Adrian Baird followed up with an account about hiking a meadow along the Pacific Crest Trail that was as expansive as the lower York River that we sailed together. “I am roughly 800 miles from the border of Mexico. About six miles in I walked through Becks Meadow, which had to be thousands of acres. I could barely see across it. And I was the only human thing in it. That night I was visited by an owl whose hooting woke me up. He stayed just a minute, then left with one of my gloves. He must have thought it was a tasty little mouse until he had it in his talons. The second night, after a butt-kicking climb of 2,700 feet up a canyon and through a primeval, serene, sylvan forest, I slept at 10,700 feet in patchy snow, truly a High Sierra elevation. I saw no one for three days. The loudest sound was the thumping of the blood flow around my ears. All the while the sky was as blue as blue can be.”
Orphans Sail
June 16, 2026
In perhaps the most significant sail of my life, I got to take out 12 orphans from the Milton Hershey School. Broken into two 2-hour sails with six boys each, they got to learn how to sail the York River off Yorktown and to enjoy the luxury of cruising on
