The NEW Post Your Campsite/gear/knife/hiking/anything Outdoorsy Pic Thread!

[Galeocerdoshark]

Come out here some time and I'll take you on a hike to see it in person. Here is a good example, in this part of Sequoia NP the treeline is 11,500' (3500 M) and you can see the clear line on the distant range

Once again, great pictures. Thanks for the invitation. Who knows, I might make it to the US one day.
As for now, I hope to witness this phenomenon a bit closer to home, maybe in Norway or Sweden, or the Swiss/Austrian Alps.
But who knows, one day. I'll gladly remind myself of the kind invite.

There aren't a lot of fossils in my immediate area, but about an hour's drive south is a good pleistocene bed with mammals, and another with shark's teeth. A good distance north is a place where I have found cretaceous baculites with the original shell material intact, another where I found a huge ammonite (about 18" or 50 cm diameter), and I know a great spot in the southern desert for cambrian trilobites. The coast range west of here has some miocene/pliocene marine beds that are full of shells.

Are you talking about shark tooth hill? I know of some Dutch fossil hunters that went hunting there and had gotten extremely ill because of some bacteria/virus that is hidden in the dirt and is being spread by air when you start to dig through the earth. The local hospital was aware of this. Local people are immune to this virus, but people of other continents aren't. They were sick and unable to go to work for atleast 6 months. The site did produce very nice shark teeth and other vertebrate fossils for them, though.

What I'm really thinking when I read your post was... PICS


@OwenM: I keep 'going barefoot' to my backyard, lol. Walking barefoot on grass does feel amazing though. On rocks... not so much

@HM: thanks for explaining! I don't get a lot of the technical stuff on photography though. I'm lucky my fossil hunting buddy is more into that and takes macro pics for our website. Seems like another nice walk you had there, by the way.

@Matthew: those pictures are truly amazing and inspiring.

@Eero: that BK14 looks like a great companion ;-).

[CCMI]

Just got back from a trip to the Porcupine Mountains in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Did about 35 miles in just over 3 days and the fall colors were almost at their peak.

Mackinac Bridge



Lake of the Clouds



Dinner with a view



A little snow in the morning



Lake Superior in the distance



Waterfall



Another



Lake Superior



Sunset



Some parts of the forest were well into the fall colors



Other parts still very green



Lake of the Clouds from the other direction




Thanks for looking

[OwenM]

Awesome!

[HikingMano]

Ditto

And GS, no problem, I don't know much of the technical stuff myself. I will when I get myself a DSLR though....

[lambertiana]

CCMI - I really like Lake of the Clouds, especially in fall colors.

Galeocerdo - Yes, shark tooth hill. I haven't been there yet. I have heard about the health effects, I think it is a fungus.

I haven't done any serious fossil collecting in some time. In California, the best place I have seen was near Cadiz, digging for lower cambrian trilobites. I need to go back, they are rich beds and it is easy to find specimens there. Winter is the time to go there, because it is in the southern desert where it gets really hot in the summer:

http://www.trilobites.info/CA.htm

Probably my favorite location I have ever visited was Antelope Springs (middle cambrian Wheeler shale, House Range, western desert of Utah). If you don't find trilobites there, you must be wearing a blindfold. Even a blind person could find them by touch. The most common are elrathia kingii:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elrathia

About 20 miles from Antelope Springs is a mississippian (lower carboniferous in European terms) formation with enough criniod stems to fill a bucket if you are so inclined. And when I lived in St Louis I would drive up the Mississippi River to Grafton, Illinois, where there was a silurian limestone quarry that has outstanding stenocalymene celebra trilobites. They are not flattened, but fully three dimensional. They are also harder to find and clean because the limestone was in solid blocks and you couldn't just separate bedding planes like you can in shale. I would take a sledgehammer and break up big rocks, looking for parts of trilobites to show on the broken surfaces. Then I would use fine chisels to free them from the matrix.

[Myal]

just back from a road trip
went to see my brother for coffee
was a few days driving
our accomodation :


its a road trip so we saw a lot of road




some open space







its not all bare dirt and desert , there is trees , or was ...

[Myal]

its hard to get the 360 degree vast nothingness into a camera



and how long the road is too ..


civilised facilities are really apreciated tho


accomodations again ..


sunrise

[Myal]

usual touristy landmark pictures ....





cant cross the nulabor without stoppin to look off the cliffs some .. its a breath taking view




that sign aint kidding ....

[Myal]

we have these gumtrees that just fascinate me how they grow




the reflections off windscreen , gps face and camera lense were making it hard to snap this , but you get the idea of what we were looking at .. take the next left almost takes e new meaning



acoms again


we found fossils



ok thats it from me

hope the pics of the hot country will warm you guys up some where its miserable cold

hard to think of this place being sea floor but it was once

I really get why these drives are called road trips

[HikingMano]

That really is quite the roadtrip! I love the cliffs picture, how they fade into the distance.

I saw this Dirty Jobs episode once, where Mike Rowe talks about a really long straight road in Australia, where accident/casualty markers and signs are posted along the road warning people to stay awake while driving. Apparently, because the landscape is so utterly flat and vast, folks fall asleep while driving on the road and end up crashing off the road. Is that the road you were on?

[lambertiana]

Great pics! I love the one of the cliffs. And I have always wanted to spend time in the gum trees.

[Myal]

thank you

the road markers seem to be in South Australia , its a state thing . it does give a sombre reminder tho .

the trip i did was not huge :
https://maps.google.com.au/maps?sadd...mra=ls&t=m&z=5

went there , had coffee and a sleep pretty much , fixed a couple things on truck , spent a bit of time with my bro and his kids , and came home

he is family , but i do it for the drive more to be honest i think

[HikingMano]

Doesn't have to be huge to be enjoyable Although I find it funny that you call a drive that length not huge It's pretty much like me driving out to the east coast of the US and back to the west... which I've never done yet and seems pretty huge to me!

[Myal]

ok , its not huge by comparison ... i did go thru Cairns , CookTown Darwin and Alice Springs on way to Perth once , it took 12 weeks , but we did have a lot of exploring and fun stops too

[HikingMano]

Awesome!

[OwenM]

Finished a hike this morning that started Tuesday around lunchtime, and don't have any other pics uploaded, yet.
Success at last, though! I've been griping about not running up on a rattlesnake in the wild since last year, and finally did yesterday morning.

[lambertiana]

Lake Marjorie, Kings Canyon NP. The pictures do not come close to showing how blue it was...

[HikingMano]

Finished a hike this morning that started Tuesday around lunchtime, and don't have any other pics uploaded, yet.
Success at last, though! I've been griping about not running up on a rattlesnake in the wild since last year, and finally did yesterday morning.

That is awesome! I haven't seen a live rattlesnake in years, though I've seen quite a few others. I'm always on the lookout, but haven't had much luck this past year or two. Sounds like you had a great time, I look forward to the other pics! Great shot, how'd you get so close?

[OwenM]

Great shot, how'd you get so close?

Well, I didn't really get closer than about 3ft, just zoomed in with the camera. He freaked out and went from laying lengthwise in the trail to a tight coil in about a second flat, but my friend rearranged him from behind with her trekking pole to a more photogenic position.

[OwenM]

Didn't take a huge amount of pics, as we were under heavy tree cover the vast majority of the time.

Couple more of the rattler.
Pretty good camo!









We will follow this line, generally skirting the ridgelines just below or along the tops.









This tree is on borrowed time...

Lots of rock formations and overhangs(most much smaller than the pictured one) throughout. I'd probably have had hundreds of pics if I'd tried to capture all of them. One section, dubbed the "Rock Garden" is a continuous path of shifting rocks, regardless of how large they are, so that every step is a potential problem. We both had sore feet and taped right pinkie toes from day one as a result of walking on rocks and sidecut trails all the time, but no real problems.









We camped by a retired fire tower the second night.



First use of the Osprey Exos 58 I bought for a canceled trip to CO. I like it even more than my beloved Exos 46!

The TT Notch may have a bigger footprint than my bivy, but it's not too greedy.

We were laughing about the fact that our time from trailhead to trailhead was 73 hours for a little over 45 miles, and half of it was spent sleeping. Would have been nicer if the cool weather that just hit had come a week earlier, but it was a good trip!

edit: btw, for anyone local, this is the Alabama Pinhoti Trail, from Adam's Gap to the 603A trailhead below Rebecca Mountain.