[at-l] Introduction (Read at own risk)

[shane at theplacewithnoname.com (Shane)]

Ok, I'll play too...

I've been here since September of 2001.  Has it really been that long?
Sheesh...

As I recall, the first thing I did here was step in the gun debate.  Or
maybe I started it...  I don't remember...

Anyway...

Name:  Shane Steinkamp
Age:  35
Gender:  Male
Height:  5' 10" (1.8 m)
Weight:  240 lb (108 kg)
Location:  New Orleans (Harahan), Louisiana

David brought up something I'd like to ask to all of you.  If you had to
point to one pivotal experience, a milestone, that turned you on to the
outdoors and backpacking in particular, what was it?

Whoa... You mean we're actually going to talk about something hiking
related?

My love of the outdoors started very early.  One of my earliest memories was
on a Saturday when I was watching TV.  My father came in and hollered, "It's
too nice a day to be inside watching TV!  Turn the damned thing off and go
play outside!"

After that kind of thing, I most fondly remember, "What the hell is wrong
with you!?  Get out of the rain!", and "No, you are not allowed to play
outside after 10PM, and I don't want to hear any more talk about 'night
maneuvers'."  Life is hard on a four year old...

We went car camping and cabin camping as a family.  I was also fortunate to
have many outdoorsy types in my clan, and some native Americans who took
pity on a lonely white boy.

As a teenager, some other boys and I had this great place in Alabama.  As
teenagers, some friends and I would frequent what we knew as Fox Mountain; a
smallish, rocky, densely wooded mountain with a bald, grassy peak that had
very nice views of a large lake and the surrounding countryside.  This was
just outside Montgomery, on the Jordan River.  Twenty years ago, there was a
small time gravel pit operating there, and we knew the foreman, who in turn
knew the property owner, and we secured permission to hike and camp in what
eventually became our own private wilderness area.  The gravel pit took up a
very small area in this magnificent landscape, and we had several hundred
acres all to ourselves.  We would hike, wander, swim in the lake, dive off a
forty-foot high cliff, bathe in a waterfall, build campfires, eat camp food,
stay up all night, and generally act like savages without any adults to tell
us what to do.  We never got into any trouble, because there wasn't any
trouble to find.  We'd stay for weeks until the food ran out.  Howling at
the moon, building HUGE bonfires, playing cat and mouse with the resident
bear, swinging from the trees, climbing on the rocks, and generally living a
fantasy life.  We never went to bed before midnight, never got up before
sunrise, and almost never wore clothes.  We became someone legendary in
those parts, and rumors that wild men live among the trees are still told in
the local store.  These rumors were evidently wildly exaggerated and spread
by the gravel pit workers, who knew who we were, but had to tell a bigger
lie than the next guy to keep the story interesting.  We were actually
'hired' to scare the new guys, whenever one was brought on...

Legend also had it that there was gold in these hills and that in the
1940's, a prospector had found quite a lot of it right in the area.  The
wooden sluice itself was long gone, but the stone dam and tailings pile was
still right where it had always been - down in a little creek.  In days gone
by we panned in the stream but never found a thing.  The other part of the
legend is that there is a lost gold mine somewhere right here on the side of
the mountain - a story long since proved false by teenage boys with nothing
better to do with their time than scamper all over a mountainside looking
for a lost gold mine.  In the end, none of us got the fast cars, big houses,
and dream vacations that we had all planed to spend our hoard of gold on...

Somewhere in this time I became totally human.  We all did, for one reason
or another.  I can specifically remember laying on top of Fox mountain one
night with Tommy and Glenn.  We'd lay head to head and watch the stars slide
across the sky.  Some clouds came in and it started raining on us and none
of us cared in the slightest.  When the other boys came looking to see what
we had gotten up to, they found us rolling around in the grass having a
'ground massage'.  You'll see dogs and other animals do this from time to
time.  They do it for a reason...  For some reason, standing there in the
midnight sky as the clouds cleared and the stars came back on, we all had a
kind of epiphany that we would talk about for years to come.  We were human
beings, and we were all awake.

All of that was just the setup.  The one thing that sold me on backpacking -
and long distance hiking specifically - was Colin Fletcher's book The Man
Who Walked Through Time.  I read it about six times in a row in 1982.  The
man was - and in some ways still is - my ultimate hero.

I haven't been to Fox Mountain in a number of years, and haven't kept up
with all the guys, but Fletcher's mark is still on me...

Using Fletcher's model, I started backpacking in my mid-teens, and took to
being a wandering bum in my late teens.  Some folks style this as 'long
distance hiking', but a hobo by any other name is still a hobo.  Somewhere
after 10,000 miles of dragging a backpack across the countryside, I lost
track - and to be honest the miles don't matter to me.  Now I don't care to
count the miles, or to do so many of them, and prefer to walk until I don't
want to walk anymore and then stop. I am more interested in the destination,
rather than the journey. I don't fit any particular backpacking style,
although I might be primarily described as a medium-weight backpacker
leaning towards light.  I will adjust my gear based on expected conditions,
and on some trips I would be considered an ultra-lighter.  I always carry
too many toys, especially photography equipment, to ever actually make it to
the ultralight stage on a permanent basis.

I have a website:

www.theplacewithnoname.com/hiking

and a journal with a few reports and pictures.  Nothing fancy.

www.theplacewithnoname.com/hiking/journals/shane

I did just convert to CSS formatting, so let me know if the layout is OK...

Shane