We took our final trip together in the fall of 2018. I was 28 with no job and no money. She was 14 with no suspension and no reliable air conditioning. As an undisciplined freelance writer earning tens of dollars a month, I could no longer...
Sitting in the shade of a makeshift awning made out of an old vinyl billboard, we’re poured into our camp chairs like melted cheddar. The visceral desert heat wilts any ambition to move from our slumped positions. Icy drinks and breezy conversations are about all...
My wife, daughter and I were waiting out the midday heat in a casita in the southern Mexican city of Oaxaca when a text lit up my phone. Two of my Tahoe friends were planning a large group ski trip to Japan, and they asked...
Urumqi, China. Ever heard of it? The city boasts a population of more than 3.5 million, yet I had never heard of it until landing there in late January 2020. Its airport serves Altay, an even more remote prefecture in the far northern reaches of...
Sometimes it’s not about the destinations we visit so much as the in-between places along the way—even when those places are in the middle of nowhere....
Concrete chalk. That was the texture of the snow on Taos’ West Basin, a steep and slippery swath of terrain at New Mexico’s biggest ski area. It was also the venue of the next day’s big-mountain competition, which I was in. Hard as heck, but...
Sitting on our gigantic backpacks, our shoulders feel like Celtic knots, painfully twisted. Ten hours of ski touring carrying 50 pounds of winter camping gear has turned my wife Allison and my once-supple torsos into tough, overcooked meat. Daylight is fading fast, but we have...
Canada’s Whistler Blackcomb is epic. Just two hours’ drive north of Vancouver airport along the scenic Sea-to-Sky Highway, the British Columbian ski resort is impressive by any measure....
Mount Rainier rises like a wayward iceberg from the green sea of moss, fir and ferns that drape both sides of the White River. Towering 10,000 vertical feet above us, it is a disorienting and intimidating glacial behemoth creased and crinkled by yawning crevasses and...
I sometimes envision the highways and off-beaten paths that crisscross Nevada’s vast landscape as contrails intersecting in the sky. They are expansive, multi-dimensional, and lead to endless and sometimes unchartered corners of a map. Many of these roads were built with dreams of finding silver or...