After carefully making our way around tide pools, picking lines over beach ball sized boulders, and slogging across loose, gravelly beaches, it was a relief to round the final rocky headland. By this time, we were looking forward to settling…
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I only get one chance each summer to spend a full week in the mountains. The week to unplug and explore is easily the highlight of my year. For the past seven years, I’ve joined a group of friends to…
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Finding the right camping mattress can be like searching for the Holy Grail. Maybe you’re a backpacker chasing the perfect combination of warmth and weight. Or perhaps you’re a car camper hunting for that ultimate “feels like my bed at…
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The waterfalls weren’t there an hour ago. Earlier this morning we awoke from our bivouac under the towering sandstone walls of The Maze, a remote labyrinth of deep canyons in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. We’d noticed a drop in the…
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You might be quietly sobbing over the end of summer, but fear not. As nearly any backpacker will tell you, fall is really where it’s at. The colors are spectacular, the crowds a bit thinner, and the temperatures so perfect,…
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I wiggled, trying to get situated in my bivy sack, being extremely cautious not to scoot my sleeping pad even an inch farther up or down. Right above my head and right below my feet sat cow pies bigger than…
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The art of a responsible backcountry campfire is right up there with the art of the backcountry poo. Both are incredibly enjoyable, in their own unique ways, and both are more frequently practiced poorly than we all might like, leaving…
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Now that winter is in the rearview mirror (officially anyway), hikers all over the country are dusting off their boots and preparing for summer hikes ahead. Kick off the season on June 6th with American Hiking Society’s National Trails Day….
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The parallels between backpacking and relationships are innumerable, if not completely contrived for the sake of this introduction. For instance, take Paul Simon and me. We’ve never been in a relationship, but he thinks there are 50 ways to leave…
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The first time I ever drove into southwest Utah, I had a sneaking suspicion I’d fall for it. The red rock walls and arches around Moab were unlike anything else I’d seen. Though I barely knew anything about the landscape…
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Imagine the world’s largest vacuum cleaner convention. Suits, ties, slick salespeople and some schmarmy, red-carpeted, faux-pillared and gold-embossed convention center on the outskirts of Vegas that was last renovated in 1977. Take the exact opposite of all that (except the…
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When you hear, “We flew into Vegas and picked up an RV for a four-day video shoot in the desert,” you might conjure-up some sort of wild, Fear and Loathing-style debauchery. But if you did, you’d be wrong. Of course,…
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