…under your mattress. It looks like the Bailout has failed to pass the House. NYT reports a second vote has been scheduled.

Jansport apparently issues an annual challenge to its gear retailers:

Get as many employees as you can to the top of Southern California’s three big peaks (Mt. Baldy, Mount San Jacinto, and San Gorgonio Mountain) in one day.

For the uninitiated, that entails a whopping total of 24,000 total vertical feet.

You can read about the fun at the Backcountry Blog, which took up the challenge this year and lived to write about it. Purists take note, however: the Jansport Challenge allows participants to drive to the highest trailhead on each peak, and even take the tram up San Jacinto, which chops a few vertical feet off the endeavor.

How much vertical, you ask?

Well, if you start near my house, at Santa Monica Pier, my National Geographic Topo software says you’ll need to run, bike, or climb over 190 miles and 72,000 total vertical feet, to get to the top of San Jacinto Peak. Hopefully, you can arrange a helicopter to get you back home. If not, tack on another 10,800 vertical feet (down) to return to Palm Springs, and for god’s sake take the bus back to the pier.

No word on what the reward is for the winner.

Is there anything more beautiful than watching Fall arrive at your home town mountain? (The San Francisco Peaks, Flagstaff, Arizona)

For fair-skinned persons like myself, it’s sort of the Holy Grail of sun protection: the concept of a sunscreen that you ingest as a pill rather than slather all over your body.

Interestingly enough, one of my parents’ health newsletters is mentioning a product called Heliocare which promises to do exactly that. It’s a pill. Take it before you go out into the sun, and you get extra protection from the sun.

Now, my parents have a lot of newsletters lying around, many of which date back to the 1960’s, so I first had to check to see if what I was reading was current. It was. Even more intriguing, a 2004 study apparently showed that Heliocare significantly reduced both sunburn and associated skin damage due to sun exposure (more…)

It’s been hard to come up with a subject to write about this week. Every backcountry skiing or hiking related topic I’ve thought of just seems a little…off topic.

So I will go off topic to stay on, and relay a dream I had last night, in which MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann was moderating a joint emergency House and Senate hearing on the current financial crisis, and the proposed bailout.

Politics Alert dear reader: (more…)

ONE OF THE THINGS I haven’t mentioned about my recent PCT hike was that I froze my butt off at night.

At first, I was convinced the problem was the sleeping bag I’d chosen: Marmot’s 30° Hydrogen.

Since it was mid-August, I was anticipating temperatures to be mild. Instead, overnight lows dipped down right to freezing, even leaving a bit of frost on the coldest morning (at Crabtree Meadows). (more…)

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time a study has linked BPA exposure to health issues in humans. Here you Go…

With its various parts and configurations, MSR’s Hyperflow Microfilter weighs between roughly 7.6 and 9.9 ounces total.

Go with the higher number—leaving parts at home (such as the Nalgene bottle adapter or even the carrying sack) is not recommended.

That makes the Hyperflow roughly two and a half ounces lighter than my current pump/filter darling (continue reading)…

HORSESHOE MEADOW — I take one last look inside my car, checking to be sure nothing will appeal to the bears, and then I lock the doors.

It feels kind of spooky as my hiking partner Bill drives us back down Horseshoe Meadows Road in his truck, heading east to Highway 395, then north all the way to Onion Valley.

From there, all we’ll have to do is make it back to my car—fifty miles of hiking through the High Sierra via the Pacific Crest Trail…(more).

Among the more esoteric search topics that bring visitors to SierraDescents is the question of the scent of HDPE water bottles.

Do HDPE water bottles really smell bad, people wonder? Or was that just a marketing pitch started by the creators of Lexan?

Here at the world-renowned SierraDescents Institute for Plastic Odor Research (SIPOR), I decided to create an elaborate experiment to answer that question once and for all (more…)