On the Trail With the Leica M9

My photography has always straddled two worlds – documentary and street shooting, and landscape work. My original career was as a photojournalist, and I still greatly enjoy photographing people as part of my international travels. But, I also have always loved the outdoors, hiking, and doing landscape and nature photography as well.
While the same camera, an SLR or DSLR, can be used for each, neither is necessarily the ideal tool for both. DSLRs can be large, acoustically noisy, and their lenses are also bulky and a bit intimidating for discrete street shooting. A high resolution DSLR is fine for landscape work, but because I make large gallery prints I've always done much of my landscape shooting with either large format or medium format, (film and digital).
But as I get older I am getting a bit lazier, and while as little as five years ago I'd think nothing of hiking all afternoon with a 30lb camera pack, along with a heavy tripod and ball head on a shoulder sling, not so muc...