While generally I love fall, I have often said that the best fall season is when it’s warm warm warm….and then the switch is flipped and it starts snowing, and thus it is winter. This keeps the trails and mountains still accessible for hikes and runs pretty late and then builds up a decent snowpack quickly that hopefully will enable some snowpack stability. But the truth is that my ideal scenario rarely happens; more often…
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The folks at American Whitewater have been kind enough to indulge me by publishing a series of articles about packrafting in their 2020 issues. As a result, there’s no doubt that both of the people who read the articles are charging out and buying packrafts as we speak! According to the editor of the magazine I’ve said all there is to be said (he clearly doesn’t know me very well!) and this will be the…
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A few years ago I wrote a blog post I audaciously called “The Art of Conversation”, which no doubt plagiarized the title of some book and in which I talked about my perception of how to have valuable conversations (in fact, after I wrote that sentence, I googled it, and indeed, there is a book! Maybe I should read it…) Since then I’ve not only thought about conversations a lot, I’d like to think I’ve…
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In the spring of 1980 the Pacific Northwest was all abuzz about Mount St Helens. Our local snowcone of a mountain: was coming to life with small eruptions that left ash streaks that lay vivid against the late season snowpack. It was fun and interesting and a good reminder that our volcanoes were only dormant, not dead, though having crawled up Mount Hood the prior year (it took our group something like 10 hours to…
3 CommentsMany moons ago, at the beginning of the era where kayaking seemed to be exploding in popularity and some idealistic lads and lasses thought that they might be able to make a living paddling rivers, I went to the Kern Fest; an annual river festival in Kernville, which was The Rendezvous Spot for the surprising number of river lovers in SoCal, and for a week in the spring, also a magnet for people from all…
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This year the editor of the venerable American Whitewater Journal has been kind enough to indulge me (and the rest of the vast packraft world?) by letting me write a series of articles about packrafting. It’s been a really fun project so far. The first introductory/history article is here, and the second (using the River of Return trip as an example of what a packrafting trip can be) is here (starting on page 24). The…
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In 2007 I had the good fortune to go to the Wind River range’s famous Cirque Of The Towers to climb with my friend Marc Appling, and it was a week I’ll never forget. Despite the fact that Marc was a guide in the Tetons and spent his summers dragging gumbies up climbs, he was gracious enough to spend a week with yet another gumby in the Winds, dragging me up the biggest and best…
2 CommentsIt’s been over 10 years since the SLC and Jackson communities lost Marc Appling to suicide. I paddled the Bear River last weekend and went past this waterfall and remembered Marc finding the rubber ducky there. Marc wasn’t necessarily a “name” in the kayak world, but I felt like he shoulda been given his history, so I wrote a remembrance in the Fall 2010 American Whitewater Journal.
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After 25 or 30 miles of mostly shuffling on our skis through the Absaroka mountains (and occasionally actually “skiing!” it was a treat to be in our boats floating along. We purposely put in on Thorofare Creek where the gradient backed off dramatically; like a lot of drainages in the intermountain West it was pretty continuous and not too difficult, but there were a lot of blind corners and -again, like many intermountain creeks –…
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