About Me

Piute Pass, 2015

I can't remember when I started exploring the outdoors, so I think I started pretty young. My dad was a pro road biker in college and an avid outdoorsman, my mother has been physically active since I was a baby and loves to hike as much as I do. My grandparents spent Summers bikepacking across Europe until well into their 60s. As a very small child, even a toddler, we spent weekends hiking the Bay Area's many developed trails and we spent Summers camping in the Sierras. I went on my first backpacking trip around the age of 9 and my last big trip before I was "too cool" for the outdoors was around the age of 15, when my father, his wife, my brother and I did the Onion Valley-> Mount Whitney partial loop. I still remember coming home from that trip and for the first time in my life, seeing the tangible positive impact of physical fitness on everyday life.

For 11 years I didn't have enough time, money, or good sense to return to the trail. Backpacking gear was prohibitively expensive and no car meant my options were limited anyway. I spent most of my time playing video games, ignoring my schoolwork, and complaining about my pudgy body.

And then something interesting happened. We moved to Oakland, and both Dennis and I felt so oppressed by the urbanity that we started to seek an outlet. We went on an inner tubing trip to the Russian River and spent the day relaxing under the boughs of oaks. This set a Katamari in motion that grew like wildfire. We wanted to return to the river the following weekend. He wanted to get into fishing. We wanted to go camping as soon as the tent arrived from Amazon. I wanted to go hiking right now. The need to adventure was sudden, urgent, and profound. So we caught busses, rented zipcars, and coerced friends. We did everything we could to get the fuck out of dodge.

Cherry Lake at night. Credit: Pierre-Henri Traboulsi

After a few hours of google sleuthing for a cool location, we found Cherry Lake in Stanislaus National Forest and went camping there almost every weekend for a few months. This was an expensive hobby: zipcars cost almost $300 to rent for the weekend, but we were obsessive. We reorganized and reevaluated our camping gear throughout the week, kept our weekly overhead down, and spent our afternoons hiking, fishing, and daydreaming about the weekend. I loved preparing food for our camping trips, my approach was generally to par-cook and pre-chop the ingredients so that I could just heat/sautee and assemble at camp. The food was excellent but in fairness, it was not "camp food" by any stretch. It was homemade food, finished at camp.

We used to bring our cats with us to camp. Isomalt wants a breakfast burrito. Credit: Pierre-Henri Traboulsi

By Summer of 2013 we had saved up a hefty sum (for us). We'd been planning on taking a trip to Europe for the 2013 MAD food conference and, in part, to take a long overdue honeymoon. Everything was booked. And about a month before we were scheduled to depart, we got this crazy idea to cancel everything and buy a used Subaru.




So we did it! We did it. We cancelled everything and lost about $600 in cancellation fees. We decided that we'd have just as much fun spending 10 days in the wilderness as we would spending 10 days in Europe, and we'd get a car out of it. We weren't wrong.

Trinity Alps Wilderness

We honeymooned in the Trinity Alps Wilderness. We had almost no plan, just a guidebook, a bunch of trail maps, campground reviews, and a ridiculously full hatchback. What followed was one of the best weeks of our lives. At some point we did a 14 mile dayhike to Canyon Creek Lakes and along the way we saw a bunch of backpackers. We spent about an hour relaxing at the lake, fishing and sunbathing, and reflected to each other that we wished we could stay.

So next Spring, totally done with the soul-sucking concrete jungle of Oakland, we moved to Santa Cruz and began to really enjoy life. Dennis fished almost every week and I explored almost every trail. We had an unexpected windfall in Spring of 2014 and decided to act on our Trinity Alps reflection. 90 pounds of REI gear later, we were ready to roll.

Our first trip was Sykes Hot Springs in Big Sur. Dennis and I were completely appalled by the trash and condition of the hot springs but we were completely hooked on the activity. We couldn't wait to get back out and started planning trips to last the rest of the summer. I cooked up a storm of all kinds of wild dishes, pulled out the old dehydrator, and prepared a huge variety of dishes to enjoy on our Rae Lakes Loop trip, and for Dennis to enjoy on his solo trips to Trinity Alps and the Lost Coast Trail.

Rae Lakes Loop

So that's sort of where the Seasoned Hiker story begins, you can find recipes from that same Rae Lakes trip at the beginning of the blog. I didn't go into my culinary backstory too much but I've loved food and cooking since I was a very small child requesting a play toque and an Easy Bake Oven for Christmas. When I originally applied to UCSC I indicated that I would be pursuing a nutrition major. Dennis has been working in the food industry since he was 14 so he's on the same page, he loves food just as much as I do. We were both born with the cooking gene, and the trail is an exciting, largely untapped frontier to explore it.

Volunteering at the local cooking school during my junior year in high school.