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Tom Diegel’s Gallivants (and Occasional Rants) Posts

Packrafting Bridge Creek and Stehekin

Back in March I got a message from a good packrafting buddy Tim Kelley, who told me he got a permit for tromping around the North Cascades in July.  Not really knowing what my July schedule was, and in the vein of planning schedules around good trip invitations I said “sure!”  Many years ago on the way home from an early BC hut trip to Portland we stopped in the Methow Valley to do a…

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Packrafting the South Nahanni region – Part II

Here is the remainder of the tale of our Nahanni packraft adventure; part I is here. To catch up, we started at Flat Lake and floated down the Little Nahanni to the South Nahanni, where we took out and hiked up and over some decent mountains to an unnamed tributary of the Broken Skull river, where we hiked a little ways upstream to a nice hot spring and the base of a big climb onto…

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Packrafting the South Nahanni region

If you like to paddle rivers, there are fortunately a lot of choices (something that’s sometimes difficult to remember in the great Southwest desert!) and even if you’re into rivers, it’s hard to keep track of all of them!  So I didn’t feel too bad a few years ago when my old pal Greg Hanlon said “we gotta go do the Nahanni!”  huh?  Where’s that?  “In the Yukon, or maybe the NW Territories.  We gotta…

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Remembering Jeremy Nobis

Wayyy back in about nineteen hundred and ninety three a few of us in Portland who dundered around playing pickup ultimate frisbee decided it was time to play in a tournament, so for reasons I don’t remember we decided to drive all the way to Sun Valley, ID for our first one.  The bad news was that we quickly realized that unorganized pickup was a woeful excuse for tournament level play, but the good news…

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Fun over the years

A few years ago I put up a blog post I deemed “Embracing my inner dork,” which in and of itself was pretty dorky, but the truth is that I’ve thought about that a lot over what is now almost nine years and over that time I’ve edified my dork-ness to an even greater level, and it has worked out fine.   That said, even then I didn’t relay a deep, dark secret, because….it was…

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Svkiing Svalbard

We have the good fortune to live near a lot of great skiing, though like a lot of avid skiers who live in Salt Lake City it’s not a coincidence that we live here.  The combination of terrain that varies from wild to mild and is easily accessible, the quantity and quality of snow, and easy access to a relatively livable city that doesn’t have the trappings or cost of living of a resort town…

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Riding the Arizona Trail Part II

Okay, it’s been a bit longer than I anticipated to wrap up this scintillating tale, but wow…..it’s been snowing in the Wasatch! So between skiing and reconnecting with friends we practically haven’t seen since the end of last winter I haven’t taken the time to write. For reference, here is an image of the AZT in its entirety: The whole trail is just shy of 800 miles – and includes a hike across the Grand…

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Arizona Trail Bikepack – part I

Even though Ashley and I had an incredible spring and summer of riding our bikes around Europe, we seemingly have an endless capacity for bike tours, so when our old pal Benj Wadsworth invited us to join him and a few others for an Arizona Trail ride this fall we jumped at the chance. The Arizona Trail stretches from the Mexico border to the Utah border for almost 700 miles and has become an early/late…

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Italy’s Gavia Pass

One of the great appeals of Europe to cyclists around the world is the plethora of amazing passes to ride.  Most have been made famous by the Tour de France:  the Galibier, Tourmalet, Ventoux, Alpe d’Huez, and others practically became household names in the Lance era.  For Americans, the lure of passes is really only satiated in Colorado and California, where Euro-scale passes like Cottonwood, Independence, and Loveland challenge the ‘Rado-ans and California’s “Death Ride” that…

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