Category: Backpacking
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Holy snow
Central-western Montana has had an extraordinary winter, which is necessarily leading to an extraordinary spring. Massive amounts of snow means massive amounts of water, and in the last month temps have yet to get too warm (which is nice, as upper 60s feels stifling at the moment), and have been punctuated with big storms which…
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Recoating silnylon shelters
I remain a fan of silnylon shelters. Cuben remains excessively expensive, for me, and aside from higher levels of waterproofing it is hard to get excited about PU coatings, due to longevity issues. Silnylon stretches and can be made waterproof for a very long time, with the former being a still underestimated benefit in severe…
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My best time of year
At work we have three recesses a day. The kindergartners would not mind another, and from a no-window office my sense of the how the day evolves is generally driven by these three openings, which together add up to just short of 90 minutes. Some days I hardly make it out of my cave, and…
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The permit wall
Late in 2016, as I was packing my gear room, I can across a pile of backcountry permits stuffed toward the back of a low shelf. It was the sort of place which only gets organized during a big move, and is easy to put off. So I assembled them all and stuffed them in…
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No map
Over the past few years I’ve occasionally experimented with two solutions to backpacking and hiking malaise. The first is to go where there are no trails, and use animal corridors and decayed paths to make your way. This approach has resulted in a few of my most memorable hikes. The other approach is to go…
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Pushing the next button
On a few occasions last year I mentioned that, over the past decade, my happiness had generally correlated with the volume of activity, which had in turn tended to spawn more frequent and especially longer writings here. More interest has almost always meant more words. Thankfully, this is has ceased to be the case, as…
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Loving winter
There have been a few occasions in the past three months when I’ve been nostalgic for last winter in the desert; when snow lasting more than a day was extraordinary and aside for six weeks of wet north facing slickrock we could do wherever, whenever. Since right after Thanksgiving there hasn’t been a day when…
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…most of the the ingredients seem to be there
Montana history is an easy thing to get stuck into, largely because it is easy to digest in scope. Only a state since 1889, only subject to written history since the early 19th century, and to this day not the subject of extensive research, save perhaps with respect to wildlife. Our local library provides a…
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Being lost
The farther down the road we went, the more isolated we became and the whiter everything became. I wondered aloud if we were making a foolish mistake; we weren’t even experienced enough with snow to make a guess. Florangela said, “It’s an adventure.” But I kept thinking how all the roads in Yellowstone followed rivers…
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The water treatment industrial complex
Recently bio-nerd, fast guy, and friend of B&P Ethan Linck published an essay in Slate calling into question the empirical reasons behind blanket water filtration in the backcountry, writing: “The idea that most wilderness water sources are inherently unsafe is baseless dogma, unsupported by any epidemiological evidence.” Slightly more recently, clickbaiting mugwump hack Wes Siler…
Bedrock & Paradox 
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