Castle Crags

Yesterday I visited a childhood friend of my dad’s in Dunsmuir, CA (just south of Mt. Shasta), Alan Berry, who told me a nice fish story involving my dad and gave me a copy of his bigfoot recordings. When I was growing up, I devoured all of the books in the UFO/bigfoot/pyramids section of our library. Strange way to start off on a scientific career, you ask. Maybe. On the other hand, I learned to tools and trade of being a skeptic by reading these books. And to this day I love to read crazy speculations. I think it may help loosen up my neurons. But perhaps my neurons are so lose they have turned to goo?
Anyway, on to the hiking. By popular request, here are a picture of my new trail running shoes.

Ha! You asked for it, and you got it! The shoes have pretty good grip and are Gortex, so they should be pretty good in wet conditions.
Well, my shoes and I, we went for a run yesterday in the Castle Crags. We started out just off I-5 at the Pacific Crest trailhead. From this trailhead, there is an initial steep climb followed by a stead grade up to the base of the Crags. Then it gets a little steep and running is not as easy. But bounding over boulders can be quite fun (if exhausting!) Here is a picture of the Dome and Mt. Shasta in the background

I had about two hours round trip, so I ran up about 1:10 minutes and just made it to the dome before I had to turn around. Then, going down I made a wrong turn. This led to the embarrassing situation of passing two groups I had just passed running down the mountain. The first group shouted “You’re crazy!” to which I said, “Thank you!” The second group, when I had first seen them one had asked me whether anything was chasing me, and I replied “A big bear!” When I passed this bear group again, I told them, “I keep trying to lure the bear toward you, but he won’t come.” Such is life, running on trails.