It has been a rather depressing 12 months for the California coastal ranges. 

With two new lightning fires over the weekend, it now looks as if much of the Ventana Wilderness in northern Los Padres will burn.  This is on top of last year's Zaca fire which consumed most of southern Los Padres in the mountains above Santa Barbara.

Here's a brief look at some of the areas that have been impacted:

South Ventana Cone/Ventana Cone, Ventana Wilderness
Currently burning in the Bear Basin Fire

Junipero Serra, Bear, and Pinyon Peaks, Ventana Wilderness
Currently Burning in the Indians Fire

Chacuma, San Rafael, and McKinley Peaks, San Rafael Wilderness
Burned in the Zaca Fire

Malduce Peak, Dick Smith Wilderness
Burned in the Zaca Fire

Bear Mountain, Henry W. Coe 
Burned in the Lick Fire

Had a followup visit with my OS a few weeks back to make sure everything was still in place before I start the summer hiking season.   Everything looked as good as could be expected and I'm not a candidate to have the hardware removed.  The pins were still where they were supposed to be and I've got a minor amount of arthritis in the foot. 

The only real outcome is that he recommended taking Glucosamine suppliments.

I cleaned out the site IP blacklist over the weekend.

This removed the many thousands of IP addresses that had been blocked since I initially implemented some anti-spam safeguards several years ago.   Lets see what builds up from here.

There are currently three ways to have your IP address automatically banned:

1. Comment Spam   I'm currently checking inbound comments against a blacklist of banned keywords (Mostly various penis pills and prescription drugs).  
2. Forum Spamming  This site runs on PhpNuke and does not have the forum module enabled.  This doesn't seem to stop the multitude of automated robots that attempt to post things there.  Accessing any of the forum modules or forum admin modules (none of which are linked from the rest of the website) will get the offending IP banned.
3. Bad Robots  There are several places on the site where I've included a small invisible link to a dummy webpage.  This link is marked with all of the appropriate markers to keep legitimate robots away from it.   Any robot that does index it is immediately banned.

The links take you to the current lists of banned IPs. 

Update:  A few thousand blocked requests since yesterday.  There seems to be a single libwww-perl based botnet doing the forum spamming.  The comment spam also seems to be coming from a single source and is following its standard pattern of picking out a single page and spamming it exclusivlty for a day or two.

I added 1 additional safeguard.  There is now a mod_rewrite check to block requests that contain "http:" in the URL or query string.  This blocks a http injection attack that is attempting to spam for a russian chat website.

Update 2:  Now also blocking POST requests with no referrer via mod_rewrite.  You'd think the spambots would at least populate the referrers, but many don't.

Update 3:  Replaced the comment keyword checking with a call to Akismet.  That seems to be working quite well.

Update 4:  Akismet has been successful in blocking 100% of the spam with no false positives thus far.  I've gotten comment spam from 500 unique IP addresses in the past week.  The forum spammers seem to be isolated to a dozen IP which were all picked up and blocked in a day or two after implementing the above check.

Update 5:  A new botnet started getting through Akismet so I added some new hidden form fields validation to the comment page.  One I'm expecting to be blank and the other I'm expecting to have a specific value.  Still have Akismet in there if it passes these 1st 2 checks, but so far this has been 100% effective and nothing has made it to the Akismet layer.

Back when I first visited Butano a year or two ago, I noticed that Big Basin was only a short distance to the east and wondered if there was a route connecting them.  It turns out that there are actually two- the Butano Fire road and the Gazos Creek Road.  The Butano Fire Road is an extension of China Grade Road (This is the right turn you pass while driving to Big Basin from the north)  Gazos Creek Road runs from Big Basin HQ to the sea passing the site of the historical Sandy Point Guard Station.  Both of these roads are popular with the mountain biking crowd. 

With a few additional roads added, it was possible to combine the two into a lengthy 25 mile loop dayhike.

Small waterfall along Gazos Creek Road.

In my last entry, I noted the backcountry crime scene that I found on the skyline trail.  This week, I think I found the culprit- this Middle Ridge redwood tagged as a "killer tree" with skull and crossbones flagging tape.

 
Killer Tree

The full set of pictures, map, and commentary are here.

I headed down to Big Basin on Thursday morning to squeeze in a quick hike before the massive storm system hit. 

Today's route passed the McAbee Overlook and Berry Creek falls and covered a number of trails that were new ground for me.  I came prepared for a downpour, but managed to get most of the loop completed before it started raining steadily.

Always Picturesque Berry Creek Falls

I stumbled across one of the more odd things I've seen in the backcountry about a half mile upstream from Berry Creek Falls.  A single shoe rested in the middle of the Skyline to Sea trail.  Next to the shoe was a fallen "widowmaker" tree branch marked with yellow police tape.  Strange. 

Pictures, map, commentary, and the full set of pictures are here.

It was in the mid 40's as I headed south from Mountain View for my first outing of 2008.  By the time I reached Hollister it was sub 40 and it broke freezing around the time I turned off of Hwy 146 onto the park access road.   The thermometer bottomed at 24 degrees near the Chalone Creek bridge and then rose a bit to 27 up at the parking lot.  Good to be back in warm sunny California. 

Today's route was a loop around the remote Northern Wilderness trail returning via the Juniper Canyon & High Peak trails. 

The morning chill did end up quickly wearing off and it turned out to be quite a nice day. 

Machete Ridge from the Northern Wilderness Trail.

Pictures and commentary are here.
Earlier Pinnacles trips are here:  2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002.

In no particular order, here are some outings I'm considering for this winter and spring.
Additional suggestions welcome, particularly for any place I've yet to hike.

1. Pinnacles NM, Couterclockwise loop around the Northern Wilderness and High Peaks trail.  (Done clockwise a few years back, doing this to kick off the year on Tuesday)
2. Big Basin HQ to Butano SP via Gazos Creek Road
3. Pine Ridge Trail thru-hike w/ overnight at Big Sur lodge
4. Ventana Double Cone from Bottchers Gap (do this about once a year)
5. Skyline to Sea (looking for a car swap partner for this, I'll take the uphill variant)
6. Lost Coast trail (been there twice, but never been south of Jackass Creek)
7. Henry Coe,  Hunting Hollow to Burra Burra Peak (repeat of the very first hike on the website)
   Will do Bear Mountain instead if they reopen the northern section of the park in the spring
8. Dick Smith Wilderness, Malduce Mountain and Samon Peak (2 of the HPS Big 4)
9. Mt. Diablo 4 peaks, Clockwise (Done this counterclockwise)
10. Ventana Wilderness, Cone Peak from Highway 1

Time once again for the yearly review post.  I didn't get much hiking done in '07 so reviewing this year seems a bit like a band releasing a greatest hits compilation after only a single album.  I'm planning on working much less and hiking much more in 2008.

2007 Highlights

Back on the horse- Return to Yosemite Valley for a successful reattempt of the route I had been doing when I broke my ankle:

Sierra Point and Liberty Cap, Yosemite

My first and second 30 milers since breaking my ankle:

   
Ventana Double Cone, Ventana Wilderness  &  Buena Vista Pass, Yosemite

Most viewed pictures of 2007

2007 was a freak year for Half Dome fatalities and this picture of the cable route got linked from a number of discussion forums on the events

Half Dome from Clouds Rest, the previously reigning top photo

Waiting for Yosemite SAR after breaking my ankle back in 2006

Half Dome from the Clouds Rest Summit. 

Most viewed albums of 2007 (2006 rank)
Only one album from this year cracked the top ten

1. Clouds Rest and Half Dome (3)
2. Pico Blanco (1)
3. Broken Ankle (2)
4. Kaiser Peak (10)
5. Emigrant Wilderness Backpack (4)
6. Lost Coast Backpack 2003 (9)
7. Ventana Double Cone 3x (new) 
8. North Dome (-)
9. Lost Coast Backpack 2005 (-)
10. Hetch Hetchy Waterfalls (8)

- Top referers were Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft
- Top non-search engine referers were Tom Mangin's Two Heel Drive (thanks Tom), Summitpost, and the VWA forum.
- Top search engine key phrases were "clouds rest", "fedak, lost coast trail", john fedak, and kaiser wilderness.

Traffic to fedak.net came in at ~250k page views- flat with the prior year for the first time in the site's 5 year history.  This was probably partially due to the lack of new content in the latter half of the year, a honeypot that I implemented, and a gradual shift to people using the rss feed.  Non-human page views added another 344k, up substantially from the prior year.

The project that consumed most of my summer has (finally) come to a close and I should hopefully now have some time to get back to the trails.  Heading out to Mt. Diablo tomorrow for a warmup hike and then hopefully a few late season backpacking trips over the coming weeks.

Spent last weekend in Arizona visiting friends from my Intel days and watching the Steelers get their asses handed to them by the Cardinals.  Flew from AZ to PA on Monday for a solid week of sleeping in and generally de-stressing.  Caught the Roger Clyne concert at the Pittsburgh Hard Rock on Tuesday (good show, but not one of their best),  Visited the Grandmothers on Wednesday and Thursday, saw 3:10 to Yuma on Friday, Went to the Penguins Home Opener on Saturday and finished off the week with the Steelers shutout of the Seachickens on Sunday.  

Weather in Pittsburgh was in the 80's all week, which is more or less unheard of for Pittsburgh in October.

By now, most of you have noticed that I haven't been hiking all that much this summer.  Its been all work and no play as of late.

I'm finishing up a major project at the end of September and (hopefully) will be taking some time off in the fall to get back on the trails.