News / Hike

The spirit of adventure and exploration doesn’t have to be super dangerous and difficult sometimes it’s just going a different route or somewhere you have not been before. That’s not to say planning and preparation are not important either. One of the great things about San Diego’s backcountry is an area you have been to many times can still have a few surprises up its sleeve.

We often don’t get days off together so when a Monday lines up we like to jump at the chance to get out together. Running a small business means our schedules don’t really line up but the day after valentine’s day we headed to the coast for a little adventure.  We would be doing the Ho Chi Minh Trail in La Jolla.

Waking up was difficult, after a decent night of sleep and temperatures in the forties I was warm in my bag and had only minimal tossing and turning. I had only needed to leave the comfort of my bag once in the night to pee.

Last week was another great adventure, the week prior we were getting our snow camp on In Eager AZ and then in a span of a week we were back in the desert backpacking Joshua Tree

With the lock downs compounded by the California wildfires I was getting a little stir crazy at the house. I was doing good until the backcountry pretty much got secured to reduce the possibility of more wildfires so when my buddy Mike put together a hiking trip to Mt Charleston, I jumped at it. My usually summer go to of the eastern sierras was off the table, so I got to do a mountain I have wanted to try for a while, but Las Vegas kept getting in the way, haha.

Survival Starts at Home: Tools, well there are a million and one ways to address this and I will start off with this one, make sure your tools are in good repair and ready to go. So much of what we do in the outdoors is seasonal and because of that a third of our gear can be shelved for the season at any given time. So, we should be aware that what we need to make sure we might need to keep our backcountry adventures safe and fun might need some periodic maintenance and a check out before we grab it and go.

Survival Starts at Home: Water, we spent an amazing week in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and you can read about it HERE, but it was definitely a stark contrast from the water situation down here in SoCal.

We had a great little get away this past week and shit down to go visit the in-laws in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. This was my first trip to the U.P. and I have to say I absolutely loved it up there

Survival Starts at Home: Signaling, one of the more underused, carried and understood concepts of backcountry travel is signaling. Like what am I talking about when I even bring it up, who are we trying to signal and how are we doing it. Well like we say Survival Starts at Home with planning, training and communicating a plan.