People… is this the week we rise up? No? Well, I’m ready when you are!
In the meantime, I prepared a few resources for you to mix up your outdoor life: Breathe in that crispy fall air and go commune with the Great Mother.
Labyrinths
The other day, an unmaintained trail on the west side of Runyon Canyon led me to this beautiful rock labyrinth. It reminded me that I’d been wanting to tell you about labyrinths in this newsletter.
While the L-word might conjure a Cretan hedge maze, a labyrinth is really a spiralling path described on flat ground by stones, dirt, paint, or any other material. They’re generally unicursal, meaning there’s only one path for you to follow, and you must turn around and walk the same path back to the entrance when you reach the center. (A tiny “out and back” for the hikers in the room.)
Though labyrinths have been around for about 4,000 years, cathedrals facilitated their wider use as a vehicle for meditation. People would walk the labyrinth, sometimes repeatedly, thinking through a particular problem (or prayer), turning it over and over as they walked and finding that they were able to consider it more clearly as they did.
What then seemed like a taste of transcendence has since inspired some (squishy) scientific explanations, which I like because they’re, frankly, equally woowoo. The best theory is that a prescribed walking path occupies the motor/spatial parts of your brain that normally require coordination and calculation—thus you’re freer to tHiNk BiG.
There are labyrinths everywhere: they’re easier to find than a man with a shirt on in Runyon Canyon.
Try one yourself with the World-Wide Labyrinth Locator. It’ll tell you when each labyrinth is accessible (many are open 24 hrs), what it’s made of, who owns the property it’s on, etc. Call and double check the deets before you go. (And send me pics of the labyrinths!!)
Swimming holes
We love to swim in the middle of nowhere, especially after a long hike or day in the sun. Use swimmingholes.org as you would the labyrinth locator. They’re pushing updates to a new app called Outly (the quality of which I haven’t assessed), but the site still works. Swimming holes don’t tend to disappear or reappear for reasons other than rainfall, but again, check the writeup against other sources online (bc I care about you, mi amor!!).
How and why to improperly use g**gle maps
I’m going to teach you an anti-trick. A dumb, flawed way of using technology that shouldn’t work, but it does. You can use this anti-trick to find restaurants, bars, cemeteries, defunct businesses, weird historical stuff, etc., but I use it most for finding places to go outdoors.
A big part of the nagging disappointment we of the anthropocene experience is, I think, due to our insistence on performing consumer research. We expect that crowdsourced reviews or our superonline culturati will lead us to something—[a dove violently appears]—magical in a way that simply living IRL will not.
So if, like me, you’ll shrivel and die faced with another best-of list, expert recommendation, or wall of Y*lp reviews, try this:
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Open up the mapping software of your choice.
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Zoom in relatively near where you want to go. Poke around.
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Look for green areas (typically parks, cemeteries, or other public land).
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Zoom in a little more. Hiking trails and fire roads will usually begin to appear as gray or dotted green lines.
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Click into or search the general location to see what people’s photos of it look like, do a little recon to make sure it’s safe, and GO, FOR GOD’S SAKE. If it doesn’t click with you, return to step 2.
That’s how I found Willow Springs, a gorgeous 6-mile out-and-back trail up by Santa Maria, which I hiked in silence, encountering a loose herd of cows, no cell reception, and zero human beings.
It’s also how I found Charmlee Wilderness Park, an ethereal place in Malibu where you mostly can’t hear cars (in Malibu!), and it feels like you’re on a hairy moon with a view of the ocean because parts of it were burnt by the Woolsey Fire. So weird-but-good that I went back the next day with friends. The unusual grid of trails I saw when zooming in on the map sucked me in:
You’ll want to take at least the following two precautions before you go somewhere you know next to nothing about (I didn’t even know Charmlee’s elevation).
First: Check that it’s open! Trails close for all kinds of reasons, chiefly fire, flood, and maintenance. Use AllTrails or a similar resource to verify that the trail’s good to go — if no one’s commented on the trail writeup in the last couple months (or weeks for those marked “heavily trafficked”), I’d be suspicious.
Second: Please quickly g**gle the place because it’s 2021, and we live on Earth. It was the difference between me hiking near Hemet (longtime home of card-carrying white supremacists) and finding Willow Springs.
Enjoy, nerds. More real soon :)
love,
Alex
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SOON… computing was almost really different (or, software for stoners) …… a sinfully niche journal about food, cooking, and cookbook (!) history …… a lost publication by Japanese streetwear nerds, found (it won’t matter if you don’t care about fashion, don’t worry)