Category / nature

by suffernpodiatry.com

Mt. Everest: Man vs. Mountain vs. Tectonic Plates

from nytimes.com (04/25/15) The base camp at Mount Everest after an avalanche on Saturday. Credit Azim Afif/via Associated Press

from nytimes.com (04/25/15) The base camp at Mount Everest after an avalanche on Saturday. Credit Azim Afif/via Associated Press

For hikers, trekkers, trail runners, and armchair adventurers, Mt. Everest has to loom large as an ultimate destination. Unfortunately, over the past 20 years, so much high altitude catastrophic loss of life has occurred there. As of 10 p.m. EST on April 24, 2015, the New York Times is reporting another 17 people have perished on the mountain after an avalanche swept through base camp, killing climbers in their tents at base camp, and cutting off those camped above the avalanche beyond the Khumbu icefall section of the route. This avalanche is attributed to the magnitude 7.8 earthquake with its epicenter near Kathmandu which struck today and the subsequent aftershocks.  That event has reportedly claimed well more than 1,800 lives with that number surely to be revised upwards. In a chilling coincidence, with respect to Mt. Everest, this past week marks one year since 16 Sherpas died in an avalanche in the Khumbu Icefall area between base camp and camp one on the mountain’s southeastern ridge.

Writer Mark Synott posted a thoughtful piece about guided climbs on Mt. Everest on adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com just days before this most recent catastrophe and loss of human life occurred. In his piece, titled ‘Everest-a moral dilemma’, which now seems very dated, reading it through the prism of the current unfolding maelstrom of even more human suffering,  Synott  questions some of the brazen trends developing among guiding companies working to put more and more eager people on the summit of the world’s highest mountain, whether those paying clients are qualified high altitude climbers or not. But Synott also looks back to a simpler time, at some of the great victories on Everest when the struggle was really man vs. mountain, a time when only the most prepared and daring would deign to make that climb.

In an eerie bit of foreshadowing, Synott concluded his  thoughts on Everest by writing that “there is high drama to be found on the world’s highest mountain…”. He surely did not anticipate another tragic climbing season with the loss of life reported so far only paling in comparison to the loss of life, human suffering and tremendous devastation ongoing in Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, and the surrounding region.

Man versus mountain may succeed once in a while. Men versus moving tectonic plates, however, will never win. We watch helplessly from afar but hope and pray that swift relief will come to all affected, on Everest and throughout Nepal.

Howard E. Friedman

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by suffernpodiatry.com

On the trail: the grass survives, again.

The grass survived.

The snow has melted, finally, and you can once again run, walk or hike through the grass. After months under a foot or more of snow, the grass is still green, and alive, mostly.

How does grass survive the freezing cold, the darkness, buried under the snow?Humans can not survive being buried in an avalanche for more than a few minutes. Yet grass survives the cold, the weight, the desiccation. How do its cells resist rupturing, imploding and becoming a protoplasmic organic slime? How do its fragile roots maintain their grasp on a soil which has itself frozen and is no longer nurturing.

This week marks the beginning of the holiday of Passover, commemorating the exodus of the Children of Israel from slavery in Egypt. The holiday has many themes, revisited each year by parents and children and grandparents and grandchildren in a performance art like meal called the ‘seder’ where the story of the exodus is retold, using food as symbolic props.

But one idea often gets lost in all the preparation and the re-telling. The name of the holiday, Passover in English and ‘Pesach’ (pronounced peh-sakh) in hebrew, conveys a most basic but critical thematic idea. The name of the holiday references God’s sending an angel to visit death upon the first born males in pharonic Egypt as a punishment. God instructed the angel of death to spare the Jewish children. The name, then, focuses on a celebration of survival and an acknowledgement of God as both the taker and sustainer of life in a world filled with Divine intervention in the matters of mankind.

It is by design that Passover always occurs near beginning of springtime, a period of rebirth. And the blades of grass are the first signs of that renewal. They persist through a winter that really should have killed them. But at winter’s end the grasses stand up with no flowery announcement of their arrival. Unannounced and unadorned, they unfurl themselves and reach for the warmth of the nourishing sun.

The springtime holiday of Passover marks not only re-birth but also the birth of a nation that survived its own long winter of oppression, deprivation and servitude. Not every blade of grass survives the winter and neither did every member of the nation survive to leave Egypt 3,000 or so years ago. Which is why seeing the grass again in the springtime is the perfect time to truly celebrate life.

by suffernpodiatry.com

Walk in alone. Walk out together.

March is the unofficial start to the hiking season, at least for people setting out to hike a long trail, like the 2,100 mile Appalachian trail. Setting out in March avoids the coldest, snowiest part of winter and provides a long enough time to walk until the cold settles in again in the fall. More times than not, hikers start out on a solo journey, hoping to challenge themselves.  But along the way, even the most solo of solo hikers will find comfort in commiserating, camping, hiking, with others he or she meets along the way. And while the time spent in the company of others may be brief, that joining together can lift the spirits of even the most aching, blistered and tired soul.

We have many journeys in life that we must embark on alone. But ‘alone’ does not mean abandoned. My nieces and nephews just lost their mother, my brother lost his wife, who passed away at the age of 55. The end arrived as they sat by her side for long days and nights over several weeks. They are a close and united family, but naturally still face this challenge each on his and her own terms. The husband and the children entered the hospice room as individuals but they emerged from that space and a week of mourning together, bereaved, yet even closer.

The Appalachian Trail is often referred to as ‘the long green tunnel’. The trail is a single-track which passes through mostly forest, a long tunnel amidst maple, birch, oak and hickory leaves, verdant green in the spring and summer. Walking  along you can feel isolated, traveling alone with the burden of your gear on your back,  rays of light squeezing between the dense canopy of leaf filled branches, illuminating the ground with occasional spots of light here and there. But as you make your way and meet others who share your journey, your steps feel lighter as you share your burden. And despite your physical and emotional exhaustion, the journey through the long green tunnel does eventually come to an end. When you emerge, no matter how alone your sojourn felt, at journey’s end, know that you did not walk it completely alone.

Howard E. Friedman

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by suffernpodiatry.com

On the Trail: Personal challenges and personal agency.

(Forestwander.com via Wikimedia Commons)

(Forestwander.com via Wikimedia Commons)

Six wild turkeys emerged from the wooded shadows into a clearing,  single file, variously walking on and sinking in to the foot of snow on the ground. Than another six than another dozen emerged, walking, sinking, moving slowly and circumspectly, stopping to forage among twigs branches and fallen tree trunks.

I had just finished running and walking among the same trails as these wild, ungainly birds. I knew a bit about the challenges they faced moving over uncertain and unwelcoming terrain, having sunk through the snow myself. Moving overland in the winter woods was laborious.

Today’s temperature was 20F, much warmer than last week’s low teens. But there was still a sense of accomplishment in managing the environment, wearing three layers instead of 4, one pair of gloves instead of two.

‘Manage the environment, don’t let the environment manage you’, an intrepid outdoors friend commented.

Humans have been struggling, and mostly succeeding, to manage their environment for thousands of years. And there is a satisfaction that comes with surviving frigid temperatures, avoiding hypothermia and frostbite and yet enjoying the out of doors, with its rich palette of colours, shapes and textures. It is the pleasure of matching personal agency against the challenges of the environment.

And we have largely mastered our environment, be it climbing tectonic uplifts soaring five miles into the hypoxic frigid sky, like Everest, or submerging to study thermal vents miles below the surface of the ocean, like the Marianas Trench, or, of course, the ultimate mastery by man- space exploration.

Yet assuming our personal agency always results in ‘mastery’ is a fallacy. It is a fallacy in the outdoors as witnessed by the many fatalities- Rob Lowe, dying on the cold shoulder of Everest moments after calling his wife in New Zealand to say ‘I love you’, Chris McCandless whose death by starvation trapped in the Alaskan back country was famously chronicled in the book ‘Into the Wild’, to name only two of hundreds, if not more.

And personal agency as ‘mastery’ is a fallacy in our day to day lives, as it only takes us so far. This is truest especially when faced with overwhelming challenges against which no one can prevail, not the smartest, the prettiest, not the wealthiest or the most accomplished, not the most important. No one.

In the test of man against nature, the latter always prevails. As for our personal agency, we can manage, or try to manage, our responses especially in the face of impending loss.  We can take small comfort that we have, at the least, participated in the process. The winter trail will test your ability to survive the inhospitable, the uninviting, the unnatural for us warm blooded, furless mammals. And it is that mere survival that makes the successful days on the hard packed snow among the barren trees and frozen ponds so gratifying, even as it gives a fleeting, albeit false, sense of invincibility.

Howard E. Friedman

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by suffernpodiatry.com

On the Trail: Winter and the Big Bang

(Forestwander.com via Wikimedia Commons)

(Forestwander.com via Wikimedia Commons)

In a week riddled with more senseless and barbaric killings around the globe one small item of astrophysical import did not  garner much attention, even though it addressed the fundamental question of how the universe began.

The mercury began this morning in the teens when I awoke.  Dressed in layers I ran  to the nearby woods to see what I would see. In winter, all is hidden yet all is revealed. I saw no animals running about but only remnants of their activity from the day or night before. Squirrel tracks galore, raccoon and opossum prints, the occasional deer tracks and even the footprints of a family of mallards on the ice covered portion of the slow moving creek, webbed toes pointed toward open water. Two red tailed hawks and a great blue heron took off from their hidden perches, quickly, silently, vanishing like actors disappearing into the wings.

I ran a familiar route on snow and ice and came to the small pond, now frozen solid, a rare opportunity to walk out on the ice. The water is never deep here so the only risk would be wet and frigid feet if the ice cracked below. But it held.

The harsh frozen landscape seems ancient, as if it could exist for eternity, in contrast to Spring where flowers and their petals seem so fragile, even at the peak of their beauty. Winter conjures images of frozen planets in our solar system, or the frozen dark side of the moon, dry, seemingly lifeless. And thus winter makes me ponder the origins of our universe and the earth itself.

Professor Brian Koberrlein expanded on an article explaining how our universe did not necessarily begin with one defined singular moment, the ‘Big Bang’. Rather, the professor at Rochester Institute of Technology wrote in Physics Letters B, citing research from the University of Benha in Egypt and Letherbridge University in Alberta, Canada this month, the universe always existed and will always exist. A ‘big bang’ happened along the way, but that moment, referred to as “singularity” by astrophysicists, does not have to have been the first moment.

“Singularity”, one point from which all else emanates, is a comforting idea, and, we each can identify defining moments in our lives that marked a new beginning. But, outdoors in nature, peering down the snow covered trail that fades into a sun filled patina of white and ice, the infinite seems more real than the finite.

And I am glad to welcome “infinity” back into the model of how the universe began. The concept of timelessness helps frame our own travails and challenges. Whatever will be, the universe always was and always will be and we are a part of that timelessness. And while winter on the trail evinces a natural timeless quality, you can follow that same path in the Fall, or Summer, or Spring, and it will still take you to forever.

Howard E. Friedman

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by suffernpodiatry.com

On the Trail: Hiking alongside evolution

Tabun Cave, site of pre-historic human activity, lies next to the Israel National Trail (phto: Albatross Aerial Photography)

Tabun Cave, site of pre-historic human activity, lies next to the Israel National Trail (phto: Albatross Aerial Photography)

Israel is in the news for the recently announced discovery of the Manot 1 pre-historic modern human partial skull, carefully dated to 55,000 years ago. The skull was found in a limestone cave in the Galilee region of northern Israel in 2008 and carefully researched for the past 6 years by Professor Israel Hershkovitz and a team of anthropologists from Tel Aviv University. The find was published in the respected journal Nature and reported widely across the world. The skull has features of modern humans but also some Neanderthal features, again focusing attention on the question: did ancient Homo sapiens interbreed with Neanderthals?

About one month ago I was fortunate to have an opportunity (thanks, Mom and Dad) to visit the Carmel region of Israel and hike a bit of the Israel National Trail, a hiking trail which extends the length of the country, 1000 km, from north to south.

Blue, white and orange triple color blaze of the Israel National Trail

Blue, white and orange triple color blaze of the Israel National Trail

The section of trail I visited is literally a stone’s throw from another important anthropology site, the location of Tabun, Skhul and El-Wad caves, also limestone massifs, with a commanding view of the Mediterranean Sea and Israeli coastline just 5-6 miles due west.

View of the Mediterranean from Nachal Meorot

View of the Mediterranean from Nachal Meorot

These caves were discovered and excavated beginning in the late 1920s by British paleontologist Dorothy Garrod,a pioneer and rare female in her field. The site continued to be excavated into the 1960s and was recently named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This collection of caves demonstrates more than 200,000 years of human existence including Neanderthal and early Homo sapien remains, living in the same location, even if not at the same time.

Looking into Tabun cave. Neanderthal remains were found in the middle layers and ancient hominid remains above and below.

Looking into Tabun cave. Neandratal remains were found in the middle layers and ancient hominid remains above and below.

Moreover, one of the adjacent caves presents a clear example of Natufian culture, humans who began to settle in one location and live a more agrarian lifestyle, no longer living a nomadic ‘hunter-gatherer’ existence. Just outside this cave system were multiple buried human skeletal remains, more than 10,000 years old, decorated with various ornaments. These may represent one of the earliest burial sites in the world.

And now, just dozens of miles away, we now have evidence of human remains which indeed represent another example of ancient humans in transition. Just exactly what that transition was from and where it was going to remains to be proven more definitively.

Manot-1 partial skull with features of ancient hominid and Neandratal (photo: Prof. I. Hershkovitz, in Nature, on-line Jan. 2015)

Manot-1 partial skull with features of ancient hominid and Neanderthal (photo: Prof. I. Hershkovitz, in Nature, on-line Jan. 2015)

It is rare these days to see “Israel” in a newspaper headline without some human tragedy or geopolitical tragedy following close behind. For the story from Manot Cave, at least, the only controversy would be of a scientific nature. And on that point, remarkably, most scientists interviewed have praised the Tel Aviv University researchers for their careful, deliberate study, analysis and conclusions.

While most tourists who travel to Israel do so to visit and bask in the holy religious sites of the past couple of thousand years, be they Jewish or Christian or Muslim, very few people travel to Israel to see where ancient Neanderthals once lived. I myself have traveled to Israel on multiple occasions, and only recently even knew such a site existed in Israel (thank you Professor John Hawks and for your Coursera course on Human Evolution).

Perhaps after visiting all the holy sites, tourists and locals alike should visit these most ancient sites of human habitation, to underscore our common heritage and to know that what joins us all into the family of ‘Man’ is so much more ancient than what divides us.

Howard E. Friedman

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by suffernpodiatry.com

On the trail: Walking and newness

“Are you getting tired of walking?”, Steve Inskeep, host of NPR’s Morning Edition asked National Geographic adventurer Paul Salopek after he had completed the first year of his planned seven year walk retracing human migration from Ethiopia, through the Middle East, Asia, North and South America and ending at Tierra del Fuego, the southern tip of Chile. Salopek is wintering in Turkey for a few months, to rest, catch up on documenting his trip and plan the next section of his walk.

Salopek did not hesitate to answer.

Myriad reasons attract people to walk the open road or trail. Many are motivated by the need to exercise. Some are seduced onto the rocky trail by the siren call of rustling leaves, or a cascading creek, or the birdsongs which are so prominent a part of nature’s soundtrack.

And if you are fortunate, you returned from your hike or run or walk in the woods feeling emotionally recharged, even if physically tired. You may have seen an animal or flower that quickened your heart beat. Worries dissipated, at least for a time, and where to place your next footstep was your most pressing concern.

But how does it happen? How can running along a brook, hiking in a meadow or walking through the park be so therapeutic?

Today at twilight I ran along a creek, a small river, actually. And I was surprised by what I did not see. No birds. No herons, or egrets or cormorants. No swallows diving toward the water than soaring toward the sky. And I saw precious little animal life. One cottontail, not the dozen I usually see. And one doe, large eyes staring straight at me, but all alone.

The branches were bare save for the pine and spruce boughs. And no trefoils or clover were in bloom. All was quiet, nature bereft.

As I contemplated the stillness I thought of the answer Salopek gave at the end of his interview.

Salopek interacts with villagers (photo by Paul Salopek) http://www.nationalgeographic.com/explorers/bios/paul-salopek/

Salopek interacts with villagers (photo by Paul Salopek) http://www.nationalgeographic.com/explorers/bios/paul-salopek/

“Are you tired of walking?”, Inskeep asked.

“No”, he answered immediately. “I think, on the contrary, that’s what this walk does. This walk has the power I never imagined, to make the whole world seem new again”, Paul Salopek concluded.

How than does the trail recharge the soul? When you engage the world at a slow human pace, and remain in contact with the ground, you have the opportunity to see the world anew.

Around the globe, many people will soon mark a new calendar year. But make no mistake. What makes the year, or month or day new, is not the date on the calendar. Rather, the ability to look at the day with open eyes, and take the time to contemplate that experience, that is what endows sameness with newness.

I do not have Salopek’s seven years to walk. But I can wander into a nearby forest or field, and when I do and whatever the season, even on a barren winter eve, all seems new, again.

Howard E. Friedman

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by suffernpodiatry.com

On the Trail: Great Blue and You

Great Blue Heron, by Marie Read, allaboutbirds.org

Great Blue Heron, by Marie Read, allaboutbirds.org

Twenty minutes watching a great blue heron from fifteen feet away can teach you a few things.

I sideled up  to the waters edge of Overpeck Creek recently after running in the large urban park, to see what I would see. Usually not much. A distant cormorant or a snowy egret on the far side in the phragmites. But this morning would be one I would remember. A great blue heron stood motionless on the kayak dock just a few feet off shore. Completely motionless. Statuesque. Immaculately attired actually.

And there it stood. I  sat on a nearby granite rock and noted the time. It did not move, fixed in its gaze toward the water. Five minutes passed. Ten minutes. Than in balletic form it turned 180 degrees. And again stood still, now gazing at the water in the opposite direction. Another five minutes. No movement, until slowly the heron stepped off the dock and into the water, clearly a more strategic position. It lowered its head to within inches of the water, than looked up and moved away,  crouching under the sloped gangplank of the dock, compressing its neck into a perfect S shape, its dagger like beak pointed, poised, primed to strike.

Then in one explosive action the bird uncoiled its neck, and in so doing buried its beak full into the water with nary a splash.

Great Blue Heron, by Greg Bishop, flickr.com/photos/gregbishop160/2928315528/

Great Blue Heron, by Greg Bishop, flickr.com/photos/gregbishop160/2928315528/

What happened below the surface, though, remains a mystery for it raised its head high, its beak empty. Had it caught something small and quickly ingested? Whether because of its success or its failure, the great blue than strode away.

I took away some lessons from watching the heron, lessons of patience, perseverance. Lessons of focus, stillness and, that solitude is often essential.

But I also learned that clear, cool autumn morning by the shore of the wide slow moving river that if you plan to survive hunting small aquatic wildlife near the water’s edge, you should arm yourself with a very long, flexible neck and a beak as lethal as a bayonet.

Howard E. Friedman

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by suffernpodiatry.com

On the Trail: A Walk into the Unknown

adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com

adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com

National Geographic together with The North Face are on an expedition to find the highest peak in southeast Asia. A group of six seasoned adventurers are traveling primarily on foot with some boat and motorcycle assistance deep into the jungle on a trip that will require two weeks of unsupported hiking and travel in each direction. The group is so off the grid they are carrying their own stash of anti venom to treat a possible, or even likely, poisonous snake bite by any one of a kaleidoscope of colorful and lethal vipers, cobras and kraits. Mark Jenkins, a seasoned writer of adventure non-fiction is documenting the group’s trip with regular posts at adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com

This expedition has all the hallmarks of real exploration and is reminiscent of expeditions of  the 19th and early 20th centuries. The objective is vague, the route is potentially deadly and what the outcome will be is far from clear.

adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com

adventureblog.nationalgeographic.com

Below is a link to the first post, including a very closeup picture of Trimeresurus albolabris, the lethal white lipped pit viper, which expedition member Hilaree O’Neill nearly stepped on.

Myanmar Climb: Welcome to the Jungle – Dispatch #1 – Beyond the Edge.

by suffernpodiatry.com

Off the Trail: Marking time.

This weekend Jewish congregations around the globe will once again resume the weekly out-loud public readings of the Torah (Five Books of Moses, aka Old Testament)  from the beginning, Genesis. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” the Torah opens. The statement is simple but jarring. Every year at this time we are confronted with our humblest of beginnings. Not our personal beginnings but the earliest explosive cataclysmic beginnings of a universe so vast as to be incomprehensible.

Geologists estimate the age of our planet Earth as 4.6 billion years old. Yet multicellular life did not make its appearance for almost 4 billion years. John McPhee, pulitzer prize winning non-fiction author of Annals of a Former World, a 660 page collection of five books published under one title for the first time in 1998, writes succinctly: From an interstellar gas cloud, evidently, the solar system began to form about 4.56 billion years ago. The first eleven verses of Genesis cover more than 4 billion of those years – the entire Precambrian and the first one hundred and fifty million years of Phanerozoic time (p. 630).

jpegIn his five separate books written over about 20 years, McPhee accompanies leading geologists along as they explore and explain the geology of the United States. McPhee’s plum line is Interstate 80, which starts near the basaltic columns lining the Hudson River just north of New Jersey’s George Washington bridge and following it as it crosses the mid-portion of the country )what he refers to as “the craton” and continuing from East to West ending in or about the San Andreas fault which runs right through San Francisco. McPhee queried one geologist and asked him how he reconciled his professional work that dealt in hundreds of millions and billions of years with his daily life which operates on minutes and hours, days and weeks. The rock scientist explained that his was indeed a schizophrenic existence.

We focus on the now, because, after all, that is where we live our lives. The present. Our sense of history spans decades, and in some cases, centuries and once in a while, a millenium or two. “Classic rock” music goes back only fifty or so year, making a mockery of the word “classic”. But, rock music is not that old. The rocks that are the actual foundations of our cities, the bedrocks under the dirt holding our homes up, are, however, beyond ancient. I don’t think we have a word to capture the span of ‘billions of years ago’. “Ancient” is lacking. “Old” is not even a consideration.

The woods are an antidote to the “now-ness” of mundane living. In the forest, or mountains, or wadi, whether hiking or running, you travel among the extraordinarily ancient rocks, some sculpted by water running intermittently over thousands of year, between boulders carried and left behind by advancing than retreating glaciers, and summit mountain tops rounded by tens of thousands of years of erosion, shaping the land bit by bit. Out there is where we are confronted with our planet’s unfathomable past. And at least once a year, Judaism reminds us all that our lives area a fleeting nanosecond in God’s intergalactic time scale. But soon enough, within minutes of the opening of Genesis,  we will begin reading about the exploits of Man and Woman, as they begin to build their lives, in the slow motion that sometimes seems so real. In fact, we make our appearance just 16 sentences later, and mankind remains the focus from then on.

Our challenge is to synthesize these two schizophrenic realities, and make some sense of the now.