The buzzing on my wrist comes as no surprise. In those brief moments drifting in limbo between asleep and awake, I struggle to register what exactly it is floating above my head. Beyond the soft armor of mosquito mesh surrounding me, and through the tarp stretched taut above, an amorphous shape of white bends into unrecognizable shapes and patterns, like sunlight seen from beneath the surface of water.
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Where Stone Meets Sky
The Sierra. The range that has captured the fascination of icons like Ansel Adams and John Muir. Superlatives have been spilled over its incredible beauty, its almost idyllic climate, and the trails that beckon you to explore it ever more deeply. It may best be known as the Range of Light, but to me, it is simply the place where stone meets sky.
The Golden Staircase
The confluence of two creeks, a mere stone’s throw from our proverbial bedroom window, seemed not to care that morning had broken. Nature’s white noise machine chugged along, ignorant of day and time. The alarm on my wrist was more particular about exactly what time it was, and its buzzing was as inescapable as the reality it brought with it. Everything ahead of us was in one and only one direction: up.
Rocky Mountain Wall Art
The Rocky Mountains. Perhaps no mountain range better resembles the image of the American west. Soaring spires of granite, vast alpine landscapes of lush greenery, and hidden lakes that serve as reminders of their glacial origin. The Continental Divide Trail (CDT) affords a front row seat to it all. From the snowy San Juans of...
Southwest Wall Art
The southwest is a land of mystery and contradiction. Sweeping desert landscapes, stately saguaro, and an arid ocean of seeming desolation that hides a wealth of life in plain sight. On thru-hikes of the Continental Divide Trail and Arizona Trail, along with a section hike of the Mogollon Rim Trail, we saw up close the...
Pacific Northwest Wall Art
Ice-capped hulking volcanoes. Mountains cloaked in ancient forests. Coastal beaches shrouded in mist adjacent to one of the quietest places in the United States. One word always comes to mind when I think back to the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest. No, not rain: diversity. Not far from our home, two trails wander—with unparalleled access—through...
Stone and Sky Wall Art
For all its challenges, long-distance hiking has one obvious upside: it affords you a front row seat to some of the world’s most spectacular scenery. Escaping to wild places via images on a webpage is one thing. Now, you can bring those landscapes into your home, with Stone and Sky wall art created from our...
Adventure Consulting
What is ”adventure consulting”? At Stone and Sky, it encompasses 3 things: People on the trail and readers of the Stone and Sky blog may know me best as ”Mountain Man”, due to more than 10,000 miles of hiking experience on long-distance trails alone. The other sides of me you might know less about? Writer....
A Brief History of Time
Honest question: What day is it? Away from the routines and patterns of home, it’s remarkable how something so familiar vanishes so quickly, each day seamlessly bleeding into the next, only the rising and setting of the sun demarcating one day from the next.
Mogollon Rim
The morning discovered us in a state now quite familiar: strolling past a shallow depression full of dark brown water. Fine crystals of frost on nearby meadow grasses sparkled in the first rays of sunlight, while those that had been warmed for but a few minutes had already melted into droplets that now weighed heavily on the blades to which they clung.
Mirage
Deep in the heart of the world’s largest ponderosa pine forest is not the place one might typically think of evoking imagery of the ocean. In every direction, a uniform pattern of trunks and canopies extends toward all points of the compass in such a way that it’s difficult to imagine the forest ever coming to an end. The trail snakes its way through a labyrinth of sameness that makes it feel almost disorienting.
I Left My Heart in the San Francisco Peaks
The lightning flashed without even a whimper of thunder, so distant was it. The crescent moon that hours earlier had tucked the sun into bed and took its place in the sky was nowhere to be found, obscured by banks of thick, dark clouds that should not have been there.
North Star
They were right there. The same place they always were. At least until—apparently—they weren’t. The mittens that had been dangling from my sternum strap were nowhere to be found. Not exactly the start to the morning you dream about.
Atonement
After two days of what can only be described as sensory overload, my first thought was: did I really just see that? Getting up close and personal with one of the world’s greatest natural wonders will do that to you. My second thought was more akin to wondering what price the trail would now exact in exchange for those past two days.
The Prestige
There are—apparently—two constants to the soundtrack of hiking atop the Kaibab Plateau in autumn: the telltale crunch of small, angular stones beneath each step; and the trembling of aspen leaves in even the slightest breeze, a sound that could easily be mistaken for gentle raindrops.
O Coffee, Where Art Thou?
Discombobulated. No, too strong. Confused. Not exactly. “I feel foggy headed,” says Ace, succinctly serving up the answer to my internal question as we sit down at a brief early morning break to remove our wind shirts. The question: what exactly is going on with my brain this morning?
Starting Line
Since I’d first heard of it in 2016, the Arizona Trail has captured my imagination. Completed only five years earlier in 2011, it stretches nearly 800 miles north-to-south down the length of the state, from Utah all the way to Mexico. Along the way, the vast and often unsung diversity of Arizona is on display
Rookie Perspective #6: The End
Holy shit! We did it. After more than 100 days and 2500 miles we reached the southern terminus of the CDT. Most importantly, Mountain Man did it. I cannot believe he has hiked three of these bad boys. And today, when we touched the obelisk marking the end of the trail for us, he completed his Triple Crown. He set out to achieve this goal and he did it. I couldn’t be more proud of him.
Land of Enchantment
If you close your eyes and picture New Mexico, what do you see? I'd always pictured a vast, arid plateau. Maybe Taos ski resort. And ancient remnants of the dwellings of indigenous people.
Wyoming, Wyoming
The first time I saw the grassy hillsides sloping upward into dark green forest, I was 24. Hours earlier on the same cross country drive that moved me to Seattle, the flatland plains of the Midwest had stretched impossibly far into the distance, away from either side of my car as it zoomed down the interstate loaded with every one of my worldly belongings.
Sierra in the Rockies
Dryness: the ultimate luxury. Something you often only truly appreciate in its absence. Such has it been the past several mornings, waking to gear that all had a superficial dampness to it. Not the kind of moisture you'd expect from rain, but the kind that comes with the settling of cool damp air overnight. Not enough to condense, just enough to give everything that feeling of unpleasant clamminess.
Snowbound
Thirty miles. That seemed reasonable given the perfect weather we were expecting and the gentle topography after the first few miles of climbing. It didn't go as planned.
Power Outage
Most every day on trail I wake up knowing that I'm right where I'm meant to be, but on rare occasions I barely wake up knowing where I am at all. Today was definitely the latter. Whether from a night of poor sleep or from the drain of yesterday’s roller coaster, I woke up with leaden legs and eyes that could barely manage to keep themselves open.
The Modern Day Adventures of Ulysses
As previously published on the Ulysses app blog Truth be told, I’ve never thought of myself as a writer. Homer, I most certainly am not. As an engineer, numbers have always come more easily to me than words. Safer. More predictable. Less apt to be used carelessly. Perhaps not surprisingly then, my relationship with writing...
The Silence and the Fury
The same chorus of white noise from the brook not 10 feet from our tent that had played us a lullaby last night played us back into consciousness this morning. Leaving our campsite deep within the forest, it was time to make our way up onto a vast plateau and the blast zone that constitutes the entire northern half of the mountain.
The Great Range
I wasn’t always this soft. Age and a career in front of a computer has a way of doing that, slowly obscuring who we really are underneath. Some people go to church to be renewed. I come here.
Red Rock, Meet Blue Sky
There's very little that the Pacific Northwest and the desert Southwest have in common, except for one important detail: they're both landscapes defined by water. So much of the lush green Pacific Northwest and it's snow-capped peaks is owed to its surplus while the arid desert and mesa of the Southwest have a character shaped by its near-complete absence
Riding the Roller Coaster
If we weren't climbing, we were descending. That sounds obvious enough, but there are many days on the PCT where at least a few miles are reasonably level with little to no elevation gain or loss. Today was not one of them. With nearly 20 miles to make to pick up the next resupply before 5pm, it was another early start…
In the Heart of the Cascades
It stretched into the distance as far as I could see. With my back towards the Three Sisters, Mt. Washington, Three-Fingered Jack, and Mt. Jefferson towered over what looked like a boundless expanse of nothing but volcanic rock. Wave upon wave of fields were piled high with the stuff.
Blueberry Forest
Since crossing I-5 outside of Ashland, I've felt closer to civilization in Oregon than any other stretch of the trail so far. The best evidence is the number of consecutive road crossings, many separated by less than half a mile, that we seem to encounter every day here.
Cruise Control
The elevation profile looked particularly benign today, so when we set off this morning it looked to be a fairly comfortable day. But by the time we reached a road crossing little more than four miles into the day, we sat by the side of the road contemplating what to do. Beardoh had been struggling with worsening indigestion, stomach cramps, and fatigue the entire week…
Desert Redux
The thermometer is not my friend, or at best our relationship is strained. Today was further evidence of that fact. Hitting the trail a bit before 6am to get a jump on the impending heat, the Hat Creek Rim stretched still another 10 miles and beyond that another 6 awaited before the next water source. It was the desert all over again.
What Do You Mean There's No Water?
Just when memories of the searing heat and long waterless stretches of the desert had drifted deep into the recesses of my mind, it all came abruptly flooding back...but I'll come back to that.
Coppertone Strikes Again
Some days everything seems to go right, and this was one of those days. Yesterday's good fortune of spending the night at Nancy & Terry's cabin in the woods was perhaps the most relaxing and satisfying surprise of the entire trail thus far and the trend only continued this morning when we were greeted with coffee, pancakes, bacon and eggs for breakfast.
Mammoth Lakes
Fifteen miles feels considerably shorter when visions of hamburgers dance in your head. Sleeping next to an alpine lake at over 10,000 feet, no one was surprised that a blanket of cold had settled in to replace the comfortably warm evening of the night before.
Stone and Sky
Now this is the Sierra I remember. Gone were the storm clouds and back was the sapphire blue sky that sets the backdrop for some of the world's most dramatic mountain landscapes. Today would mark the trail's first major pass so we decided to sleep in, start a bit later than usual, and keep a leisurely pace through the morning to allow the snow up on the pass to melt and soften as much as possible.
John Muir Trail 2015
An image gallery of photos from the John Muir Trail—the jewel of the High Sierra, running 210-miles from Mt. Whitney to Yosemite Valley. Start Point: Yosemite Valley, CAEnd Point: Mt. Whitney, CATotal Length: 211 miles
Katahdin
After a night of restless anticipation, morning came early. I strolled away from The Birches for an early reunion with my Mom and Dad who’d driven all the way from home to meet me, but even before I made it to the parking lot my hometown friend Shauna, herself having travelled to meet her brother NY Mule, came running down the trail towards me.