Date: 9/17/20 Miles: 15.7Total Miles: 1497.1 “Getting up is optional. Getting down is mandatory.”—Ed Viesturs Of all the mountains I’ve spent time in, two have held a particularly special place: the High Sierra are in my heart, but the Adirondacks of my home are in my blood. What we’d see today had me wondering how…
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Angel from Montgomery
Date: 8/18/20 Miles: 12.0Total Miles: 997.8 Standing at the kitchen sink, she gazes out into the stifling heat of a Deep South summer’s evening, the fire red sun hanging briefly against a gray sky before dipping to the horizon. A middle-aged woman wondering how another day locked in the same listlessness has come and gone,…
Endurance
Date: 7/13/20 Miles: 9.1Total Miles: 436.8 en·dur·ance | in-ˈdu̇r-ən(t)s , -ˈdyu̇r-, en- 1 : the ability to withstand hardship or adversityespecially : the ability to sustain a prolonged stressful effort or activity In August of 1914, with the world peering into the void of what would become the First World War, a wooden ship unique…
Grand Lake
Date: 7/6/20 Miles: 13.1Total Miles: 330.7 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…
The Silence and the Fury
Date: 9/1/19-9/2/19 Miles: 18.7 Total Miles: 28.5 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…
The Great Range
As previously published on The Guidebook—the outdoor blog for Chaco sandals Date: 7/6/19 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. For me, “here” has…
Canyoneering 101
Date: 4/19/19 Miles: 18.3 Total Miles: 75.8 The 5:30am alarm came as early as ever, this time with the added realization of just how cold a night it had been. Each bundled in our warm layers, we broke camp as quickly as we could to start moving and even then still kept on down jackets…
No Country For Old Men
Date: 4/18/19 Miles: 16.5 Total Miles: 57.5 The sweltering oppressiveness of a Deep South summer in To Kill a Mockingbird that hangs in the air with the same suffocation as that of the story’s racial injustice. The silent and hopeless expansiveness of the Texas desert that is nearly as menacing as its villain in No…
Wonderland
Date: 7/8/18 Miles: 17.2 Total Miles: 89.8 “This is the part I hate.” I can still hear him saying it. The smile on his face minutes later, waving goodbye from the front door, is the truly indelible part. The sweeter half of an otherwise bittersweet memory, as Emily and I pulled down the street heading…
Persistence of Memory
Date: 7/6/18 Miles: 21.3 Total Miles: 55.7 Up the stairs to the fifth floor, a collection of Impressionism, surrealism, and cubism masterpieces adorns the starkly white walls of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Nestled among Monet’s famous Water Lilies triptych and Pollock’s massive drip painting canvases hangs a work of a very different kind,…
