In Conjunction With OutsideTV.com Three weeks from today, I’ll be flying to Ethiopia. I’ve been training for trip. I’ve been aqua jogging. Actually, I just had to stop aqua jogging. I was over-training with the 12”-wide water-flotation device. In my defense, I was just trying to keep up with Astrid, the 65-year old woman with a hip and knee replacement. At … Read More
Bigger This Time
Believe the hype, drink the cool-aid, make the trip. That’s my motto this month. I didn’t start it. My friend Sara did. Actually, an intuitive did. Or, to be precise, my decision to go see an intuitive. A month ago, while driving through the dark streets of Bozeman, I called Sara in Bend. We’d both lived together in Boulder a … Read More
Getting it Anyway
A Blog in Conjunction with Osprey Packs. Check out their site and great stuff atospreypacks.com. Climbers can, as a rule, break rules. We expand our youth, our shoulder stamina, and, most commonly, our seasons. How many people do you know who go crack climbing in shorts in January? Ice climbing in puff jackets in June? Sport climbing in bikinis February? … Read More
Hoarding the Collection
It takes two people 94 days to use 36 rolls of toilet paper. This is pure science. This is my life. Or it is give-or-take the two half rolls I left behind in North Conway last week. My friends Jim and Sarah came over on my last night in New Hampshire to load my van for me. They each went … Read More
Terminal Effervescence
I started skipping winter without knowing it, a few years back. Today, 1.5-inches of rain into the New Hampshire afternoon, I’m making up for what I missed. The poodle has to go outside to go to the bathroom, and I promised him I’d take him once the rain let up. That was three hours ago. I’d let him out to … Read More
Common Denominator
The trouble with having a blog is a sudden desire to take basic elements like your decision to go to Africa with shoes that suddenly feel too small, how to fix the squeak of your van with a wooden spatula, the death of your grandmother, the unexpected appearance of antivenin five months after you needed it, and an utter sense … Read More
Left, Right in the Road
Last week, I left Jackson. I’d lived there just long enough to have a hard time leaving. I’d lived there just long enough to call it a home, though, to other more stable people, it seemed a stop on a quest for home. Sure, I lived in an unfurnished house on No Name Alley while strangers called my home in … Read More
Calling Shotgun From the Other Side of the Sea
My dog Osito’s breath smells like a combination of dead chipmunk and poop—even though I know he has had neither in the past three days. I’ve been watching him non-stop. It’s how I make up for being gone. I landed back in Colorado last Friday, spent all day at a memorial service on Saturday, got a migraine Sunday, and drove … Read More
Going Local
I-70 stretches 449 miles across Colorado. I’ve been plugging away at this stretch of highway for thirty years. It houses a portal to every memory I have. Somewhere in my mind I think that I will have finally grown up when I can drive I-70 without a combination of sweat, tears, and laughter in an empty car. But it isn’t … Read More
Appalachia Merge
Travel has a way of smashing your life together and making you earn the fall-out. I’m on a plane, again—this time from the southeast to home. I’m back on tour and just spoke, got sandbagged, and took a flu shot to the left shoulder all in three days in North Carolina. I like the southeast. The air feels good, the … Read More
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