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Guns and schools in the era of Trump
Today something entirely unexpected happened. Since last spring I’ve been a therapist in a local elementary school, something that is harder to explain than it should be. For one, I don’t work for the school district, I work for a non-profit which contracts with the school district to place myself and a partner in the…
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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…
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Loving and hating the puffy
To begin with, there is the issue of terminology; “puffy” being a plain dumb word, but it is how we refer to synthetic or down fill jackets these days, so so be it. As with most lexicological nits this one is seemingly benign, but it does promulgate a one-dimensional view of insulated jackets, a problem…
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Packraft the Bob, this year
If you don’t live around here doing a packrafting trip in the Bob Marshall is a pain. Western isn’t close to very much, the regional airports tend to be expensive, there isn’t an easy way to get to the trailheads without a rental car, and even then the number of truly good loop routes is…
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Pack materials for 2018
This post and the follow-up a year later have remained among my most popular works, and with 2018 coming into focus they are at last worth updating. Not too much has changed in the world of backpack fabrics, but time has allowed for enough clarification that a few things are worth saying again. There are…
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Concerning pack weight
There remains some confusion about how to make a backpack lightweight, and yet still functional. The simplest and best way remains to raise your own bar; get better at packing, need fewer things, need lighter things, and so forth. But this can be a hard end to maintain, as I have recently been reminded, and…
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Renewing incompetence
Five or six years ago it really became clear that this whole backcountry thing was going to be my thing, one of those very few things in my life that I would be truly good at. Acute limits to my risk taking propensity and physiology had already limited how far I’d been able to progress…
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Bedrock & Paradox 
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