Let’s face it. Modern life can be overwhelming, and sometimes you just want to get away from it all. Like, really far away. Like, so far away that the government can’t track you remotely via your mobile device, and the screams of potential, innocent victims can’t be heard amidst the towering pines and mountain spires of the hinterlands. If you’re on the hunt for some true wilderness R&R, my ultimate packing checklist for backpackers will set you off on the right foot.
There’s a slogan that followed me everywhere I went in Quito, “Ecuador is all you need.” It was plastered to the sides of green tourist buses and graffitied across the crumbling, stucco walls of historic buildings in old town, and it’s true. Ecuador is one of the most varied, vibrant, and adventurous countries I’ve ever been to. The best part? It’s easy to do on a budget. Here are a few tips I wished I’d known before I hopped on a plane to South America. Continue reading
People often ask me where I get my ideas from or what fuels my endless enthusiasm for the outdoors. The truth is, I stand on the shoulders of giants. In the information age, we are so fortunate to have countless images of the best mountains and trails the world has to offer at the tips of our fingers. Here are a few of the women I admire who make my heartbeat quicken on the days I feel despondent.
The walls were moving, and I didn’t know where my guide was.
I was squatting, pants-down, over a pit toilet within a crudely constructed turquoise shed somewhere around 15,700 feet in the Andean foothills of Peru, trying desperately not to puke. The walls appeared to be having a rave of their own, swaying rhythmically to and fro like one of those inflatable arm waving men you see outside of used car dealerships. Mind you, the walls were not actually alive. They were static, as ordinary outhouse walls tend to be. I was the one collapsing. I was trapped in the psychedelic hellscape that only severe altitude sickness can bring, and I was terrified.
Every Wednesday night in Los Angeles, a gaggle of misfits and cycling nerds gathers at 9pm outside a nondescript donut emporium nestled deep inside the dingy side streets of Koreatown. They are not sugar-gluttons or drunken party cruisers. Rather, they come together each week for the simple task of a bike ride.
“I wish I remembered more of it.”
The feeling stuck in my brain like old gum to a shoe as I tried to conjure up details from the day’s climb that broke all my records, bruised my heart, and took me to 16,818 vertical feet above sea level.
Last Thursday afternoon, I bit into a bright pink apple, feeling the familiar crunch as my teeth sliced through its delicate skin. The texture was waxen at first with a cool grit the color of eggshell hiding underneath, and I paused as each flavor spread wide across my tongue. First tart, then floral, then an accelerated array of sweet, sour, base, and plant before I swallowed and began again. I paused, affixing my gaze on the small, oval sticker that bared a barcode and a cheap cartoon logo, and I wondered, “Where did you come from?”
“How much higher do you think that outcropping is from where we’re sitting right now?”
Justin was faded, nauseous, and swaying in the mid-day heat of the Eastern Sierra when the words fell out of his mouth. My head felt like an over-inflated balloon. Dumbstruck, I tried my best at a civil response, “Fuck. I don’t know… Maybe 50 feet? Is this not the summit?!”
Let’s face it, you’re on the trail so many weekends out of the year that you have a pet honeybee named Myrtle who lives behind your right ear and a heart with John Muir’s name on it tattooed across your left tricep. You knit sweaters from the leg hair you shave once a year before your family’s Christmas party, and you know how to create a fierce smoky eye out of nothing but a spoonful of mushroom spores you found in the forest. You are ethereal. You are muddy. Your favorite Beatle is George’s sitar, and you legally changed your middle name to Moab when you were 17. This one’s for you, sugarplum.
On this fine June evening, I’d like to raise a glass (of champagne, PBR, kombucha, cherry limeade, or whatever else is in your merry cup) to the odd jobs. To the jobs that got us through and the jobs we barely got through. To the kettle-clanging coffee mavens and the primped and pastied pole goddesses: this one’s for you.
