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A few resources after hiking 1000+ miles of the PCT

It’s been a minute since I’ve last posted here (I’m a bit more frequent on Instagram and Twitter), and I wanted to gather a few resources for those interested in reading up on my outdoors experience after solo hiking 1000+ miles of the PCT, in two sections over a couple years.

First, a video overview of 2016 featuring many beautiful memories from the Washington PCT in the second half of the video:

Hiking to Canada. A multi-media audio journal of my first few days on Washington PCT. Spoiler alert: I saw a mountain lion on my first day. It’s still on my TODOs to complete the whole set.

Intro to Ultralight Backpacking. A brief presentation on ultralight backpacking and the philosophy behind it as well as how and why I go light, prepared for co-workers at REI.

Backpacking with Less: A Personal Introduction to Ultralight. An article I wrote for REI after completing the Desert PCT, to expand on the presentation above.

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Preparing to hike 537 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail

I have less than 24 hours until I leave for the start of the Washington Pacific Crest Trail, Bridge of the Gods at the Oregon/Washington border. From there, I hike north to Canada. I have spent many hours over the last couple of weeks planning, gear testing, internet ordering, and errands running. I now have a set of gear I feel great about, and I'm coming in at 9.5 pounds for a base pack weight. The first thing I did for planning was to use Halfmile's PCT maps to figure out my daily approximate mileage based off of what campsites were available. For those who have not heard of Halfmile, the man is a legend. From 4-5 day long hikes with my brother, I knew that I could hike 18 miles per day easy. After speaking with him, he encouraged me to push it, especially since my body will be so adapted to walking in the end. With an estimate of 22 miles per day for the trail – including time spent resupplying and taking close to "zero" days in Snoqualmie, and Stehekin – it's going to be a challenge. I'm excited for it.

Next, I focused on gear since this can take awhile to ship, especially with much of the best lightweight and ultralightweight gear coming out of small, independent comapnies.

I used LighterPack to keep everything organized, and inspiration from my brother, Karen Wang, and Twinkle on what to include in my pack. You can see a line-by-line breakdown of all of my gear here.

Items I'm most excited about: fanny pack, Zoom H1 audio recorder w/ wind muffler (looks like Beaker), Ricoh Theta 360 camera, down booties, Feathered Friends sleeping bag, watch, friendship bracelet.

Food was a trickier one for me to figure out. There are many calorie equations out there for figuring out how many calories per day you’ll need. For me, I just picked a somewhat arbitrary number that I thought would be a little more than I needed (4000 calories per day) and gut checked it with someone I trusted (my brother).

From there, you’ll need to decide what kind of food you like to eat first and foremost, and try to factor in at least one “quality meal” per day. For me, that quality meal is lentil or black bean flakes soaked in water for 30 minutes, wrapped up in a tortilla with nutritional yeast. The rest of each day’s calories are primarily filled with energy bars, candy, and nuts. You want to shoot for the highest caloric density foods you can find and still enjoy eating. This will ensure that you’re not packing more weight than it’s worth, which is why almost no one brings fresh fruits or veggies on the trail, except as luxury items after an in-town resupply.

You can view a full list of the food I'm bringing here, as well as a resupply strategy for where to ship everything, what to ship it in, and about how many days of food to pack in each box.

And here is my final pack, with all gear and 4 days worth of food inside (feet for scale). I feel as logistically prepared as I can possibly be for the trail, and in under 24 hours I will get to put my physical and psychological endurance to the test.

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Hiking to Canada

Friday, July 1 is my last day at Google. I will be hiking 537 miles to from the Bridge of Gods to the Canadian border and back down to Hart’s Pass to meet Duncan and June.

Planning has been exhilarating. Using Halfmile’s maps to plan out mileage and Google search all of the beautiful places I might sleep. 

Sometimes I feel insecure thinking about how I may be lonely, or my feet might hurt, or there are parts I may be hungry or thirsty or lost. But at the end of the day, doing something solely for myself feels amazing.

I am ready. I am not afraid.

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Public proclamation to take more selfies this year. Specifically, ones that show my soul.

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This weekend I made a bench and learned some things.

I love the process of cutting wood.

I love wood’s grain, its smell, its character and imperfections.

I’m not so into drilling wood, which feels mechanical and harsh compared to the delicate and mindful process of measuring, cutting, and oiling wood.

For my next project, I’d like to create a bench using only wood and glue to hold it together. I think this will be a fun challenge and create a more beautiful product, where only wood is shown at its seams.

Relatedly, a section in the book I am reading had a few paragraphs about how important it is to just start – something, anything! – when you are feeling down. 

The author suggests making a plan of your day, splitting activities into two categories: one for mastery and one for pleasure. We need both to be happy, and this delineation helped me realized that I haven’t quite been balanced in the past couple of months.

Nts for getting started: put your head down and be present with your work. Let positive momentum carry you forward.

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Nonthoughts

This Note to Self episode with Anil Dash continues to resonate with me.

It’s not even an after thought, it’s a nonthought. That we have a social responsibility and an emotional responsibility to the people that use the technologies we create is almost seen as heresy in conventional tech. There are still lots of people making lots of thoughtful things, but the default examples – the Facebooks and Ubers in the world – see it as almost an attack to even raise those challenges. How do we change the culture of what is seen as success in technology? And that it has to be something that truly makes people satisfied and happy?

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Duality

Today is the last day of 2014. I will soon be 27 years old. It's interesting to look back on the themes of this year and realize that I tackled some problems with such focus that I ended up swinging the pendulum completely the other way.

One such theme is staying. With our inevitable move to New York this summer, it would have been easy to decide not to invest in our space. However, the bike shelves have been mounted, our liquor collection continues to grow, and we have Christmas lights and even an ornament. These small decisions have made staying feel better, regardless of the understanding that we will leave.

The space we have created is so comfortable it's womblike. It's easy to get sucked in here. We have spent countless hours playing cards, sipping beers, and just sitting. For all its hygge-ish glory, I crave the feeling of being like a machine.

It's likely that New York will do this for us. Can Seattle do this for us? In a few months, we shall see.

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"Design is the choices we make about the world we want to live in. What do we want to shape us? What nourishes us? What do we want to see grow?”

— Wilson Miner

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Ode to Emptiness

Earlier this year, my bag was stolen. It was a bag I'd bought in July 2009 at MUJI in Soho, down the street from where I worked. The bag--not only an epic companion--was the most perfect embodiment of 'form follows function' I'd ever owned. 

Never before had I owned such an intuitive, sturdy, and beautiful bag. There was a spot for everything and not a detail extraneous. The bag, in its minimalism, could be many things to many people. Depending on the owner, the inner pocket held notebooks or napkins, some keys or an apple instead. The bag's plain aesthetic appealed to both sexes and its neutral design served as a canvas for where things could go, rather than where they should go.

This idea illustrates the Japanese concept of emptiness and the design philosophy behind the bag's universality. Simplicity in the West infers a single, suggested path, whereas emptiness in Japan offers a blank canvas to engage with. Take, for example, two different approaches to the design of a cooking knife, as described by Kenya Hara.

Here are two well-made simple tools. The Western style knife has the path of a finger grip. The Japanese style knife, no. At first glance, the design of the gripless knife seems to lack common courtesy to the user. But it is within this universality, the user can hold it from any angle.

Japanese cooks prefer knives without any ergonomic shape. A flat handle is not seen as raw or poorly crafted. On the contrary, its perfect plainness is meant to say, “You can use me whichever way suits your skills.” The Japanese knife adapts to the cook’s skill (not to the cook’s thumb). This is, in a nutshell, Japanese simplicity.

Many examples of emptiness exist in Japan across architecture, objects, and ceremonies. Surprisingly, very few permeations of the emptiness aesthetic exist in Japan's digital realm. According to iA's Oliver Reichtenstein, Japanese web design is lagging about 8 years behind the rest of the developed world.

Although Japanese web design may be behind the times, emptiness is trending for websites and apps made by American and European agencies. In contrast to the glitter-trail cursors and elaborate loading screens we saw in the 90s, this new age of design seems to get out of the way of content so that users can get what they need. Besides a commitment to the reduction of elements, there are other trends that lend themselves to great user experience:

Fluid experiences from device to device. One of the worst things is to go to a website on your phone and have to resize and scroll each time you reload a page. I just want the content. Apps like Instapaper and iA Writer remove distractions so you can experience content pain-free. It is a blank slate of sorts, and extremely functional while still offering a beautiful, immersive experience. 

Paying homage to the medium. In Japanese woodworking, this means going with the grain of the wood, never against it. In working with the grain of the web, one might consider the infinite scalability of its edges, the ease of vertical scrolling, and the gestures unique to each device. Though less expected than typical hyperlinks, gestures for smartphones and key-commands for desktop can provide a more efficient, enjoyable way for users to navigate. Additional properties of time and motion add dimensionality and breadth to UX.

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Last night I went to a reading by Sheila Heti for her book How Should a Person Be,  which had two big takeaways for me. Also, Christopher Frizzelle, Editor of the Stranger, was there. He'd met Sheila at Pony the night before.

The first takeaway for me was Sheila's perspective on an artist's purpose. "The purpose of an artist is to leave people enjoying life more than they had before." I love this idea. That art should add value to a person's life not just by changing their perspective or opening them up in some way, but also by making them feel a certain exuberance.

The second takeaway was Sheila's perspective on female friendships. Friendships with men are easy. They seem to flock to her. Trust is easy to establish and maintain, though men may not always be the most reliable.

With women, establishing mutuality is less instantaneous and more complex. Woman friendships have hurdles and crises and an element of agony to them. When Sheila was younger, she was perpetually attracted to what men thought and what they had to say. The same is not true today. For today’s Sheila Heti, relationships with interesting females now feel infinitely more compelling and rewarding than relationships with men.

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Why aren't there better tools to surface old content?

One thing that I find missing is discovery of non-new content. The web is completely oriented around new-thing-on-top. Our brains are also wired to get a rush from novelty. But most “news” we read really doesn’t matter. And a much smaller percentage of the information I actually care about or would find useful was produced in the last few hours than my reading patterns reflect.

via Noah Brier

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Bored with Authenticity

Written while at Hornall Anderson.

Resident badass Chris Freed shared a presentation yesterday on the value of doing as it pertains to soulful work. Rather than speculating, planning, humming, hawing, and rationalizing about a concept some more—if you commit pen to paper, hand to tool, instinct to action, you might just create something brilliant. There's more to the humming and hawing stage of design than blank slate syndrome, though. We owe it to our clients to scrutinize concepts in detail, to be sure that the idea is solid, the design is functional, and the execution can stand up comfortably and confidently against competitors in the marketplace.

However, somewhere along in the rationalization process, designs get watered down. The more you refine a product, the slicker it becomes and the less human it can feel. 

According to Apartment Therapy's Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, in this NYTimes article: “People [are exhausted] with the shiny and perfect. People don’t relate to it anymore. But the vintage and artisinal will resonate with people as long as we live in these times."

The article continues: “Maybe not with everyone, though. As Dmitri Siegel put it: ‘When you pile Etsy on top of Etsy, it gets really cacophonous: "Everything in here is totally unique!’ It starts canceling itself out.’”

And though there are disparities between being engulfed by a sea of Etsy crafts versus a sea of Shinya Kimura motorcycles, it does start to make one think. Would life really be better with artisinal everything?

For me, the answer is maybe. Maybe, and I wish. But the point Siegel is getting at is that without mass-produced experiences as a reference point, personalized experiences start to feel dull. In an ideal world, life would be filled only with objects of integrity but, sometimes, you just feel like a Big Mac.