Category: Packrafting
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The 2014 shoe report
Disclaimer: Several of the shoes discussed below were given to me, free and under the expectation of a published review, by the manufacturer. Others were purchased at an industry discount, while one was bought at full retail. Clockwise from upper left: LaSportiva Vertical K, Altra Lone Peak 1.5, LaSportiva Boulder X Mid, LaSportiva Anakonda, Patagonia…
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The 10 best packraft runs in Bob Marshall country
What a summer of packrafting it has been. Above all else, exceptional floats of all varieties have been the theme. Normally I don’t go in for lists; subjectivity makes them an absurd exercise and I intentionally do not indulge in traffic-driving techniques or cater to folks poor attention spans. The following is an amusing and…
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The Spirit of Backpacking
Where is the spirit of backpacking? Out there, of course. It’s in the soft guys in boonie hats, sitting and sweating in the middle of that steep pitch up to Ptarmigan Lake, a third of the way to their camp, on the first night of their trip. It’s the three guys with Walmart packs, and…
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Hiking with ghosts
Rob Kehrer is dead. Based on reports I assume he and the other founding member of Team Heavy, Greg Mills, hiked around the Tana River canyon and put back in on the river, where Rob was quickly flipped by a boil or whirlpool, became separated from his packraft, and drowned and/or succumbed to hypothermia before he…
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The farewell tour
Going through the lower reaches of the South Fork, down to and past Spotted Bear, I saw no one for hours. A civilized stretch of river relative to the past days, but still two hours of dirt road from anything. A raft came into view, a guy with a big hat at the hours, and…
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The long summer hike
It’s a good problem to have, but summer around here is getting long in the tooth. 6 weeks of good weather and 16+ hours of daylight each day must be filled, and inevitably energy runs low before either days or possibilities, no matter how insistent the looming winter is that all useable moments must be…
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The democratic wild
If you live near one, come August it’s impossible to not think that the American National Park system is fatally flawed. Glacier National Park, our backyard, gets around 2.5 million visitors a year. I’ve not seen a month-to-month parsing, but my guess would by that well over 80% of those folks come in the 2.5…
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Fear, hello again
Spencer and I had a fantastic run on the North Fork of the Blackfoot yesterday, one of the best whitewater runs in the Bob. So great was the fun, and so continuous and fast was the action, that this is the only photo I took all day. I first ran this stretch a long time…
Bedrock & Paradox 
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