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…
Favorites
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,…
46
Date: 9/4/17 Sleep has never come easily to me. Years after the Appalachian Trail I’d still occasionally turn over in the middle of the night and reach bleary-eyed for the headphones on my nightstand to plug them in and listen to one of the few sounds that would bring an end to my rising anxiety…
Roots
Date: 9/2/17 archaeology: noun | är-kē-‘ä-lə-jē 1 the scientific study of material remains (such as fossil relics, artifacts, and monuments) of past human life and activities Nearly one year ago, I arrived at an unassuming stripe of cleared forest that would never have been identifiable as an international border had it not been for the…
O Canada
Date: 9/25/16 Miles: 19.8 Total Miles: 2650.1 It began like any other day: morning coffee from the warmth of my sleeping bag followed by deflating and rolling up my sleeping pad, and stuffing my few belongings one by one into my pack before emerging from my tent to take it down once more. The only…
Confessions of a Chacoholic
Date: 9/24/16 Miles: 19.3 Total Miles: 2638.8 I love Chacos. True story: I own 8 pairs of them. Two pairs hiked the Appalachian Trail, two have hiked the John Muir Trail and the Wonderland Trail twice, and three have now hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. Combined they’ve been my companions for well north of 5,000…
