I’ve reached the stage in life where I’ve been to more funerals recently than weddings. In the past two years, I’ve lost three different friends far too young. First was Ken who we lost at 62 to an undiagnosed heart condition. Then was Bryan at 61 who succumbed to brain cancer early last year. Yesterday I heard about a horrific mountain lion attack on a woman hiking in Colorado’s Front Range and a few hours later found out that the victim was my friend Kristen, aged 46.
2025 has been a lot of things–you hardly need me to tell you that!–but one thing it definitely was for me was marked by excursions in unexpected directions. Interspersed amongst the A-list, centerpiece adventures were a lot of smaller side quests and diversions reminding me that the point is the journey not the destination.
What didn’t happen didn’t happen and what did, did. Fun was had and personal challenges were faced. We get another year older and another year wiser and another year slower and another year richer in terms of stories to tell and dreams to dream.
Four years ago, in the just-post-pandemic world, we had a teen starting High School. He was plenty smart, but introverted—the kind of kid who’d done better than most with the online schooling in middle school. So we told him he had to pick some sort of extracurricular club or team to try his first year in high school. He’d had fun mountain biking, so he joined the school mountain bike team. I’d had fun mountain biking too, so I joined as well It turned out to be a good choice.
We both started riding with the team; two practices a week after school. The team’s season is in the fall and comes with four races at various locations in the state. “Joe, do you want to do any races?“
“No, that sounds like a lot of pressure. I’m happy just riding at practices.”
“If you’re joining the team; you should do at least one race.”
“[grumble grumble] okay, fine, sign me up for the first one I guess.“
Continue readingBackpacking, like much of life, is an exercise in serial problem solving focused down to the essentials more than usual. You’re out in the wilderness and either have what you need or don’t, you go forward on the trail or back, you camp here or you push on and maybe find something better. Distilling life down to a set of do-or-do-not choices is refreshing and the 2025 Mini Backpack was a perfect example of this.
As has been previously established, there’s nothing mini about the Mini Backpack. It’s a five-day/four-night backpacking trip for our Middle School scouts we do on odd-numbered years in some Colorado wilderness area. Four years ago, Kid 1 and I raised the bar to what was assumed was an unreachably-high level with an epic trip in the Flattop Wilderness. This year was arguably bigger still.
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Ireland! The Emerald Isle! Eire! The Old Country! Few places hold as much mystique and ethnic identity for so Americans as this medium-sized island in the North Atlantic. Thanks to the mass emigrations of the 19th century and after, it’s said that there are more Irish in America, or at least people that consider themselves Irish, than in the Republic itself.
My family is not Irish in any way. We can’t trace our lineage to the old country and, in fact, we are probably descended from the bad guys in all the stories throughout Irish history. So why Ireland then? My extended family was looking for an interesting place to visit to celebrate my parents’ 80th birthdays, some place to explore together which was interesting to all of us, not too exotic, and which we’d never been before. Most importantly, it was a place to get all ten of us under the same roof for the first time ever! To be honest, Ireland had never been near the top of my travel wish list, but I was certainly willing to give it a shot. Family first with exotic foreign tourism to fill in the crevices. Let’s see what all the fuss is about with this small country and why it casts such a big shadow across the Atlantic.
Continue readingSometimes it turns out that your “A Race” is just a race.
In a change of pace from my usual trail running focus, 2025 has been the Year of the Bike. All the time and energy I’d have normally spent running was instead spent biking… and it was a nice change! The reason for all that training was the Leadville Silver Rush 50 mile MTB race.
My progression from running to bikes is well established thanks largely to my son’s high school team. Now that they’re old enough, Joe and his friend Kai wanted to do a big “adult” race and Silver Rush was picked as the most likely option. So I joined in the fun as well. Six months of training went very well and, like ultra-running training in years past, produced some really top-notch spring and summer fun as well. Going into Silver Rush weekend, I was feeling good; the bike was dialed, my legs strong, and my skills as good as they were likely to get.
Continue readingWinter has a way of making you write cheques your body may or may not be able to cash when summer comes. As I was recovering from a shoulder injury in January and feeling bored (no skiing, no running, big sadness), Kid #1 decided it would be fun to enter one of the big, challenging mountain bike races along with his best friend. So naturally I decided it would be a great idea to get in on the fun as well. So we both signed up for the Leadville Silver Rush 50 mile MTB race. Fifty miles, 7000 feet of elevation gain, topping out at 12,000’. What could possibly go wrong?
There are other states in the USA which are bigger by area, but no state looms larger in the American psyche than California and no state is broader in what it has to offer. I’m told that California is what people from other countries think of first when they picture “America” (plus maybe New York City).
So okay, let’s go visit “America”.
The main goal of the trip was college touring with Kid #1. Since several of his top prospects are on the south end of the state, we planned a week-long venture to SoCal. But we couldn’t spend an entire week doing campus tours, so we mixed it equal parts with touristy stuff and the long drives required to do anything in California.
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Thirty years ago this month, fresh from finishing an exhausting four years in an elite liberal arts school, having gone 0 for 7 on grad school applications, three friends went on a backpacking trip in the mountains above my home town. I’d grown up in the incredible White Mountains of New Hampshire but hadn’t really appreciated them until moving away to the “big city” for four years, but that’s another story. The relevant thing here is that I wrote up a quick description of the hike and put in on my web page. That original post is preserved here: https://www.swarpa.net/~danforth/wj/carter.html.
I wrote up a few more “trip reports” over the next couple years and gathered them together into a web page called The Wilderness Journal hosted on a server run then (and still!) by some college friends. The world wide web was brand new and everyone was still figuring out how to use this whole paradigm. Eventually, this sort of thing would come to be called a “web log” which was immediately shortened to “blog”. Blogging became a real thing in the late 1990s when Justin Hall (who was two years behind me at university and I knew peripherally) started his Links from the Underground and normalized oversharing of personal experience on the internet. Probably someone has written a Master’s thesis on how this sort of phenomenon lead directly to modern social media.
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As the diligent outdoor hipster I am, always chasing the latest recreational craze, I figured I should see what the “Spirit of Gravel” is all about*. So I signed up for a gravel bike race with a bunch of my friends. Fortunately for me, the difference between a race and a ride with friends is a matter of whether I have a number pinned to my person and if I know the friends ahead of time or whether they’re just people I ran into on the course. I’m in no danger of winning anything, even last place, so the difference between a gravel race and a gravel ride is entirely academic.
The race in question was the Mad Gravel Hemi-50 in Elbert, CO, about half an hour east of Castle Rock. Despite being considerably east of I-25 in the “eastern plains”, it’s a really lovely part of the state. The race started and ended at my kids’ Scout camp and there are there are lovely forest and rolling hills and killer views of Pikes Peak and the southern Front Range. Why not? I signed up, paid extra for a campsite the night before, and set about rounding up friends.
Continue reading“Your X-rays look great and your range of motion and strength are getting back to where they should be,” said my doctor. “You’re cleared for all activities.” Rarely has someone I barely know said something so nice to me!
As usual, it’s been a time. The fall was tumultuous and the holidays their usual mix of stress, chaos, and bonhomie, and I was just getting down to business of getting serious about fitness again. My New Year’s resolution was to “say yes more often”; get out there and do stuff, not make excuses. Winter is a great time for running along with cross country skiing and the usual dozen or so ski trips.
Life, obviously, had other plans…
Continue readingAs years go, 2024 was my longest, chronologically at least. Not only was it a leap year with one extra day, but we started 2024 eight hours ahead of my usual Mountain Standard Time.
So, what is there to say for a 366.33 day long year? It was a year of changes, for sure. It started gleefully unemployed in Central Europe and ended grimly, busily employed in the Rocky Mountain west. There was good news and bad news, both personally and in the wider world. But we carry on nonetheless and the little adventures over the year are what make the year worth living and remembering. Here’s some of what deserves to be remembered.
Jan 1 – Lean Wien Tourism Machine – I try to run in any new state or country I visit, so this was my showing-the-flag in Vienna as the sun went down on our last day. Palaces, cathedrals, and a nice bunch of parks
https://www.strava.com/activities/10492787823
The Outer Sanctum 