Foothills Open Space at Menaul 2018

Thursday, March 15, the New Mexico Volunteers for the Outdoors (NMVFO) held their annual trail building workshop classroom session at REI for anyone interested in learning about building trails. The following Saturday about 40 people worked on a project in the Albuquerque Foothills at the end of Menaul to practice our new skills, led by several members of the Albuquerque Open Space Division.

After the orientation and safety briefing


we worked on re-routing a section of trail

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Hitching Wait Time

Hiking can be sooooo much fun, and geeking out while hiking is even better. While making plans for my upcoming Pacific Crest Trail trip, creating spreadsheets with supply stops and distances to the nearest towns, I started thinking about hitchhiking, almost inevitable on a long hike in the USA unless you have your own support crew.

But to really geek out, I just learned about the Hitchhiker’s Paradox. Given a random (Poisson) distribution of cars passing every 12 minutes, you might expect the expected wait time for the first car is 6 minutes, but that is wrong. The way events seem to clump in a random distribution means you are more likely to start waiting in a large gap instead of a small gap, so the real expected wait time is 12 minutes. Cool!

Related Posts: Next Trail PCT