No experience has made me long for the outdoors quite like Summer in Manhattan. Scorching days and sticky nights stacked one on top of another like some sort of steamy space time continuum. This is the time of year that I start pining for the dusty Ponderosa forests and ice cold mountain lakes of the the Sierra Nevada of my youth. So it was with great delight last Summer that I stumbled upon Cold Splinters, a blog written by fellow New Yorker, one Mr. Jeffrey Thrope.