I’m standing at the base of Mount Marathon in Seward, Alaska, watching people sprint up a mountain that most sane humans would prefer to climb slowly. It’s the Fourth of July, and this grueling 3.5-mile race — straight up 3,022 feet of scree, shale, and suffering, then straight back down — has been a Kenai … Read more
I almost didn’t write about North Cascades. There’s a selfish part of me that wanted to keep quiet about the one national park where you can show up on a Friday in July and still find an empty trailhead. But that’s exactly why more people need to know — because this park is too extraordinary … Read more
I stood at the Visitor Center in Zion last July, sandwiched between a family of five and a busload of tourists all photographing the same shuttle bus. The thermometer read 104 degrees. The line for the restroom wrapped around the building. And I thought: there has to be a better way. That’s when I started … Read more
I’ve been to a lot of national parks. I’ve driven the Going-to-the-Sun Road, hiked into the Grand Canyon, and watched Old Faithful from a bench surrounded by three hundred strangers. But nothing prepared me for a park where you can’t actually go anywhere without a boat. That’s Voyageurs National Park — 218,000 acres of northern … Read more
The ferry from San Pedro takes exactly one hour. Sixty minutes where the smog thins, the Pacific turns from slate to sapphire, and the mainland shrinks into something you stop thinking about. I stood at the rail watching Catalina grow on the horizon — a craggy silhouette rising from the channel — and felt that … Read more
I’ve driven across America three times. Each trip was unforgettable — and each one left me exhausted, white-knuckled, and wondering why I’d volunteered to stare at 2,800 miles of interstate instead of actually seeing the country. So this summer, I’m doing something different. I’m parking the car, booking a Superliner bedroom on Amtrak’s California Zephyr, … Read more
I’ve logged enough highway miles with kids in the backseat to know that the difference between a trip everyone remembers fondly and one that ends with someone crying in a gas station parking lot comes down to preparation. Not the kind where you fold outfits into packing cubes and label snack bags — I mean … Read more
My dog Moose has logged more miles than most people I know. Three national parks, fourteen state forests, and enough dirt roads to fill an atlas. He turned seven this spring, and somewhere around our third breakdown on a fire road in the Ozarks last fall, I promised myself I’d stop treating his comfort as … Read more
There’s a specific moment when a cabin weekend clicks into place. For me, it happens on the first evening — cooler full of food, fire going, porch chair creaking underneath me, and the kind of silence you forget exists when you live in a city. But getting to that moment? That requires gear. And not … Read more
I’ve been driving the same crossover for five years. It’s fine. It gets me to the grocery store and back, handles the occasional weekend hike, and the cargo area has swallowed enough camping gear to justify its existence. But last month, halfway through a 14-hour drive to Utah, I realized something: my car wasn’t built … Read more