“Bushwhacking is like my third favorite thing to do in the outdoors, behind crotch-deep postholing and getting hit in the head by falling rocks,” I said, shoulder-deep in desert foliage, hands raised like a man fending off a swarm of bees, walking forward in sloppy, almost-balanced steps. I am not a fan of bushwhacking, but [...]
My friend Joe crashed his mountain bike on a relatively mellow, sweeping right hand bend section of fast-rolling singletrack on July 7, dislocating both shoulders, which meant a summer and fall of walking around in an immobilizing sling. I watched the whole thing via Joe’s Instagram feed, and when I saw him, he had written “CHIN [...]
At a grocery store last week, the cover of Cosmopolitan‘s January issue caught my eye with the headline “EPIC SEX.” Immediately, in my head, I started imagining the scenario: “… and that was after about two hours of this. So I untied him, and we cleaned up all the broken watermelons, put away the jumper [...]
I haven’t had a “proper” Thanksgiving dinner since 2002, somehow managing to be anywhere but watching football and eating an oven-cooked turkey. When people say “Thanksgiving,” I think of being somewhere in the desert with two of my closest friends, Nick and Jayson. Three out of the last four years, the three of us have [...]
Maybe you’ve heard this one: Ski resort patron approaches lift ticket kiosk on Powder Day of the Century and demands a refund for his/her lift ticket, citing “too much snow.” Or the guy who wants to return a 20-year-old headlamp to a store because it has a “lifetime warranty,” which he assumes means his lifetime, [...]
You, outdoor recreator, are quite probably quite educated: Bachelor’s degree, possibly a master’s degree or Ph.D. You wore a cap and gown and were handed a number of certificates decorated with fancy letters saying you went to college and finished — maybe even college for adults, which is called graduate school. But you climb rocks, [...]
“You know, I was just thinking that three bumper stickers changed my life,” Dan said as we tromped down the trail a couple weeks ago. I laughed because I knew what he was talking about. Not “Obama/Romney/McCain/Bush for …” or “Nuke a Gay Whale For Christ,” but the time someone says something and you hear [...]
Sometimes I like to fantasize that I have some sort of backcountry suaveness and culinary instinct, and that I will someday take a special lady somewhere beautiful and make a nice dinner for her and it will be really romantic. But the reality is that this is pretty much the best (only?) trick in my [...]
Ever fantasized about being a fire lookout, or living in a cabin high in the mountains, or deep in the wilderness somewhere? It’s romantic, calming. Our world feels hectic—which is our own fault—and we think of a place like that, out in “the middle of nowhere,” as a place to escape, to get away from [...]
A handful of Saturday mornings, I have driven out of Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood juggling a bowl of granola on my lap, trying to rub the sleep out of my eyes and asking myself if I packed everything in my pack— harness, shoes, rack or rope, headlamp, food, water. It’s 2 a.m., and people are [...]
It’s a singular feeling when you’re 33 and talking to your mother and she says, “You know what I think you should try? Match.com.” Then there’s another feeling when you say to your mother, “Well, Mom, I had this weird feeling about meeting women and telling them I live in a van full of climbing [...]
I asked my friend Nick to drive from Denver to Seattle with me a couple weekends ago, since we hadn’t spent several hours alone in a car together since 2008. After 21 hours in the van, I think we got sufficiently caught up. Basically four years later, neither of us have much of anything figured [...]
I had this idea in early 2011 to make a web site about “normal” outdoorsfolk, those of us who are fairly average in ability when it comes to climbing, skiing, cycling, and other outdoor pursuits — but exceptional in our love for them. That became Semi-Rad.com, which I see as a celebration of that passion [...]
When you go on a climbing or backpacking trip and someone says, “I’ll bring the coffee,” do you secretly bring your own stash to supplement whatever they’re bringing, because you know you’re going to drink double the amount of coffee they think you’re going to drink, and then some? I do too. This is not [...]
For years, I have known to pee on rocks at high altitudes because mountain goats crave salt, and if you pee on plants, mountain goats will eat them until they’re gone. I have seen goats milling around the restrooms at Summit Lake on Colorado’s Mount Evans, kind of bashfully but definitely intently making their [...]
Remember that time you took that photo of you and your friend(s) standing on the summit of something and it was the most exciting photo ever? Of course you don’t. Look through your outdoor photo collection. Do you have 100 photos of the same thing, of you and various friends standing in front of various [...]
I have this paper map in my car where I’ve been highlighting every stretch of road I’ve driven on in the past 3 1/2 months, and there’s not a very simple explanation to the 12,000-mile line I’ve drawn. The places I’ve been, driving around, finding a storyline about the mythical American road trip, don’t fit [...]
Snow is falling in the high country. Be honest. Can you really afford to start this year’s ski season with anything but the best? The best costs money. But it’s worth it. Outfit yourself with all this hella expensive ski gear that I Googled for you — only $125,561.00, plus probably some shipping fees and [...]
It was the night before my 5-day backpacking trip with five tough teenagers from East Palo Alto when someone asked about toilet paper, and we discovered we hadn’t been issued any. This was most of the kids’ first time in any sort of backcountry outside the Bay Area, and each seemed to have a different [...]
It’s hard to sell me a water purification device. I’m a lifetime backcountry iodine tablet user, because of its simplicity: The only way it can malfunction is user error, it’s light enough to put in any pack, even if I don’t think I’m going to need water purification. Never have to worry about leaving other [...]
GoLite makes a lot of things — ultralight backpacking gear, trail running gear and apparel, outdoor performance clothing, even luggage. One of the things they probably don’t focus on is rock climbing. But I’m going to tell you that one of their packs is great, not for ultralight backpacking, as advertised, but for alpine rock [...]
Remember your last road trip, the day you left town? Wherever it was, whenever — July 4th, Memorial Day Weekend, Spring Break — you were driving toward a place where you wouldn’t have to work. You could just play. Biking, climbing, backpacking, whatever. You were going to sleep on the ground in a place you [...]
Maybe you’ve seen this photo somewhere on the Internet before. I came across it the other day, again, when I saw it as someone’s profile photo on a climbing web site. It’s of course not new (note Lycra tights on man, Reebok aerobic cross-trainers on woman.) Plenty of Internet commenters have weighed in on the [...]
