I'm thumbing through the Wall Street Journal (the actual paper version) last evening, catching up as I like to do on business news, world affairs and the like, when I ran across an article that made me do a neck-snapping doubletake.

Entitled "A Backpacker Buys Shoes," the brief column detailed how newly famous long distance backpacker Andy Skurka makes his big hikes with trail runners--sneakers essentially--on his feet.

That's right.

Skurka wears the light, synthetic and mesh shoes rather than the heavier tradtional leather boots and swears by it. He retires each pair of trail runners after 500 miles. That means he had to have used about 16 pairs of them to get him across North America last year on his 7,800 mile Sea-to-Sea trek.

No Andy Skurka here, but I too have switched to a light hiker shoe, using them for a trek across Wales last fall and down the GR20 in Corsica a month ago. And they performed well. No complaints from the dogs.

I'm still a bit shocked, though, to find such a nugget of outdoor information tucked into the WSJ, amid stock prices, technology talk, corporate downsizing and the war in the Mideast.

Guess you never know...