It’s 9:30 on a Friday night, and I’m dozing into the sweeping panorama of some David Attenborough Planet Earth documentary when my phone sputters to life, vibrating amidst a chorus of chirping by both the device and the leopard seals of Antarctica. Continue reading “No news is good news”
The National Park Service turns 100 years old in 2016, and dirtbags nationwide are finding creative ways to commemorate the NPS Centennial. I, on the other hand, lack artistic sensibilities, and am thus marking the occasion in the same way I celebrate everything else: by eating. Here’s the second installment.
The National Park Service turns 100 years old in 2016, and dirtbags nationwide are finding creative ways to commemorate the NPS Centennial. (My favorite so far is the Dirtbag Diaries’Milepost series.) I, on the other hand, lack artistic sensibilities, and am thus marking the occasion in the same way I celebrate everything else: by eating. Without further ado, then, I present the next installment in this series about things I’ve eaten in national parks.
Question: How do you make dehydrated soup appetizing?
Answer: Hike until your companion’s head appears to be a bucket of fried chicken, and then hike three more miles. You are now ready to eat dehydrated soup. Continue reading “Find Your Snack: Great Sand Trap”
When, at long last, I spotted the Colorado River from my perch atop the Poison Spider Mesa, I waxed poetic to my new friend about the singular pleasure of a Milt’s malt, and how I believed I was finally ready to take my relationship with Milt’s to the next level: Would I finally take the plunge and order tots AND onion rings?
In 1987, the New York Giants beat the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXI, and Giants quarterback Phil Simms kicked off what has become perhaps one of the best-known phrases in marketing history.
“I’m going to Disneyland!” he exclaimed.
Thanks to a tragically short attention span, I don’t really follow professional sports, and I’m certainly not one of those steel-trap folks who can tell you sport-trivia from decades before they were born. But this phrase rings true with me. Continue reading “Ode to a Cheeseburger”
“The living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.”
—Edward Abbey, 1968
A fine layer of red dust covers everything in the tent. It’s the same scene I imagine would greet campers waking up in the vast red desert on the surface of Mars, were they lucky enough to survive a windstorm there.
I unzip the door and thrust my head into the landscape outside the tent. The vista from here is similarly Martian: gargantuan red cliffs tower overhead; craters two, three, four thousand feet across fall away from the red dunes of fine sand across the mesa. It is eerily silent.
The only distinguishing factor—all that stands between us and the Mars rover, it seems—is the series of scrappy juniper and sage bushes dotting the landscape as far as the eye can see. Squatty, hardy, and with a low center of gravity, they appear to have withstood last night’s dust bowl better than we have. Then again, it’s taken them untold generations to get it right.
my alaskan odyssey 