Boot Camp

Yesterday afternoon, feeling a bit down in the dumps for a variety of reasons, I decided to head for the hills to clear my head. A good hike often helps these things. My other mission was to begin the painful task of breaking in some new boots. The fantastic repair job that I got done on my faithful old boots that died last year (see here for the full report) held up marvelously, and in fact still holds up, but I will admit that they lost a fair bit of flexibility with the new sole, and although they are great for the medium grade sorts of hikes I do in the immediate surroundings, I’m not really sure that they’d be great on the longer ones. I have not taken them up Mount Wilson, for example. The repair extended their life for quite a bit longer, and they will still be useful, but I decided last week that I should start breaking in a new pair to last me (I hope) another 15 years or so. I decided to try to get something as close to the ones I had as before, and so the Asolo TPS 535s were the ones I got (supposedly the natural successors to my Asolo AFX 530s). So I laced them up (already unhappy with the wimpy laces they have as compared to the big rope-like ones on my old boots) and set off from the trailhead in Topanga.

My goal? Eagle Rock. A favourite of mine. There it is in the photo on the right (click for larger). It’s a relatively quick hike, about 3 miles out, along the Musch trail (not the fire road) and a 1000 foot elevation gain, with mostly nobody around since it is insanely hot at 2:30pm and only mad dogs and Englishmen (so the Noel Coward song goes) go out in the midday sun. I’ll leave you to decide which I am (remember, on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog). So I was able to speed up the mountain to the Rock and stay there for a while, only meeting four other people heading that way the whole time.

You might wonder why it is called Eagle Rock. I did for a long time, as probably have many others. One day last year I looked at it the right way (as I approached it, from the top as you do) and decided that I knew the reason why.

I don’t actually know if this is the official reason why, but to me, there’s obviously an eagle shape. Do you see it? It is a rather huge rock. You can’t see anyone on it to give you a sense of scale, but if you go back to the first picture of it, you’ll see some holes in it. (Click the thumbnails below for larger views of some shots of them, including a view from one of them of a fire trail in the distance, not far from where I took the picture of the approach to the rock itself.)

Some of those are actually large enough to sit in, treating them as little caves. In fact, I do that whenever I come up. The trick is to come up when it is super-hot (so that there are very few people) and then hide inside one of those crevices overhanging the abyss, eat lunch, read a bit, write a bit (I actually wrote part of a paper here some years back), perhaps nap, and then head back down later (maybe after the sun’s fury has abated for the day).

This is what I did yesterday (no nap this time) along with the additional business of taking off my boots to nurse my two new impressive blisters (one on each heel).

There’s some movement in the boot that my feet are not yet used to, producing rubbing in the heels. This is why you break in new boots. To learn these things that you cannot determine in the store. I hiked up fast and hard, and so these imperfections got magnified nicely in a way that will allow me to diagnose them effectively, I hope. Solutions will include lacing the boots differently (combinations of tighter and looser points in the right places along the foot where the laces run can produce a wide variety of fits for your boots), waiting for the boots and feet to move more together as the boots become more flexible (you just have to endure it for a while until that happens) and, when all else fails, threatening the boots with abusive language. The key things that one can check in the store (width, length, and a few other basics) I have already done right – evidence for this includes no blisters or any complaints from anywhere else on my feet – and so I’m confident that these boots will work out just fine, in the long run.

Another key achievement of the hike – and a very important one – is getting a good amount of scuffing and dirt all over the boots. There’s nothing more embarrassing than being seen on a hike with new equipment. I want these guys to look like my 15 year old boots as soon as possible.

So, a day later, the blisters have been repaired, and I’m waiting for the evening to come so that I can….. go out again in the boots to stress them some more of course! This time for a shorter (but still fast, I hope) hike over at Runyon Canyon, that remarkable hiking spot a few minutes from the heart of Hollywood.

-cvj