Las Trampas Ridge

If you listen to this music in surround sound through a Creative Labs sound card, set CMSS (not CMSS 2) Stereo Focus to 0% for best results.

If you listen to this music in Windows Media Player, there are video effects called Visualizations under the View menu. My favorite visualization for this music is Warp, under the Ambience submenu.

My name is Ben Hubbell, and I live in Berkeley, California. My favorite day hike in the East Bay is in the Las Trampas Wilderness, from the bottom of Bollinger Canyon to the top of Las Trampas Ridge. I watch the sunset and nightfall from the top of the ridge and hike back to the parking lot in the dark without a flashlight. On the left is a photograph of the sandstone outcropping that I watch the sunset and nightfall from.

Las Trampas is Spanish for “the traps.” It also has a secondary meaning that refers to trickery and deception. The Spanish settlers of California named this region Las Trampas, because Native Americans used to trap animals by chasing them up the steep walled canyons of the region until the animals had nowhere else to run.

The songs “Las Trampas Ridge” and “Nightfall” are dedicated to the experience of being on Las Trampas Ridge day and night. “Sunrise in the Mountains” is dedicated to the Arctic-Alpine zone of the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

I worked out my basic chord progressions in a shareware program called KB Piano. I composed and arranged the final scores in a free cross-platform music notation program called Musescore. The scores were exported as MIDI files and all songs except for “Chilly Winter Morning” were rendered in the Garritan Aria player. The instrument samples for all songs except for “Chilly Winter Morning” are from Garritan Jazz & Big Band 3 and Garritan Personal Orchestra 4.

In order to compose one’s own music, one must listen to music composed by other people. Some of my favorite music is made by Alice Coltrane; Amon Düül II; The Beatles; Beethoven; Blondie; Billy Joel; Bob Marley; Cat Stevens; Carlos Santana; Charles Mingus; Country Joe and the Fish; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young; Fleetwood Mac; Grateful Dead; Jade Warrior; Jefferson Airplane; Jethro Tull; Jim Croce; Jimi Hendrix; Joni Mitchell; King Crimson; Marvin Gaye; Mike Oldfield; Pete Seeger; Pink Floyd; Return to Forever; Rickie Lee Jones; Talking Heads; Vangelis; Vivaldi; and Yes. I am also influenced by Top 40 radio from the early 1970s and Bebop Jazz on the FM radio.

I am also a landscape photographer. See photographs I took in the East Bay Hills, including many taken on Las Trampas Ridge. You can also look at a collection of my photographs from Yosemite National Park.

People often ask me if the above picture is color enhanced. The intensity of the green is not exaggerated; during the winter and spring, Las Trampas Wilderness is the greenest park in the East Bay. However, the real life shade of green is outside the color range of the film I used.

I shot the above picture on a tripod with an aperture of f11 and an exposure of over 30 seconds. I shoot all of my landscape photos on a tripod, so I am free to use long exposure times whenever I want to.

It was very cold when I took the above picture, and I had to take off my warm gloves in order to operate my camera. The metal body of my camera was even colder to the touch than the early morning air.

I took the above picture in 1992. The trees are much taller in 2010, so that they obscure the view of the Oakland end of the Bay Bridge. The spot where I took this picture has had a small labyrinth for the past several years.

Ben Hubbell built this PHP page in a text editor called UltraEdit. Ben tested this page in the following Windows browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari. All text, music, images, CSS, and HTML copyright © 1992–2010 Ben Hubbell.

Ben HubbellLas Trampas Ridge:music for people who hike

Ben Hubbell
Las Trampas Ridge:
music for people who hike