We don't give them much thought, but they sure are everywhere. Roads. Dirt ones, paved ones, gravel ones, long-since abandoned logging ones, and every other flavor of the road rainbow. Walking long distances gives you a new appreciation of just how extensive the totality of our road system really is…
Search Results for: welcome
Welcome to Summer
“We’re gonna get wet.” Not exactly the “we’re gonna need a bigger boat” line famously delivered by Roy Scheider in the movie Jaws, but you get the idea. Hardly had the words tumbled out of my mouth before it was on top of us. The sting of the pea-sized pellets of hail against the back of my legs was what I felt first as we scrambled to throw on rain jackets and ponchos.
Welcome
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Welcome to Oregon
The sound of the morning was an unusual one: a distant chime and then a cluster of them, faint but clear. High on a ridge near 7,000 feet, the list of possible sources was quite limited. As it grew louder, the chimes revealed themselves for what they really were: cow bells. The patchwork of meadows we'd seen since yesterday were the perfect place for a herd of free-ranging cattle to graze.
Tumanguya
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.
Uncharted Territory
To wake with the realization that you’re not on the trail you’re supposed to be, might normally be cause for alarm. But in this case, it was by design.
Shortcuts in the Wild
Automation is having, shall we say, a moment. Spreading its tendrils through our lives everywhere from our homes to our cars and to the supercomputers disguised as smartphones stashed in our pockets, its promises are many. More efficiency, less time wasted on the perfunctory tasks of daily routines, and more focus on the things that really matter.
Not That Patagonia
The rock strewn dirt road we’d arrived at just as dusk cast a pall of gray over the mountainside was more than just a home for the night. It was now our yellow brick road—albeit a less brightly colored one—leading us to a distant town stop that we could not see, an Oz of a far less fantastical sort.
Mercury Rising
I told myself to file away the morning’s chill into my memory bank for safe keeping. Like a mental block of ice, I had a feeling I would soon be in need of opening the mental freezer to find some measure of relief from the oven we’d soon be descending into.
In Search of Sameness
The stars hang motionless, quiet, flecks of salt on an endless piece of black construction paper stretched above our heads. The crickets, less quietly, perform their discordant symphony from a score known only to them. The distant hum of a plane’s jet engine racing across the sky begins as a dull thud, builds to a roar, and disappears behind the mountain.
Resistance
Aside from our plunge into the depths of the Grand Canyon and our subsequent reemergence, the trail since Utah has been largely devoid of any significant climbing—until today. In the first minutes after leaving our camp at the base of a climb, any pretense that our legs might have been under about the leisure with which we’d stroll our way to Mexico had vanished.
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.
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
Unfinished
Last year was a weird year. How’s that for understatement? A world away from a world that was tumbling down a spiral it had not seen in a century, we had the good fortune to be strolling through some of the country’s most spectacular scenery as we followed the length of the Continental Divide Trail. Right up until we reached Glacier National Park, at least.
Alpine Zone
It was not an acoustic illusion. The deafening rain on the shelter’s metal roof hadn’t been lying after all, the wall of gray having unleashed a flurry of drops that matched the maddeningly loud sound above our heads. Eyes and ears in agreement, it was undeniably pouring.
Green Mountain Rainforest
Hearing the patter of raindrops on the roof of the tent, it was hard to know whether last night’s storm had overstayed its welcome or if the winds that had swept it away were simply ushering downward the moisture that had collected on the canopy above us. By the time we realized it was the latter, it was on to a familiar routine.
Stone and Sky News & Updates - July 2021
Normalcy. Remember what that felt like? I’d very nearly forgotten myself. The 4th of July has come and gone and the heart of summer is finally here. But it’s not just any summer. Here in the U.S., it feels like we’re slowly tiptoeing our way out into the light, emerging from a state of pseudo-hibernation....
Entr’acte
In less than 5 miles, there's only so much excitement that can happen. In the hours before taking even the first step of those 5 miles, we tossed and turned in our little home on the windswept and sun baked sands of the desert outside of Lordsburg. Like a prison spotlight, the moon had bathed even the small hours of the morning with a bright, white light.
Route 66
All things change. Nothing stays the same. It's as true of this trail as it is for anything else. Long from now, much of the 2000 miles we've walked will be gone, forgotten beneath the soil that has reclaimed it, replaced by newer and better tread. But the scenery—the thing that brings people back year after year—that will remain the same.
Two Thousand
After yesterday's downright social atmosphere, it was back to a more familiar one: just us, the trail, and a smattering of cows that aren't quite as adept at holding up their end of a conversation. It was the first morning that either of us could remember starting without a warm layer or two, so warm was the early sun.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Food. Hot shower. Laundry. Grocery store. An easy hitch, or better yet, no hitch at all. Sounds basic enough, doesn't it? It's a simple recipe for the ideal resupply stop. And yet you'd be surprised by how few stops we make that check even that modest list of boxes.
So Long, September
The last day of September. Somewhere along the way, summer slipped into the distance without us hardly noticing. The cold nights of the past few weeks heralded the start of autumn, but with the return of cloudless sunshine and 70-degree weather it feels like the perfect time to be out hiking.
Wind of Change
As if bemused by the accelerating pace of our hectic lives, the natural rhythm of the world moves ever onward, inexorably slowly, one season slipping into another almost without our notice. It's one of the many small joys of trail life—the rare attentiveness to even subtle changes in the world around us that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Cirque
How could it end like this? A day of jaw-dropping scenery reduced to a twilight scramble over a nearly impassable jungle gym of blowdown. But in the interest of not burying the lead let's rewind and get to the good part first.
Yosemite East
Did we miss something? Not five minutes down the trail from where we'd slept, it looked like a great hand had swept through the forest and toppled everything in its path, both the living and the dead. What looked like perfectly healthy trees, some several feet in diameter, lie one upon the other like match sticks that had spilled from their box.
The Snows of September
It's amazing how quickly things can turn. Mountains are fickle like that, especially in the “shoulder season”—that no man’s land beyond the heart of summer where autumn can so often confuse itself with early winter. Expecting the unexpected, and being prepared for just about anything is what hiking in shoulder season is all about.
Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde
Looking back at the hillside it was nestled into, surrounded by a maturing forest of pine, you have to shake yourself a bit to even wonder: that's an outfitter up there? Even as it shrunk into the distance, I had to assure myself that it had not been a mirage.
A History of PUDs
It's the dirtiest of words out here: PUDs. Pointless Ups and Downs. It behooves you not to complain too much when you've signed up of your own volition to walk from one side of the country to the other, but PUDs are like the proverbial thorn in your side, the pebble in your shoe, the tiny thorn entangled deep in the fibers of your sock that you just can't shake…
This Never Gets Old
I'm sitting on the beach in the Bahamas. The water is an impossibly deep shade of turquoise, the sand as bright and fine as baking flour. The wind blows, filtering through the palm trees and issuing a gentle, constant rustling sound as they sway slightly.
The Legacy of Water
Its fingerprints are all around us. The lingering patches of snow that still cling to the coolest of high alpine corners. The lifeblood of the thick carpet of tundra-thriving grasses, bold enough to color such a forbidding landscape with their flowering blooms. Even the glaciers that long ago sculpted the waves of stone we've called home for these past 6 weeks.
The Magic of Kindness
Like a truck stuck in second gear. That's what it felt like when my feet took their first steps away from our camp this morning. The evening rains had left only to return a time or two overnight, ensuring that we'd be packing up wet tarps, at a minimum. There was no blue sky to herald the morning, only a thick cloud that we seemed to be finding our way out of little by little.
Endurance
In August 1914, with the world peering into the void of what would become the First World War, a wooden ship unique among all but one set sail from Plymouth, England bound for Antarctica. Apart from its cousin ship, Fram, no other wooden ship had been built—or has been since—with such attention given to strength and the ability to withstand the crushing power of an Antarctic winter’s ice floes.
Gatorade Please, Bartender
At 8.3 pounds per gallon, the weight of water is something you notice. While the heaviest of the commodities we tote around with us, it's also inarguably the most important which is why the decision of exactly how much to carry away from each water source is such a critical one. Fortunately, in spite of the rapid snow melt in Colorado, water sources have been plentiful.
Winter Park
When short days like this dawn, it's hard to think about much else than the shower and town food waiting at the end of the rainbow. But standing between us and that promised land was another 13,000 foot summit and a perfect morning to climb up and over it.
Grand Lake
The mountain pine beetle likely has no conception of its impact on the landscape. No larger than a grain of rice, it proves the adage that even very small things can pack an incredibly big punch. Unfortunately for Colorado forests, that punch has been right to the gut of millions of acres of lodgepole pines.
Never Summer
For such a pleasantly warm summer afternoon, it sure didn't begin that way. Shoving off down the trail this morning, the air was as still as it had been when the sun had set and the moon had begun to rise the night before. In fact, it was comfortable enough not even to need a wind shirt, or so I thought.
Sun Soaked Addiction
There's no denying it. This is an addiction of sorts. Less destructive than drugs or alcohol, perhaps, but no less of an obsession. I've met a lot of people over the years who think this long distance hiking stuff is downright crazy, madness.
Unified Trail Theory
Every trail carries with it certain echoes of others, not unlike distinct branches of the same family tree. Terrain, weather, water sources, flora, and quality of tread all combine to make a trail its unique self. With so many overlapping qualities and in spite of their differences, it's as if all trails share some of the same connective tissue. Call it a Unified Trail Theory.
Is This the Right Border?
It's always strange when things you've looked forward to for so long are finally right in front of you. The past several years have in a very real sense all been leading up to this—a humble looking dirt path branching away from an otherwise un-noteworthy patch of road.
The Mountain that Blew its Top
Four months before I was born and a small, towheaded terror was introduced to the Brownscheidle household, an altogether different sort of terror was unleashed on the Pacific Northwest not far north of the Columbia River that divides Oregon from Washington.