Sagebrush personal hiking blog
Ten Gila Chapter Back Country Horsemen NM volunteers and staff backpacked 2.0 miles from Red Rock Trailhead, trail-south of Silver City, to a basecamp along the CDT, assisted by several packers and mules.
We lopped and limbed 4.5 miles of the CDT for three days, leaving one day early due to high winds forecast.
My first trail project of the year– what a fine beginning!
I listen to audiobooks while hiking solo, and have been fortunate enough to do a long hike each year since 2012– that is a lot of audio. I record links to each completed audiobook in my online hiking journals, first as a note to myself, and second a recommendation to anyone reading or crawling this blog, a shout-out to the work of authors and readers that I have enjoyed.
My preference is to avoid audiobooks with DRM Digital Rights Management, and unfortunately a monopoly controlling contemporary audiobooks insists on DRM as a condition for authors to be published with them. Luckily for me, LibriVox was started in 2005, a group of volunteer readers who record and distribute audiobooks of public domain books. In my youth I tended to read mostly science fiction, and missed out on many classics of literature, and LibriVox has allowed me to remedy that situation in some small part.
(Please be aware that book copyright duration differs according to country, and USA rules are different from everyone else. Nowadays I look forward to seeing what new books slip out of copyright January 1 of each year, for possible use on my next hike.)
Below are all the audiobooks completed on my long hikes to date, sometimes with short notes. Perhaps this might help other travelers on their audiobook journey. More notes below the list…
(no audiobooks on this trip, just podcasts)
When hiking, I only listen to audiobooks in one ear, at moderate volume, and take care to be aware of sounds around me. If I am in serious bear country, audiobooks can wait.
For USA copyright rules, in 2025 works published in 1929 or before move into the public domain. Due to a quirk in copyright law, many early science fiction whose copyright was not renewed by the publisher became public domain early, so I have recently been enjoying Golden Age SF.
I make a note of particularly good readers, and often seek out other books they have read. Some of my favorite LibriVox readers: Kara Shallenberg, Karen Savage, and the prolific Phil Chenevert. For the Girl Genius Agatha H series, Angela Dawe is excellent. For Cory Doctorow books, Wil Wheaton is super, though the author is also quite good. I avoid AI readers, for now. No narrators with uptalk, please.
On early hikes I also listened to contemporary audiobooks by Podiobooks.com, a site for mostly free downloads by self-published authors. Sadly that site has been absorbed by another website with a different business model, and links may not work.
During the lonely months between long hikes I keep up morale by searching for more audiobooks on LibriVox and elsewhere, and currently have more than 100 books downloaded for future hikes.
I joined a small crew to do trash cleanup near Otero Park in the bosque (forest along a river) in Socorro, organized by Save Our Bosque Task Force SOBTF.
This location happens to be along the Socorro alternate of the Grand Enchantment Trail, hence my interest.
My two strangest finds were a hot water heater and an elk carcass. Ewww.
