Ahnu Mendocino Hiking Boots: Separation Anxiety
This story is about footwear. And emotion. It’s not about the passion young women supposedly feel for $450 stilettos. No. This is about the abiding, nuanced appreciation one feels for certain hiking boots. The ones that feel right from the first moment. The ones that reach out to you, that don’t build a bond so...
Outdoor industry flexes its nicely toned muscles
Look who’s throwing its granola-fed weight around. The 4,000-member Outdoor Industry Association is threatening to pull an important trade show from Salt Lake City unless Utah stops its plans to horn in on millions of acres of federally protected lands. A lot of money and a lot of land is caught up in this debate....
Again: pack the essentials. And no more.
There are three dark emotions that can attend the end of any long hiking trip. The first is interpersonal: I swear I’ll never again set off into the woods with that whiner. The second is gear-related: how can someone in good conscience sell a tent/boots/shirt with seams that pop apart under my gentle/frantic/angry tugging? The...
Mother Nature’s drive-through
Can it be that Americans prefer to enjoy the outdoors from the climate-controlled womb of their cars? That’s one way to read recent stats from the National Park Service, as relayed by USA Today. Overall, visits to the parks are up, but the time spent in each park is down by about 15 percent. In...
Gnarly olds keeping water-sports industry afloat
Age and water sports do not mix. Sure, you might see the occasional mat of oiled gray chest hairs on the beach. Or a lock of blue hair escaping from a swim cap at the deep end of a pool. But serious water sports—surfing, kayaking, diving—are too extreme for most older bodies. And there’s the...
So close to going so far
The 4,600-mile North Country National Scenic Trail, which spans the upper tier of American states from New York’s eastern border to North Dakota, is the nation’s longest trail and one of its least traveled. The AP claims only 12 people have hiked it end-to-end, probably because about half of it runs alongside roads and long...
Gear videos are a mostly justifiable time-suck
When you’re outdoors, gear isn’t everything. It just enables everything. Good gear usually equals good performance: it lets you go farther, faster, with less exertion. It also, often, embodies admirable design. And it’s reliable, which matters always and especially in sports where an equipment failure can mean injury or death. Gear also gives you something...
Americans spend more on the outdoors than on pharmaceuticals
Here’s a little factoid from the Outdoor Industry Association’s latest report on the economic impact of outdoor recreation: Americans spend a lot more on bicycling gear and trips ($81 billion) than they do on airplane tickets and fees ($51 billion). And here’s another: Americans spend almost as much on winter sports ($53 million) as they...
Glamping: return to nature without touching it
We suspect the glamping bubble is about to burst. Why? Because movie stars have climbed on the bandwagon (as witnessed by the recent McConaghey-Alves wedding) and (the surest sign that a trend is in freefall) glamping apparently showed up on one of the Housewives reality shows. On the other (manicured) hand, most days we get...
Summer’s here and the time is right for dreaming about skiing
Included in the news that Colorado’s Echo Mountain was up for sale—we can’t give you a price because it’s going to be auctioned—was this nugget: the state has 140 abandoned ski areas. Turns out these ghost resorts have their own website…as do ghost resorts in other states, including Alaska and New Hampshire. And a book....
Saturday Mash-up: May 19, 2012
Like the other photos for Saturday mash-ups, this one is picked not for its relevance but just because we like it. It’s a photo of a “black ice growler from a recently calved iceberg closing in on the shore at the old heliport in Upernavik, Greenland. Such black ice growlers originate from a glacial crevasse,...
You’re over 50, you’re outdoors, and it’s Friday
Old people have occult skills for opening bottles of beer. Chalk it up to experience, cunning, and a stubborn insistence on opening that bottle of beer dammit even when there isn’t a reasonable tool at hand. But they are too worldly to use the tricks of younger folk. They don’t use their teeth; they know...
