Somehow I've managed to arrange a vacation this year, two weekends and a week of travel with family up north. It always takes days to get out of the work routine and to start experiencing things off that grid.
Our after work hikes are back on and this calls for more planning - San Gregornio, San Jacinto, and Mt. Whitney. Picked up Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust: A History of Walking and revisited the section on walking clubs, especially interested in the Naturfrieunde (Nature Friends, motto "Berg Frei") founded in Vienna in 1895 and today one of the largest NGOs in the world. Militant leisure, working classes' access to nature, socialism, sustainable development, and rambling... living threads offering much to the inquisitive. German, Austrian and other Alpine immigrants brought the Nature Friends to the US in the early 1900's and today there are 4 locations in California being operated by them including right one in Los Angeles (actually Sierra Madre).
Coincidentally I've been on a Bergfilme jag, watching Der Heilige Berg (1926) and Das Blaue Licht, with a handful of others in the queue (Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü, Der Grosse Sprung). Just an mild obsession with a gorgeous, obscure micro-genre.
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