NOLS courses are hard. My jaw thrusts downward and outward while my hands cup the sides of my mouth. “Rrreeddd tent, close your vestibule” I yell from my tent door…
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Click HERE to purchase Capitol Gorgeous, THE climbing guide to Capitol Reef National Park and Wayne County, UT. This is a small volume to big adventure and at $9.95, it is a…
Thick, pungent smoke billowed from between the two pieces of wood. First, wispy and upward in strung out curls, then heavy, grey, and everywhere. The lungs, laboring from the arms’…
Devil’s Slide rises almost 800 feet above my boyhood hamlet of Stark. As a child the deciduous forest that stretched northward across the railroad tracks from our house felt immense.…
Any time my friends and I end up at Del Taco in Las Vegas at midnight, there has got to be some sort of story. “Well, what do you want…
Editor’s Note: On the table by the window here at 616 Washakie sits a sun faded copy of Daniel Doan’s book, Our Last Backpack. It was a gift to…
The slots rise hundreds of feet upward, the narrows windy, twisty, sandy, muddy, straight, steep, flat, red, black, orange, grey, everything in between all those. These cleaving slices through the…
Author’s Note: The November 7th of 2021 marks the 25th anniversary of my father’s unexpected passing. He was 46. In the 23rd year after his death I actively engaged with…
My tears take the long way to the pillow. They trace a line over my cheek bone and down to my chin, being slowed by week-old stubble, before depositing themselves…
The pandemic reinforced my love of tea and tacos. Here is the beginning and the end to 2021’s daily grind: ~ the pot: with Andy home it is a two…
I lost Luke twice. He was my first love. I remember the tears rolling down my cheek as I wrapped my arms around him. I buried my face into his…
I have no tattoos. That story is one of lazy summer days, friendship, and happenstance. But it is not for here. Here is where I tell you what tattoos the…
“Well, I’m not sure if this is helpful” I yelled, with barely competing decibels. . . “but this is probably one of the top five worst nights I have ever…
Editor’s Note: The author lives and writes from the current and ancestral lands of the Eastern Shoshone, Northern Arapaho, Apsaalooké, and Cheyenne. His direct ancestors landed at Plymouth Rock in…
Editor’s Note: I wrote this piece, taken from an interview with a NOLS alum, close to two years ago. The interview was done in the process of writing a NOLS…
March 27th 2021–I rose from below a juniper tree that morning. It would be hard to say that I slept or I awoke. Those didn’t come easy on this course. …