I love mountains and whatnot, but I also love gear! So if you’re looking for tales of my latest adventure, or even nostalgia about past adventures, you’d best skip to one of the classics. But if you’re in the mood to hang out in my garage for a little while, I have some thoughts that need to be aired.
People talk about the “quiver of one”: a mythical single piece of equipment which can do everything. Usually this is in reference to something like skis or bikes, both outdoor focuses famously lending themselves to a garage full of specialized gear. Hybrid bikes in the 1990s were supposed to be quivers-of-one, but failed laughably; they were too heavy for efficient road riding, too wimpy for moderate singletrack, and not comfy (or stylish?) enough to be a townie cruiser or errand bike.
Ever since I came home from college in the big city and noticed that I’d grown up in an incredible place full of mountains and forests and trails which I hadn’t really paid much attention to up to that point, I’ve wanted to get out there and see where that trail went and what was beyond the next hill. Backpacking was my main thing from about 1995 through the first few years of the 21st century; it was a cheap escape from the rigors of grad school and a way to reset the spirit from too much city living. It gave me something to do (route planning, gear fiddling) in my free time and gave me a sense of accomplishment I could put on the wall (the increasingly filled in map of the Appalachian Trail) separate from the nebulous progress I was making on my research career.
The amazing Paradise Park! Purgatory Pass and the heinous descent therefrom are the low point in the middle of the ridge.
Twenty years pass and I’ve taken up other hobbies, recreations that can get me most of my wilderness fix in single-day expeditions thanks to the pressures of duties to work, family, and friends. Don’t get me wrong, I love where my life has gone and the multitude of hobbies I’ve picked up along the way. Nor have I completely given up backpacking; I usually get out for one to two trips each year with one or the other kid on Scout trips which is awesome. But it’s been a long time since I really pushed the envelope and did something big and overnight for myself.
Iceland is… impossible to sum up in a single word or phrase. Iceland is ludicrously beautiful, but only if your idea of beauty runs to vast, stark spaces with surprising waterfalls, jagged cliffs and wide fields covered in plastic-wrapped hay bales. Iceland is a small country, but it’s still a pretty big island. Iceland is choked with history, but only if you are willing to look for it. Iceland is expensive, but you get a lot for the money.
Iceland is amazing. That comes as close to true as anything I can think of.
On a more personal level, Iceland is the third international trip we’ve made in a single year! The first was last summer’s big intro-to-foreign-travel trip to see family in Nova Scotia. When that went so well, we committed to a Big Cultural Adventure in Central Europe in Prague and Vienna over New Years. Completing the trifecta, we swung the pendulum all the way to the other extreme with a week in the barely-populated geological theme park that is Iceland.
It’s impossible to drive more than ten minutes without finding something ludicrously gorgeous like this.Continue reading →
Durango is a seven hour drive from my house; a significant bit of travel. So when Kid #1 got accepted into a week-long mountain bike training program at Ft. Lewis College in Durango, we really had no choice but to stay for the whole week down there rather than doing the long drive twice. Such trials we have to endure!
Not counting the once 20 years ago we drove through Durango more-or-less without stopping and one long weekend holed up in a cabin in the woods in Pagosa Springs during the height of the Pandemic, we haven’t spent any time at all in southwestern Colorado. Filling a week with things was a challenge because there were so many options to narrow it down from. We even managed to relax and rewind a little bit.
It’s the middle of May and the trees are fully leafed out, so I guess the ski season is done. Time to write up the details for the two people who care about this kind of thing: myself and that one guy who is mysteriously suuuuuper into everything I write (hi Bill!). Anyway…
This season had the potential to be totally epic. I got laid off in late October and had all sorts of “funemployment” time on my hands. Unfortunately, it was not an early-snow season so I spent November riding bikes instead of chairlifts. When the snow finally did come, we were preoccupied with affairs over-seas and working on finding a new job.
To my surprise, the toughest thing about a month-long streak of aerobic exercise was not the exercise.
For the past handful of years I’ve undertaken what I call Operation Active April; 30 minutes or more (usually more) of aerobic activity for each day of the month. It’s a way to shake off the winter torpor and get me back into some semblance of running shape for the summer outdoor season. Usually it involves a mix of running, skiing, and biking and usually I give up on it after a few weeks when Life gets in the way of things. But this year, I saw it through to the end.
It was time to take the family on a real vacation; something really far from home. We went to Canada in the summer of ’23 and it went really well; time to step it up to the next level!
The requirements were
1) cultural and foreign (but not too foreign) 2) different from our usual visiting-family or outdoor-focused vacations 3) fun in the winter 4) a place where none of us had been before
So we went to Prague over New Years. And Vienna too. And it was pretty great.
Why Prague?
Why not Prague?! By all reports, Prague has just as much history, cultural importance, and beauty as Paris but without the crowds. Various family members had visited and described it as “cozy” and “magical”. Sounds perfect! I started studying Czech, bought a couple of great guide books, and started planning the Big Family European Winter Vacation.
What to say about 2023? It was character-building? What doesn’t kill you makes you strong? Probably all of these are true, and yet it’s hard to look back at the year and not be more than a little glad it’s over. Yet it’s also time to be proud of some of the things that happened, sometimes by necessity.
Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity and privilege to visit a lot of incredible places and see many amazing sights. The longer you live somewhere, the better you get to know it (which is great!) but the harder it is to find something that truly knocks your socks off. Backpacking in the Great Sand Dunes with the Scouts… now that was definitely something!
On the Scout Troop Adventurousness Scale, Troop 78 is pretty far toward the epic end of the range. At least for what you can legally do with a set of middle- and high-school aged suburban kids in America, we can get pretty wild, but the November 2023 outing was definitely on the ambitious side, even for us. The logistics of getting a troop of seventy-odd Scouts (ages 11-18) and adults up into the Dunes, in the winter, is pretty impressive just on its own. There are Scouting rules and NPS rules and what we finally arrived at was a dozen “dune patrols” comprised of four scouts of similar ages and genders and two adults. In addition to heavy winter-weight sleeping bags and clothing, food, tents, and regular backpacking gear, each scout carried four liters of water (with adults carrying six). Plus each patrol had brought a tarp and poles to rig as a wind shelter and many heavy “sand stakes” to hold down tarps and tents in the soft sand and potentially hard wind.
Fast forward four years and Joe, now a strapping teen and one of the senior Scouts in the troop, is itching to do it again. In fact, he was so motivated, he co-organized a similar camping-and-mountain-climbing trip for the entire troop; booking campsites, researching routes, and leading the whole climb. Instead of 12 people on the summit, we got 38!
All these years of living in a place that people want to visit (Colorado), a place with plenty of awesome things to keep us local on vacations, means that we tend to vacation locally. There are plenty of places in the USA we haven’t taken the kids never mind the rest of the world. Beyond the occasional drive up to Montreal to catch a flight, I never ventured outside the country until I was 17, but when I did, it made a big impression! My kids are rapidly approaching that same age and we are privileged enough to be able to afford a little educational travel. So the time is ripe! Let’s put those passports to good use and see a different corner of the world!
My globe-trotting sister and her family more than make up for what other families lack in terms of introducing their kids to exotic places. After years in Africa and other exotic spots, they seem to have finally run aground in Nova Scotia. From the perspective of most Americans, Canada is only kinda-foreign, so it seemed like the perfect first foray out of the country for the kids (and first in a very long time for their parents). Plus the Maritime Provinces have all sorts of things we don’t have in Colorado, mostly summed up in the category of “Ocean stuff”. Off we went for ten days of international adventure!
It’s a mixed blessing when the toughest part of the adventure is finding parking at the trailhead. And yet that’s the situation I found myself in as the leader of the annual New Scouts Backpacking Trip (aka, Micro-backpack) for my Scout troop this summer. The thing keeping me awake at night was not whether four eleven-year-olds (and their variously inexperienced parents) would be able to handle two nights of backcountry camping. Nor was it whether the weather would be so bad we’d need to pull out a day early (which is what happened last time I lead this trip). No, it was whether we’d be able to find parking at 8am on a Friday morning at the end of four miles of 4WD road in the Indian Peaks Wilderness.
The Outer Sanctum 
