The Trail Companion

Summer 1999

Along the Trail: Member Notes

by Geoffrey Skinner

     With this issue, we are initiating a column focusing on our members' and volunteers' activities outside the Trail Center (is there really a life beyond the Trail Center??). If you have interesting tales to tell, have created a website that may be of interest to our membership, or basic gossip that you'd like to share, we'd like to hear about it. Think Herb Caen in the backcountry. Note: websites mentioned in this column will be available as links on our own website for a period of three months (until the next issue of the Trail Companion is released).
      Aaron Thies, a trails volunteer who worked with us at Jasper Ridge, left his good job as an engineer in Silicon Valley and invested roughly half of his personal savings to set up a nonprofit, The Rig Foundation. His foundation aims to inform and educate people about important issues of open space preservation, largely through his website. It is also a vehicle for directing donations toward preservation efforts. One of the main activities of the foundation is to sponsor a series of educationally-based journeys, beginning with a four-month trek to explore the "outdoor public-use areas of the western United States, Canada and Alaska." Aaron left Orinda on April 16th and is nearly three quarters of the way on his journey. His website contains a chronicle of the adventure, as well a numerous photos. He is due back in San Francisco in early August.
      Crew Leader and long-time Trail Center volunteer, Cathy Sewell, and I traveled to Edinburgh, Scotland in May to help former Crew Leader, Angus Miller, celebrate his marriage to Penny Radway. The marriage took place on May 1st in the town of Peebles, twenty-three miles south of Edinburgh, beginning with a private ceremony in the Town Registrar's Office, followed by a wedding walk along the River Tweed (past a 14th century castle and through a very long and dark disused railway tunnel), and an evening of dinner and a ceilidh dance (roughly translated as a Scottish barn dance) at the Peebles Community Centre. The evening festivities were replete with lots of men in kilts, Angus' brother on bagpipes and much energetic Scottish dancing. The couple rented a house in Peebles for the week (which they graciously opened up to their friends as well) before returning to Edinburgh, where they recently bought a house.
      Angus, a geophysicist who was a visiting scholar at the US Geological Survey while working with us as a crew leader, is in business for himself as a geological tour guide, operating as Geowalks Volcano Tours. I can personally recommend his service from our tour of Arthur's Seat, an extinct volcano in Edinburgh, during which we learned about how Scotland was formed, how prehistoric settlers farmed the slopes of Arthur's Seat, and where James Hutton, the "Father of Modern Geology," found evidence that the earth was formed long before 4,004 BC.
      Penny works as a countryside ranger for the National Trust for Scotland, Scotland's leading conservation charity.
      Congratulations to Penny and Angus in their Act of Union!
      Ben Pease, who served on the Trail Center Board of Directors for many years before retiring this spring, is looking forward to publishing his second map, Trail Map of Half Moon Bay. His company, Pease Press, published Trail Map of Pacifica, which has sold well. His new map will be a companion to his first map, and will also complement the upcoming Trail Center map, Trail Map of the Central Peninsula.
      -- Geoffrey Skinner