Tuesday, September 27, 2011
NEW STORY IN NATIONAL PARKS MAGAZINE
My most recent story: a feature on the founders of the National Parks Conservation Association in National Parks magazine. This was an unusual assignment for me. The subjects, visionary conservationists Robert Sterling Yard and Stephen Mather, also the founding director of the National Park Service, are long dead, so I relied on books, letters, and descendants' testimonies. It almost felt like archaeology, and I loved it. These men may be forgotten, but their hard work and vision established an important American institution—the national parks—and a model for the rest of the world to follow. Yard and Mather, best friends, were also wonderfully unusual and, at times, eccentric characters. Read the story here.
Monday, September 12, 2011
TALE OF TWO WEEKENDS
After a summer full of travels, I finally had two weekends close to home. One of the things I love most about living in the West: I can go from hiking through alpine wildflowers near a forgotten 19th-century mining town to wandering among sagebrush beneath towering red monoliths in a matter of days. For Labor Day, Andrew and I went up to Silverton, where he owns an old Victorian that has become my refuge over the years. We schlepped up to Silver Lake to poke about its old mining ruins, bushwhacked up to 13,000-foot Whitehead Peak, and tiptoed across streams and through wildflowers to Highland Mary Lakes. This weekend, in Moab, I discovered the Hidden Valley Trail, which leads up a cliff band and into a valley flanked by terracotta cliffs. We had it all to ourselves.
Wednesday, September 1, 2011
I just returned from ten days at the family beach house on the north shore of Massachusetts. It's good to know New Englanders haven't grown any less salty in the years since I grew up in Mass. In a used bookstore in Gloucester, I overheard an exchange between an earnest bathing-suited lady tourist and the white-bearded proprietor, who could easily be cast as a sea captain. Lady: "Do you have anything on centaurs?" Proprietor: "Well, I have this print right up there." (Amazingly, he points to a print of a centaur hanging on the wall.) Lady: "No, no, I mean a photograph of a centaur." Proprietor: "Umm, hate to break it to you lady, but.....they don't exist." I have a few stories out this month to prove that I am not perennially on vacation—though lately it seems like I am. A story on traveling wine countries appears in subscribers' versions of Ladies' Home Journal this month, and I wrote a piece on up-and-coming fields, "Play the Field," for Outside's best jobs cover story. Good inspiration for anyone flirting with a career change. And National Geographic Adventure's website just posted a story I wrote on 15 great urban hikes.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
POSTCARD FROM THE LITTLE AMERICA HOTEL PARKING LOT, SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH
This weekend I was in Salt Lake City for the elaborate shrine to consumerism that is the Outdoor Retailer trade show. I came back late in the evening to find that my car had a massive flat tire. The next morning, I set to work changing it but though I could get the lugnuts off, the wheel simply wouldn't budge. A handyman guy pulled up and tried to help—no luck—and my friend Brook, who I saw walking by, couldn't move it either. In defeat, I called AAA. Who shows up but a tiny, sassy, no-bullshit Latina lady. She barely topped five feet. She takes one look at it, kicks the crap out of it five times and kerplunk the wheel falls off. Fingering the hub with her delicate greasy hands, she explained that it was corroded on there because of all the salt buildup. I asked her how often she did this for men. "Oh a lot," she said. "It's pretty funny when it's a big beefy guy on the side of the road. He'll look at me and say 'you mean you're going to show me up?' 'Yup, I'm going to show you up.'" Apparently they are even less amused when it's in front of their friends. When I asked her how she got into this line of work, she said simply: "I got tired of having men do things for me." As Brook said, maybe the moral of the story is that sometimes you just need to kick the shit out of something.
Friday, July 29, 2011
Several months ago, an editor I know at Dartmouth called to see if I would be interested in writing a story about an illustrious business school alum, Jeff Swartz, the CEO of outdoor-footwear giant Timberland. The hour interview Swartz granted me turned into 90 electrifying minutes. His energy and devout commitment to doing good for the world through the powers of business are absolutely infectious. Which is perhaps why he is helping lead a movement toward sustainability amongst a select group of forward-thinking corporations. My feature, "The Earth Keeper," appears in the current issue of Tuck Today.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
One of my unsightly habits—there are many—is Googling other writers. I do it when I am procrastinating or feeling bored or mediocre or downright terrible. (Self-doubt—an occupational hazard?) My latest stalkee was Kevin Fedarko, a former Outside magazine editor whose writing I love and whose talent I envy. I came across an old story he wrote about searching for a mentor and finding...Bob. Bob Schacochis, that is. In one paragraph, Fedarko asks Priscilla Painton, an editor at Time, where he worked, if he could sit in her office for a week to observe her greatness. He must be speaking directly to me with this: "We later became friends, but she never quite recovered, I think, from her astonishment over meeting someone who had failed to grasp the rudiments of journalistic pedagogy: the act of teaching oneself is indispensable to the process of becoming a writer." Perhaps I should stop trying to tweeze other writers' secrets from their online traces and get back to work. Read Fedarko's full story in Mayborn.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
DISPATCHES FROM TURKEY
I am writing this on a bus between Istanbul and Ankara. I have been in Turkey for about ten days, enough to know that just another week is not close to enough. This country took me by surprise. The people are among the most hospitable I have met. (In the beflowered Mediterranean town of Kas, I sat down to listen to a man playing the saz, a traditional Turkish guitar, and he almost reflexively invited me in to tea.) The food is weirdly and consistently outstanding, full of fresh salads, hummus, melt-in-your-mouth veggies and meats roasted in ceramic pots, yogurt, and baklava. The scenery is wild—I hiked through a Zion-like gorge packed with wildflowers in Ala Daglar National Park and sea kayaked on the coast near the ruins of sunken 5th-century cities. These last 12 days have been part of a trip with Vancouver-based guide service BikeHike Adventures, which I am scouting for an assignment. Now I am on my own. Actually, I stole Turan, the Turkish guide employed by BikeHike, and we are off to explore the western Black Sea coast. He has never been to this particular area, so it should be an interesting reconnaissance mission. We have no set plans, we are just going to see where the wind takes us. I bet it'll be someplace interesting.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
AN ANTI-MOWING MANIFESTO
(also known as five minutes of procrastination)
I have decided to do away with mowing. It's tiresome, loud, burns unnecessary fossil fuels, and, most importantly, I am lazy. I suspect that the meadows that are now growing in my front and back yards irk my neighbors, particularly the seasonal retired Texans whose lawn could easily be mistaken for a high-dollar golf course. No matter. I have discovered a number of perks to letting nature grow wild on one's property.
Birds, bees, mice, and insects flock to it, and their doings ceaselessly entertain my small yard tiger, who is now much shorter than the grass and very easily camouflaged. Meanwhile it smells great, doesn't seem to need much water, makes a nice spot for an afternoon nap, and, best of all, it's gorgeous. I keep discovering new plants (see right) that have taken residence here. I don't know how they all arrived. Perhaps word is out in the plant world, and now I am the beneficiary of a large cast of colorful characters. Weeds? It's all in the eye of the beholder.
Friday, May 27, 2011
My latest story... Over two years ago, I went on an 18-day, five-boat, 16-person, spectacularly beautiful, kind of scary, occasionally debauched, and totally life-changing Grand Canyon raft trip. I have written several stories about it, yet I still have more to say. My most recent musings appeared in this month's Canoe & Kayak magazine. It's an essay on learning an important life lesson from a very unlikely sage: Jay Daniel, a beer-swilling, rapid-busting jokester of a river rat. Read it here.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Why I Love Durango, Reason #247: I have lived here for more than six years, and I still haven't exhausted my weekend options. This past one, my friends Ryan and Hilary and I drove out to Cedar Mesa in southern Utah, a mere 2.5 hours from home, and backpacked 17 miles around Fish and Owl Canyons. The beauty of these canyons is no secret and we certainly saw a few other people. (Thank God, because we forgot the sunscreen.) Yet we still found an isolated campsite in our own personal amphitheater of red rock cliffs. Highlights: an ancient Anasazi granary by the side of the trail, blooming claret cup cactus, desert wildflowers, a rather friendly leopard-print frog, glimmering green potholes, natural arches, and one hairy pull-your-packs-up-with-ropes boulder problem. All that and we were back to work bright and early Monday morning. I heart the Southwest.
Monday, May 9, 2011
The spring Outside Buyer's Guide just rolled in with today's mail. As always, there's an overwhelming number of products, from gadgets to sleeping bags. Even if you're not in the market, it's good for a little geek-out drool fest. I also have two reviews—one of women's packs and another of women's hiking shoes and apparel. This is what I spent much of my free time doing this fall: wandering around the San Juan Mountains with a rotating cast of packs on my back and shoes on my feet. (Not that spending a large part of my free time getting lost in the mountains is unusual...) A big thanks to my tester helpers, especially my most steadfast and enthusiastic sidekick Ryan Huggins, a serious badass who is not afraid to bushwhack for 12 hours a day.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Last November I convinced my boyfriend Andrew to come with me on a reconnaissance trip through the far reaches of northeastern New Mexico, the one corner of the state I hadn't explored. Like the rest of New Mexico, I loved it, yet this area was different—spectacular open vistas where the Sangre de Cristos meet the plains, remote outposts with saloons that still bear the bullet holes of barroom scuffles, pioneer churches outliving their congregations at the top of high mesas, herds of pronghorn antelope crossing the road, and the remains of a blown-out volcano overlooking an 8,000-square-mile volcanic field. On a side note, Andrew and I braved tent camping in zero degrees in entirely empty state parks along the way. Brr. That particular part didn't make it into the fruit of our labor, a three-page road trip story in this month's National Geographic Traveler.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
A long time coming! A story I reported two years ago with one of my very favorite travel buddies, J.T. Leaird, finally hit print in today's Boston Globe. Check it out here. After a friend's wedding in Barcelona, we looped north through Basque country, visiting microscopic towns, tidy geranium-studded homes, the spectacular waterfront of San Sebastian, and the Guggenheim Bilbao along the way. Among many other things. Bilbao is easily my favorite museum to date—an astounding building that not only connects the art space with the outside world but also the viewer with the art in a way no other museum does. At least not any museum I've seen. If you're ever in the area, don't skip it.