You can’t always want what you get

Posted on July 22, 2026 by cdan4th
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2026 was set to be a year of big adventures for other people. Kid 1 was heading to Europe on a six week solo tour of various cities and mountains. Kid 2 and Spouse were bound for a week sailing a boat around the Caribbean as part of a Scout group. Which left me doing… what exactly? With the possibilities wide open, I decided to go back to my roots and spend a week with just me, my backpack, a long trail through the woods, and a head full of thoughts.

I did a lot of backpacking in grad school, mostly on the Appalachian Trail for anything from a long weekend to a week or more. It was my nearby wilderness escape and I would sneak out in the dead of winter or the height of summer, sometimes with friends, but often solo. I loved the single-mindedness of it, the linear problem solving, and the freedom to do or do not as I chose. The mid-Atlantic mountains tended toward easy logistics and plenty of civilization-adjacent hiking. It was easy to walk out the door and spend a while re-threading my head. Yeah, let’s do some of that again!

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Backpacking Gear Roundup

Posted on July 4, 2026 by cdan4th

It’s 2026 and I am not the man I once was a quarter century ago… when it comes to backpacking and many other things. Gone are the days when I could lug a 40+ pound packs wearing heavy boots, but gone are the days when I needed to. Gear is much better and much lighter now (which is good because gone are my youthful knees and back!) and my attitudes toward preparedness and comfort have changed.

Backpacking has come and gone in my life, but I’ve always been fascinated with gear choice as an optimization problem. Ten years back I swung pretty hard into the super-ultralight realm experimenting with alcohol stoves, sil-nylon tarps, hand-made quilts, and fitting everything (barely!) into a 30 liter pack. It was a fun experiment, but I decided that a little bit of comfort was worth a few extra pounds on the back. Then I ended up doing most of my backpacking as part of heavily-laden Scouts trips. Now that it’s the “year of the backpack”, I’ve gotten back into long distance trekking on my own terms an in my own style.

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Too much, too little, just right?

After a lot of fun work, my kit is dialed in nicely. Here are some of the choices I’ve made and rationale behind them. It’s been refined over a hundred miles of trails this season already and I’m pretty happy with it. Your mileage may vary.

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Operation Weminuche

Posted on June 21, 2026 by cdan4th

Here’s the mission: get off the train at 2:30 on Friday at a remote mountain trailhead. Hike forty miles with 8000 feet of elevation gain to a different remote trailhead by Sunday at 10:30 to catch the next train and you’re SOL if you miss it! Forty miles, 44 hours, Colorado’s largest and remotest wilderness… Hell yeah where do I sign up?

It goes without saying that I was all in the moment Matt mentioned it. I’m generally the crazy plans guy, so it was a special treat to have Matt come up with such a cool, aesthetic line, do all the planning, ticket purchasing, and logistical work. All I had to do was load the pack, drive the car, and toe the line. Let’s go!

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Lost and Found 2: Too lost, too found

Posted on June 7, 2026 by cdan4th
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I love it when a plan comes together! Like a finely-crafted moon mission, I moved from early-season gear (and body) shake-downs to bigger expeditions in search of a goal. The eventual season finale is a week of fast-and-light backpacking this summer on the Colorado Trail, but in this episode, I take what I learned from my one-nighter in the LCW last month and put it into multi-day summer-season practice. Can I still throw down some big days in the mountains? How much food and fuel do I actually consume out there? Is my second time in the LCW just as pretty as my first?

This time, the route was the big 38-mile, 7500′ gain “outer loop” I didn’t end up doing last time. It the northern edge of this loop was the same Lost Park section I traversed on the south side last time. And it turns out that, while the last trip hinted at the wonders of the Lost Creek Wilderness, this one had it all dialed up to eleven!

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Lost and Found

Posted on May 10, 2026 by cdan4th
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2026 is to be the Year of Backpacking! I’m going back to my roots: long-distance, solo hiking. It’s been far too long since I hit the trail for more than a day or two, carrying everything I need, with my eyes on the horizon a hundred miles hence! However, before the main event in July, I’ve planned a series of early-season shakedown hikes to take advantage of the historically low snowpack; shakedowns for the body, for the gear, and for the mind.

First up, an ambitious late-April, two-night, 35 mile jaunt in the Lost Creek Wilderness! One thing lead to another–the trip slipped a week when I wasn’t feeling great on the target weekend, then we got the biggest snowfall of the season (better late than never?) and things were pushing into the busy time of May with the end of school, graduations, and other craziness. Two nights and 35 miles turned into one night and 25 miles, but at least it was getting out. Maybe there’d be snow. Whatever! Just get out the door and deal with whatever comes!

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Quick Hit: Early Season Overnight

Posted on March 29, 2026 by cdan4th
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Backpacking in Colorado… in March? In most years that would be a full winter outing but not this year. Anyway, I was itching to try out some new gear, bought in anticipation of Big Things this summer, so I threw that gear and more into a pack and headed for Lost Lake.

The trail was clear for the first 1.5 miles but with continuous packed snow above that. The lake was nearly melted out and mostly the campsites were clear. Unsurprisingly, I had my pick of sites. Cool! Tent pitched, dinner prepared, bear bag thrown, moose observed, inner peace sighted in the far distance (just past the moose, no doubt).

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The Year of the Core Shot – a 2025-26 ski season retrospective

Posted on March 27, 2026 by cdan4th

The 2025-26 Colorado season was the least impressive in living memory. The fact that I’m writing the traditional end-of-season ski retrospective and it’s not even April is telling.

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It started out well enough; the first resorts opened in late October and I managed 18 birthday laps at Arapaho Basin in celebration. But a full month later, they still had only the single White Ribbon of Death. We held out hope that the December would bring big dumps of snow… and then January… surely February is when things will turn around, right? It’s well known that March is Colorado’s snowiest month, right, right?

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Walking each other home

Posted on January 3, 2026 by cdan4th

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.

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2025: An Unexpected Journey

Posted on December 31, 2025 by cdan4th

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.

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End of the Ride

Posted on October 25, 2025 by cdan4th

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.

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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.“

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Plan B for Backpacking

Posted on August 10, 2025 by cdan4th

Backpacking, 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.

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Does this look like a “mini adventure” to you? (photo by Steve)

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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Irish Roving

Posted on July 28, 2025 by cdan4th
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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.

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