I’ve been a bit lax on the blogging front lately, due to a perfect storm of work, travel, protest marches, and giant fires that have kept me off the trails and frantically working on other things over the past few weeks. I’m going to try to get another trail logged before Thanksgiving — and maybe over Thanksgiving weekend, when I may be tramping around northern Georgia.

Until then, while the fires burn and the air quality is not-exactly-what-you-want-to-be-hiking-in levels, I wanted to share a part of this fantastic comment I received from Tom, who hiked Iron Mountain (#2) using information from Modern Hiker —

It struck me as I was out there just how freakin far I had come to get here, and how far away from ‘civilization,’ I was at that moment, and how amazing it is that we can share this information so easily and precisely these days. There I was in the middle of bloody nowhere, completely alone (outside of a mile from the gate), and I was at precisely the spot on this gi-nomous Earth of ours that I had read about and seen pictures of from my couch days before. Incredible.

Thanks so much for all your work in posting this info; it utterly made my weekend (and my week, looking forward to this hike), and armed with all that detailed information a person can feel so much more confident plodding around in areas they’ve never seen before. It’s just brilliant.

Reminds me why I got into this site in the first place … and how much I’ve missed hiking these past few weeks.

Read the rest of Tom’s experience at the Iron Mountain post, and stay tuned for more posts soon.