Once again I feel a little self-conscious about talking about MY early COVID tale, but again it is a tale that I’ve retold a few times on skin tracks and such, so -in the spirit of sharing good tales – I’ll go ahead and share it here. Before I went to France I found out that the New England Canyoneering Team (the Hanlons) were coming out to Utah for their annual canyoneering fest for their…
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So it’s been a year since the world came crashing down on us with the advent of COVID-19, as I’ve been reminded by the media over the last couple of days. Little did we all know on March 11, 2020 what our world would be like for the next year. At best it’s been a bit awkward, at worst – as I heard on a story on NPR – there are people who haven’t been…
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Ah, a New Year! Of course, this one is more of a “thing” than most New Years; the common consensus, of course is that 2020 was a bad year and that any new year past that has got to portend better days. But equally “of course”, the coronavirus doesn’t give a shit what day, month, or year it is, and there is no doubt that 2021 could indeed be worse. Certainly it has started out…
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It was Memorial Day on the Tuolumne river near Yosemite National park, normally a very busy time. But that year had a nice big snowpack in the Sierras, and “The T” was running at about 8000 cfs, which is pretty high for that river; certainly too high for the commercial raft companies that haunt that river, and thus it was pretty empty. I had been on a trip with some other folks but we had…
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A year and a half ago I did a post with the story of the Patagonia River shoes, and at the end I “promised” to do another on the story of the Patagonia Fishing Boots. It’s taken me a long time, but with a little help from a friend (more on that later) I’m finally able to sit down and share this tale. Firstly, I am not a fisherman. I love all sorts of outdoor…
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Ashley’s birthday is in mid-November, which can be a challenging time of year; a bit early for good skiing, a bit late for summer-type activities, it can be pretty cold, and the nights are long for camping. This past weekend was no exception, but since we got shut down on another European bike tour this summer and the window was closing for viable bike tours until spring she decided that a southwestern Utah bike tour…
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While generally I love fall, I have often said that the best fall season is when it’s warm warm warm….and then the switch is flipped and it starts snowing, and thus it is winter. This keeps the trails and mountains still accessible for hikes and runs pretty late and then builds up a decent snowpack quickly that hopefully will enable some snowpack stability. But the truth is that my ideal scenario rarely happens; more often…
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The folks at American Whitewater have been kind enough to indulge me by publishing a series of articles about packrafting in their 2020 issues. As a result, there’s no doubt that both of the people who read the articles are charging out and buying packrafts as we speak! According to the editor of the magazine I’ve said all there is to be said (he clearly doesn’t know me very well!) and this will be the…
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In the spring of 1980 the Pacific Northwest was all abuzz about Mount St Helens. Our local snowcone of a mountain: was coming to life with small eruptions that left ash streaks that lay vivid against the late season snowpack. It was fun and interesting and a good reminder that our volcanoes were only dormant, not dead, though having crawled up Mount Hood the prior year (it took our group something like 10 hours to…
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