Laura, back from her eight-day trip to New York, joined me for today's hike, a mid-morning out-and-back up Dixie Peak.
In the apartment before the hike, I told Laura about my new year's resolution to hike-and-blog. She told me it'll lead to boring blog posts. No one wants to read about me walking around in the desert, she said. No, no, the blog posts won't always be about the hiking, I said. The hiking is merely a prompt for the blogging; I'll write about whatever I think about while walking around. It'll be like Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, the travelogue about hiking the Appalachian Trail in which Mr. Bryson wrote less about hiking and more about the neglect of the National Forest Service and the extinction of indigenous American flora. That's what Just Enough Craig will be like—though maybe a little less pessimistic than Mr. Bryson's book.
Later, while descending Dixie and bemoaning my ignorance of indigenous Sonoran flora, I thought of an idea for a smartphone app: a hiking guide that takes the user on different trails and uses GPS to help the user locate specific sites, with each site focusing on a different species of plant. The app would show photos of the plant to help the user identify it, and then link to the Wikipedia page, or maybe have a condensed summary of interesting facts. For example: “Creosote bushes have a distinctive smell, especially after rainfall. Rub your fingers on the leaves to release the fragrance.”
Laura liked the smartphone app idea and identified the first two steps for implementing it. Step one: buy a smartphone. Step two: learn how to program smartphones. Alas, the first step might be beyond my capability.
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