Category: Backpacking
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A trail quiz
First, a quiz: which of the following trails have seen human work and construction, and which never have? Second; animal trails are very important for backcountry walkers. They always form the most efficient route from one place to another, the trick is finding enough of the animal mind to know what and where those places…
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Essential Skills: Garment zipper replacement
Replacing a zipper, generally in a full zip jacket, is one of the most common and thus, most essential serious gear repairs you’ll do. Serious in this case being roughly defined as requiring more than tape or glue to manage. The zipper on my 4 year old Haglofs Pile hoody recently died, providing a good…
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The Maah Daah Hey
The US, and I imagine the world, needs more trails like this. Strictly speaking the MDH has national park caliber scenery, as it passes through two units of a national park. Theodore Roosevelt is an obscure national park, getting as many visits in a busy year as Glacier does in an average June, and probably…
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SWD Big Wild by the numbers
It is tough for me not to be effusive to the point of utterly lacking objectivity about this pack, which Superior Wilderness Designs sent me (for free) to evaluate. Design and construction are polished, clean and professional without being showy, and represent the absolute best of the burgeoning made in the US cottage backpack industry. …
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A mystery classic
I didn’t even write about this one two years ago which, on reviewing and editing the footage, was serious restraint. One of the better alpine and packraft loops in the Bob, easily doable in 3 days. See if you can guess what and where.
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Retirement
A few months ago I spent a day snowboarding. It did not go as I had hoped. The reversion to being a kid, and flailing on and off the lift and down the hill, was immediate. I slid into trees, off on slope angles to where I did not want to go, caught an edge…
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The B&P mentoring program
Donald Trump has shown, more starkly than almost anything else one could imagine, how deeply structural racial bias and discrimination has been and is, and how it remains in many or even most cases the pivot point for social power in the United States. After the past four years we know more about this, which…
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Patagonia Stretch Terre Planing hoody
I’ve written an enormous amount about windshirts over the past decade, their importance in a layering system, and the associated subtleties. To recap; outdoor clothing in general and wind layers in particular have over the past decade explored the range of breathability and overall weather protection in a comprehensive fashion. Specific to windshirts, the frontier…
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Windshirt dry times mini-study
A crucial attribute of windshirts, particularly for backcountry (which is to say, multiday) use is moisture retention and drying speed. If the most common, indeed only criticism of windshirts as a concept is that they can be viewed as redundant relative to a waterproof hardshell, the rejoinder to that criticism is that unlike a hardshell,…
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Jailhouse Ruin
This has to be what fear looks like. Walking down Bullet Canyon things would have opened up, a wide sandy plain thick with fat pinon and juniper trees, a tight band of tall cottonwoods and willows snaking along the dry wash. The north wall opens into a series of budding side canyons, that run back…
Bedrock & Paradox 
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