toward the canyon wall. I turned to the side so he could reach it. His fingers ran against the siltstone, and he squealed with delight.

My eyes followed the canyon wall upward past the pockmarks and the barren tops. The moon, as white as the sunlit rock above us, hung motionless in the turquoise sky. Now there would be a hike to take, I thought, a walk on the moon, bounding gleefully at the edge of ancient craters, the stars above sharper than any man had ever seen them before, on a fantastic journey in which humanity finally left its womb called Earth.

Our hike into an extinct volcano

As I promote my new hiking book, I find myself thinking a lot about all of the great hikes we've gone over the years. One of my favorites is at Amboy Crater, an extinct volcano in California's Mojave Desert, that we hiked in spring 2009. I've got a photo album of it at my Facebook site.

I carried you on my back in a child carrier to and from the volcano (in the photo at upper right, you can see the cone on the right side of the horizon), but once we got inside the cinder cone, I let you out. You had a blast running around the crater floor, which was covered in soft clay and hard black basalt. You'd pick up the basalt rocks and throw them and look at every bug that moved around.

It was quite a neat thought to think our playground for the afternoon was the center of a volcano that a few thousand years ago had spewed lava for miles around!

Your picture is on another online article!

My article “Hiking with Kids – Avoiding Common Summer Injuries” appears in the latest edition of Seattle Backpackers Magazine - and pictures of you from hikes we've taken together appear with it!

The article examines how to avoid and treat sunburn, heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Seattle Backpackers Magazine is an online magazine focusing on backpacking, hiking, climbing and camping.

The top picture is of you enjoying water during a rest break we took before entering Nightmare Gulch at Red Rocks State Park north of Mojave, Calif.

The next photo down is of you at the southern edge of the Mojave Nature Preserve in Southern California, just off the I-40. I believe the Providence Mountains are in the background. It was taken in March 2011.

The bottom photo is of you playing with my trekking pole on Ritter Ranch Preserve near Acton, Calif. You're standing on rock that's half a billion years old!

There are photo albums of all of these hikes/travels on my Facbeook site.

I can't wait to go hiking with you again - there are some great trails in northwestern Wisconsin for us to hike!

Your photo is online again, Kieran!

A picture of you appeared online today, Kieran - a pic of you on the cover of my first book "Hikes with Tykes: A Practical Guide to Day Hiking with Kids" in an article about that book for a Canadian magazine. The book cover photo is of you all ready to go on a hike at the head of the Manzanita Trail high in the San Gabriel Mountains of the Angeles National Forest. The trail starts at the location of an old fault line that's no longer active. On one side of the fault line is red, sedimentary soil (like what you're standing on), and on the other side is white granitic rock that is tens of millions of year old. It made for a great pic, especially with your terrific smile!

All of the anecdotes in the interview are about you. I'm specifically describing a hike you and I took through the redwoods in northern California (the diaper stuff) and one we took alongside Lake Piru (the bug crossing the road stuff). Photo albums of both hikes on on my Facebook page.

I remember well the telephone interview for this article. Jane and I had just spent the day before in Anaheim and were heading to Palmdale on the Pearblossom Highway. We were to pick you up that night for the weekend, and she was so excited to meet you for the first time! The sun shined brilliantly in the blue sky with the San Gabriels to our left ... the very same mountain range where this picture of you had been taken. The future held so much promise. It is a day I never will forget.

Remember our many hikes together?

I've started writing a new book about hiking trails, Kieran, this time focusing on those in northern Wisconsin and Minnesota. Sure wish you could join me on some of those trails. While not quite as dramatic as the mountains and deserts we've climbed in Southern California, they're still scenic in their own right, and we still can find rock to touch that is more than a half billion years old.

We did some fantastic hikes together in your preschool days, Kieran, walking beneath 15-story high redwoods, scaling mountain peaks almost two miles about sea level, traipsing miles across bone-dry deserts and dried-up ancient lakes. I'm sure you remember some of them, especially the Kirk Rocks (as you called them), which really is Vasquez County Park. Check out my Facebook photo albums to see if any of the pics jog your memory at all.

I've kept topo maps from all of the hikes we've been on together, so if one day you ever wish to do them again for yourself, you'll be able to. I've also got a box of gems, fossils and cool rocks we've collected over the years on our many hikes. When you're on your own, I'll be happy to give them to you. I've got many stories to share with you about them.

Hopefully we'll soon be together again and once again can get back into the wilds. I'll be thinking of you everytime I step on a new trail this summer.