Seriously, is he one of the five funniest authors alive right now? I'm a Stranger Here Myself is pure genius, but what I'm taking the time to type about is A Walk in the Woods, which I just read for the second time (on my new Amazon Kindle 3G).  I first read it back in 2006, before I even knew I was head over heels in love with backpacking.  A few trips under my belt, I knew I had to crack the cover one more time and read it from the perspective of a hiker.  Better the second time around. I'm too tired right now and too a.d.d.-riddled to even begin touching upon every subtopic in that book that really gets my blood pumping, but that book just makes you want to empty your savings account, outfit yourself, quit your job and fly to Springer Mountain, GA.  Even when I expected what was coming, I still had to put the book, er, Kindle down and laugh like I've never laughed from a book.  Every person out on the trail has a little bit of Bryson and a little bit of Katz (and maybe even a little bit of Maryellen) in them.  If you appreciate the outdoors, do yourself a favor and buy/borrow/steal this book as soon as you can. 

So I was visiting my favorite Google Sites how-to website when I stumbled across the Table of Contents section.  A few hours and two cups of coffee later, and I feel like I've changed the site, for the better.  Each trail report has a table of contents with links to each section, the Day Hikes page now contains every day hike with a link to each section, and each of the three Gear pages has its sections delineated at the top of each respective page.  It's, in my opinion, neater and cleaner, and I feel that with each change this site slowly becomes more refined and user friendly.  This site was conceived after spending countless hours over at www.dorfworld.net, a site belonging to a fellow member of the backpacker.com message boards.  His trails reports had me sitting at work thinking how much fun it would be to start my own site, but "how?" kept popping into my mind - I knew nothing about websites.  I eventually stumbled upon Google Sites (I drink the Google kool-aid), and their ease of use and ridiculous price ($10 a year) quickly made up for their relatively simple layout.  Now, I'm proud to direct people to this site.  Countless other backpackers have their own sites chronicling their own adventures, and sure, it's not built through HTML (am I even using that in the proper context??), and isn't super technical, but the product that Google offers to laymen like myself is nothing short of extraordinary in my mind.  Google now offers some pretty terrific templates for those creating new sites, but there is absolutely no way I would scrap this and start over...maybe down the road they'll offer current sites the option to change over to a new template, but for the time being "slate" is the way for this site to go.

    Anywho, off my high horse.  As some of you know, my buddy Bill went to Glacier last year.  His pictures dwarf anything I display on this site, and ever since last July our conversations have centered around "where are we going to go in 2011??!?!!?"  Well, life happens and things change.  I had a baby. Mark had a baby. Bill got engaged.  Wild West 2.0 isn't happening in 2011, so now we're focused on hammering out two, maybe three weekenders this summer.  Where will we go? Who knows, but if I had to guess we would do one weekend on the A.T. somewhere in the Berkshires, one weekend in the White Mountains, and potentially (hopefully) a three-day weekend in the Adirondacks.  Wherever we go, it would be dutifully chronicled here, with more details than you care for and more pictures than you hope to view.