How We Did It in the Good Old Days

When I first started looking at gear for this past summer’s hiking trip in Colorado, one of the items that immediately jumped out at me were bear canisters – – – something that hadn’t existed when I had last gone backpacking in the early 1990s. Back then we would store our food in “bear bags” […]
Lessons learned from Ten Days in Bear Country

Before our recent ten day trip to Rocky Mountain National Park, it had been almost thirty years since my buddy Dick and I had last slept outside in the woods. While so much has changed over the past three decades, the fundamental pleasures of being outside all came back: coming upon an alpine lake after a long, dusty hike; seeing the Milky Way in the middle of the night; being surrounded by wildlife in their own habitat.
A Middle-Aged Flatlander Trains for Bear Country

Okay, if I’m being honest, I’m not technically a flat-lander, as my town sits at 358 feet above sea level. Plus we live on a hill at roughly 600 feet. And if I’m being super honest, I’m not middle-aged anymore, unless my life expectancy is somewhere in the vicinity of 125 years, which is a […]
Fear of Packing

My last backpacking trip was just shy of 30 years ago. (See the photo at the top) A lot has happened since then, both in the evolution of backcountry gear, as well as the gradual erosion of my hairline. And so, when my buddy Dick and I began planning our summer backpacking trip to […]