Backcasts archive: Through Dec. 14, 2007
By Brett PaulyBlog calendar: Dec. 14 | Dec. 12 | Dec. 11 | Dec. 9
Editor's note: This is the 15th installment of My Back Pages, which recalls previous columns penned by the author.
My Back Pages: Sole surviors
New shoeless joes are hitting dusty trails around San Francisco Bay and beyond
CUPERTINO, Calif. — Paul Lucas is well-armed with one-liners when passersby on day-hiking trails around San Francisco Bay ask where are his shoes.
"Oh, you like them? My parents made them for me."
"These are God's Reeboks."
"Aliens took them."
Or he'll simply stare blankly and respond in his Jay Leno-like voice, "What are shoes?"
Now Lucas doesn't mean to be crass or disrespectful. He just can't understand what all the fuss is about.
"There will always be a percentage of people who will look and think you're weird," said the slim 28-year-old software engineer from Mountain View, Calif. "I think it's completely natural, what human feet were meant for. And it's very pleasurable."
Lucas is on the cutting edge of the increasing numbers of barefoot hikers from Oakland, Calif., to Ontario, Canada. He leads the 25 members of the South Bay Barefoot Hikers, one of two such outfits in the Bay Area, the country's shoeless trekking mecca.
Curiously, southern California hasn't caught onto the wave like its neighbor to the north. But if we know Los Angeles, loosen your bootlaces; it'll be here soon enough.
This latest outdoors trend is enjoyed by a wide range of participants. It's not just hippie holdouts who are "one with the trail" and pondering life's inner meaning, as one might expect – though there is a fair share of those types. Bankers, retailers, computer experts, quilters, middle-age women and university students are throwing their wafflestompers to the wind, too.
"There are some who feel more connected with nature. Some people talk about that and others go, 'Huh?'" said Mike Berrow, a 40-year-old Concord, Calif., bank employee who pilots the 35-member East Bay Barefoot Hikers twice a month. On a recent outing, 21 people attended – the highest count yet.
"But there is another side to this that Nike doesn't want to hear about it," Berrow said. "There is a feeling of foot health, exercise. You come home after a reasonably long hike and your feet feel good – and you have a tactile memory of that hike."
Much to the chagrin of podiatrists and hiking boot manufacturers, these rebels eschew shoes because it is more natural, cheaper, less confining, reminiscent of their footloose childhood, less erosive to the trail, better for getting close-up views of wildlife and, they claim, healthier for their feet.
That last assertion may be disputed by any tenderfoot, i.e., me, who hiked bootless five miles with Lucas for the first time in Rancho San Antonio Park here and came away with a half dollar-size blister. Apparently it takes newcomers a little getting used to.
Indeed, more and more hikers are finding that unshod feet thicken, or callus, quickly while hoofing on natural surfaces; have reduced risks of spraining an ankle because they are planted directly on terra firma (there is no platform, no shoe sole to twist off of); don't get smelly inside sweaty, cramped boots; and, in the long run, are actually less likely to get blisters.
It would be unrealistic to assert that the activity is risk-free. Even the most grizzled shoeless joes realize they are more susceptible to broken glass, rusty nails, thorns, stubbed toes and other casualties of the trail.
Pacific Crest Trail guru and barefoot backpacking advocate Ray Jardine noted in his 1992 guide "The PCT Hiker's Handbook" that it took his foot two years to recover after kicking a rock in Zion National Park while he was gazing at a box canyon's towering rim.
The precautions are simple: Look before you tread, step straight down and use common sense. And the rewards justify the gamble.
"The notion of having your feet completely protected is beyond me," Lucas said. "People don't wear gloves all the time, do they?"
Armed with leg warmers, a wide-brimmed hat and his trusty walking stick, Lucas looked awkward in his broad, "easy on the knees" stance as he descended a muddy hill on a recent overcast Saturday.
"Tread lightly on the heel and put more pressure on the balls of your feet. It's the wider part, meant to bear more weight. The heel is a stabilizer," said Lucas, who enjoys squishy moss but is partial to pine needles and soft, powdery soil.
"I can hear you thumping – too much heel," he called to his first-timer guest as they neared a grove of bay trees. "I can get much closer to deer than most people.
It's not for everybody, you know. There are the chronically shod who would only dream of stepping out of their shoes in the shower or in bed. Then others stare in envy and haven't gotten over the psychological hurdle of going unshod."
An Adidas-clad runner dashed past Lucas and muttered, "Wow." The sprinter will be sharing trails with bootless hikers more frequently, according to Richard Frazine, a Thomaston, Conn., card and gift shop retailer whose 1992 book, "The Barefoot Hiker," is credited with spawning the movement.
"I would expect that by the end of the century we will be heard of and represented just about everywhere, with groups in every state," said Frazine, 48, who leads a 70-member club of barefooters, as they are dubbed, in his hometown.
"I don't think barefoot hiking will be the dominant form of outdoors activity, but it will be looked at as one alternative among many."
The statement doesn't seem so grandiose when one considers that barefoot hiking clubs are found in five states (with Kansas set to join the pack) and a Canadian province, which are all linked by the Dirty Sole Society, an Internet discussion group spearheaded by Lucas.
"It's not fantasy. We are growing each year. There is enough interest that close to 100 people communicate daily across the nation on the computer network – and more on a local level," said Frazine, who has trekked sans boots for more than two decades and led his first organized barefoot hike in 1989.
Kathy Derby, 47, a Sonoma, Calif., bank systems integrator, enjoys a nostalgic impulse when she rambles without her sneakers.
"It takes me back and reinforces the pleasures of my youth and being free," she said.
As a child, she was a tomboyish Navy brat who frolicked shoeless through the forests of Washington and California, where dirt, sod and pine needles massaged her toes. As an adult, she lost the chance to think about what her feet were sensing.
"In my profession, in heels and stockings and business attire, I don't get to feel the earth or the ground. You don't feel connected to the planet that you are on," said Derby, whose initial fears about rekindling her desire to hike unshod – cold feet, bruising rocks, germs and snakebites – were partially alleviated by Frazine's book.
Then she decided to take the barefoot plunge at the behest of co-worker Berrow, and hasn't looked back.
"I have never had my feet injured on the dozen or so hikes I've been on," said Derby, whose sister, Barbara Stockton, leads a bootless club in California's Sonoma Valley, "And I love the mud."
Frazine admitted that footwear makers shouldn't be shaking in their boots quite, yet.
"We will probably be as well represented on the trail as any one of the manufacturers, but certainly, together, they will far outnumber us," he said.
"We don't have any product to sell; that' sour disadvantage. If we did, perhaps the slogan would be 'Join us and save the $150 and the blisters.'"
Club hikes are free, there are no membership dues and the foot gear is skin. Tyros get kick-started by taking shoeless jaunts around their house, back yard and neighborhood before hitting the trail.
Frazine is hosting a national gathering in Connecticut in early May but doesn't want to be viewed as some barefooted messiah (though he once was a candidate for priesthood). He simply enjoys sharing an experience that has been largely covered up over the ages.
"We don't feel that we have really been someplace unless we have felt it underfoot," he said. "It takes a little recalibration of the senses, but I can walk on gravel and know there is grass growing between the rocks, even with my eyes closed.
"It is as important as seeing or hearing or smelling. I don't mean that to sound New Age or something. The foot is a specialized organ that was made to touch. We have reclaimed it for ourselves."
Many ancient peoples – Celts, Egyptians and Greeks among them – preferred to stride unshod regardless of their social class, and the tradition is carried on to a certain degree today by Amish, Asian, Hindu and other societies, Frazine pointed out.
"I think we have presented an alternative that has been overlooked or, at times, campaigned against. There is a certain social pressure that did not exist 100 years ago, not even 50 years ago," he said. "The door was closing in the face of those who naturally preferred not to wear shoes.
"We are just trying to preserve a freedom for our children and grandchildren that was cherished freely by our parents and grandparents."
This article originally appeared March 21, 1996, in the Los Angeles Daily News.
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Grabbing tourism by the tail a farce in China?
Well, whaddya know, here's a tiger story that may have nothing to do with Woods.
Allegations are flying that the sighting of an otherwise heretofore extinct tiger in China are false. In other words, there may be no tiger in the woods, after all.
Reuters reports out of Beijing that China's State Forestry Administration, the country's leading wildlife authority, is taking flak
for refusing to rule on the authenticity
of a farmer's snapshots of a wild tiger
believed to be have long gone the way
of the dodo, according to a newspaper account.
Now a legal scholar has sued the wildlife office after it apparently rebuffed his demands to appoint a committee to verify the photographs, according to the Procuratorial Daily, an official paper of China's top prosecutors' office.
This came after Internet users accused the shooter in the mountainous Zhenping county of the northern Shaanxi province of doctoring the image. And after allegations local authorities accepted the photographs as proof the tiger exists in order to promote tourism. And after the State Forestry Administration sponsored a so far fruitless search for the striped beast, according to Reuters.
"The (administration) sent a group of experts to Zhenping to conduct investigations into the tiger, without first verifying that the photographs were real," the newspaper quoted the suing scholar, Hao Jingsong, as saying.
What in the name of tourism is going on here?
Curiously, the tiger debate has only escalated in recent weeks, Reuters reports, following the emergence of a Chinese New Year commemorative poster whose image of a tiger bears a striking resemblance to the creature in question
Stay tuned and we'll try to keep you posted on the tale of the tiger.
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Wild, wild cougar encounter in former wild West town of Deadwood, S.D.
The best outdoor line of the week comes straight out of the former Old West hub of Deadwood, S.D., where a woman in her backyard hot tub came face to face with a mountain lion prowling for deer.
"Now I know what a goldfish feels like when the cat is staring in its bowl," Marlene Todd said after the harrowing encounter, according to the Associated Press.
Todd, who was merely enjoying a soak, was startled to discover that the nearby rustling sound she thought was her house cat on a lazy stroll turned out to be "this big, tan, hairy body" just 4 inches away.
"I didn't realize what it was until it took a leap and jumped up on the side of my hot tub," Todd said.
The cougar was cornered somewhat because the deck stairs blocked its retreat. It would have to go up and over the hot tub, the AP reports.
"It just took a leap. It jumped on the side of the hot tub," Todd said of the encounter. "We locked eyes, and it kicked off of the hot tub and ran away. When it jumped, it flipped my robe into the hot tub."
She summoned Deadwood police, who surmised the big cat was stalking some deer in the neighborhood and may have been attracted to the warmth of the hot tub on the frosty morning.
It just goes to show wild incidents still take place in this town with the wild history that was founded during the Black Hills gold rush of the mid-1870s – triggered by the announcement of the glittery findings by none other than Yellow Hair himself, Colonel George Armstrong Custer.
Named for a narrow canyon of deceased trees known as Deadwood Gulch, the city grew up quickly and thrived as a prototypical and largely lawless Old West town, with saloons, gamblers, prostitutes, a theater owned by a man who controlled the area's opium trade and all sorts of desperados.
Its cemetery contains the tombstones of "Wild Bill" Hickok (a stage coach driver turned gunfighter and lawman who was shot and killed during a poker game here in August 1876) and Martha Jane Cannary-Burke (a k a Calamity Jane and the "White Devil of the Yellowstone" – the frontierswoman and professional scout who was known for fighting American Indians and her claim to have married Hickok).
Undoubtedly some of the mountain lion's kin were witnesses to the roaring good times back in 19th century western South Dakota.
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To protect Mexico's Monarch butterflies, illegal loggers told to bug off
Kudos to police and environmental agents south of the border for their actions that resulted in a twofold benefit to Mexico's natural resources.
Authorities are confident this week's arrests of 45 people and confiscation of enough illegally logged wood to fill 600 heavy trucks will ease the stress to a threatened nature reserve where Monarch butterflies nest in the winter, the Associated Press reports from Mexico City.
Illegal deforestation in and around the reserves jeopardizes the butterflies, which rely on the forest cover to protect them from the cold, high-altitude winds. Huge numbers of Monarchs died during a cold snap in 2002.
The busts occurred in the "buffer zone" created to protect the pine- and fir-covered mountaintops where the butterflies rest for the winter after migrating south from the United States and Canada, said Augusto Cabrera, a spokesman for the attorney general for environmental protection.
About 600 police and environmental agents raided 19 clandestine saw mills Wednesday in the western state of Michoacan. They detained mill workers, lumberjacks, truck drivers and others, Cabrera said.
Before Wednesday's raids, the government had already seized about 6.4 million cubic feet of illegally logged wood, closed 59 sawmills and charged 193 people with related crimes this year.
"That's the important thing – that people are being charged," Cabrera said. "Before, (authorities) would seize wood and dismantle sawmills, but there weren't many charges.''
It was not immediately clear what charges and possible punishments the suspects face, the AP reports.
Definitely good news, for butterflies and their sheltering flora, especially when one pauses to consider that according to a 2000 study 44 percent of the fir forests that harbor the migrating butterflies during their annual stopover had been damaged or destroyed over the preceding 29 years.
OK, so these are only butterflies, you might be thinking. But, hey, it's a start, and we're quite certain the fight to save the forests of Mexico will have other benefits small and large.
About the author: Brett Pauly spent nearly six years editing and publishing ESPNOutdoors.com before moving on to produce the ESPN.com Sports Travel site. He is a national award-winning writer and editor with 14 years of experience in the newspaper trade, including stints at the Los Angeles Daily News and Seattle Times. The Evergreen State is where he now makes his home. Click here to email him.
