Moments in Dirt and Ink

For backpacking, I have a water filter system where I can attach a "dirty water" bag full of water at one end and an empty "clean water" bag at the other, hang it up, and the one turns into the other. It's great when I only want about 2L of water, the amount the "dirty water" bag holds, and that's how much I want for any typical backpacking trip. When I'm car camping, water may not be nearby and there seem to be fewer and fewer spigots available to fill up a multi-gallon jug. I turn to the water filter system, but the backpacking one becomes quite cumbersome when looking to get 5 gallons (20L) or more through. That's a lot of refills. So I found a way to scale it up a little. A bigger supply to fill a bigger jug. It still has my trusty Hydroblu Versa Flow as the central filtration, but a much larger roll up bag supports the supply of unfiltered water to it. This one holds about 4L. It expects to be used rolled up, but I'd rathe...

Arcata Community Forest Click for map I thought I could at least get a little hike together to ring in the new season. Winter is scheduled to start off with rain, though, and I got choices. I chose to actually do the little hike on the one day in the coming week that might have sun. It had changed to "fog", but the predicted weather seems very volatile at the moment. So on the one day not expected to rain (for the moment), I headed off for a through hike of the Arcata Ridge Trail. A looping trail now descends to the road so climbing narrow, steep steps is no longer required! A view out on the weather and there is some fog. It's not exactly the best time to meander through the forest. It's one of the few times one might manage not to find any flowers blooming in the undergrowth. The mushrooms have been coming and going. The patch of clintonia offers some interesting patterns as the leaves die off. There are some extraordinarily red waxy caps , some...