We may skirt a full-fledged hurricane this weekend, but it will be wet and blustery. What does that mean for your weekend adventuring?
It means you should try it vicariously, at least if you live at the coast or in the central Piedmont. With wind and rain now forecast, at least periodically, through mid-day Sunday, what could be better than encamping on the couch with a good adventure, either in video or book form?

Video
On the ubiquitous Netflix, you will find:

• Jaws (1975) Plan this one early in the day — and after you take a bath.
• Into the Wild (2007) If you’ve missed out on the Chris McCandless cult, here’s your chance to catch up.
• The Road (2009) Not the type of adventure most of us envision.
• Deliverance (1972) See above.

• 

  The Way (2010) If you’re contemplating the El Camino de Santiago.

• Touching the Void (2013) Based on Joe Simpson’s classic tale of survival.
• Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (1985) Hey, we’ve got a thing for 1950s cruisers.
• Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) You kids need to meet Pat Boone.
• Antarctica: A Year on Ice (2014) An internet reviewer thought it focused too much on winter. Hmm.
• Valley Uprising (2014) The well-told story of Yosemite’s first dirtbag community; move it to the top of your list

More of a reader, are you?

Since we first stumbled across it, we’ve been slowly pecking away at Outside magazine’s canon of epic adventure tales. It’s divided into 18 categories; following, is our favorite selection from a few:

The World’s Great Places  | Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, by Tim Cahill. An Outside editor and long-time columnist, this is a collection of some of the Livingston, Montana, writer’s more … eclectic observations. From the jungles of Peru, where he searches for the ruins of a lost civilization; to the cloud forests of Rwanda, where he follows gorillas; to the icy waters of Alaska, where he kayaks among orcas, Cahill is remarkable for his powers of observation, even more so for his ability to explain, often with great humor, those observations. Vintage Books.

Journeys to Hell |  A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, by Eric Newby. Says Outside: “Near the end of this epic mountaineering misadventure in Afghanistan, Newby passes a group of lepers. “That’s about all we’ve got left to catch,” comments his ever-wry sidekick, Hugh. Written in 1958, Newby’s story of dysentery, ill-fitting boots, and failed climbing is a comic masterpiece.”

Discoveries of America | Great Plains, by Ian Frazier. Frazier, a writer for The New Yorker, is “a rare satirist who understands the difference between real humor and hip smugness,” Outside accurately notes. “He drives 25,000 miles up and down and across the often overlooked region between Montana and Texas. His account, which take us from the spot where Sitting Bull’s cabin stood to a house once terrorized by Bonnie and Clyde to an abandoned Cold War command center, is equal parts absurdity and profundity.” Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Natural History | Coming into the Country, by John McPhee. Ever wonder who moves to the back country of Alaska? McPhee answers that question brilliantly in this 1977 look at Alaska environmentalism in the mid 1970s. A sample: ”I’d kill the last pregnant wolf on earth right in front of the president at high noon,” declares one of the many unforgettable characters in this even-handed look at environmental issues. Noonday Press/Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Manifestos | Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America’s First National Park, by Alston Chase. Says Outside: “Chase, a leading ‘optimist,’ infuriated everyone from environmentalists to Reaganites with this hand grenade of a book. An attack not only on National Park Service policies but on the popular ecological beliefs that inspired them, Playing God in Yellowstone may make you mad, but it will also make you think.” Harcourt Brace,

Nature and Culture | Wilderness and the American Mind, by Roderick Nash. Even if the concept of wilderness doesn’t engage you outright, this look at the country’s ever-evolving feelings toward untamed nature is a comprehensive and fascinating insight into man and his relationship with the natural world. Yale University Press, $18.

And if there’s a break in the cloud, you can use the following resources to help find an adventure near you.

The post This weekend: Water, water (and some wind) everywhere appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

“Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by the great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty bourgeois of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.”

* * *

Like us on Facebook and get health, fitness and outdoors news throughout the day.

GetGoingNC.com

Promote Your Page Too
 

The post The motivation to soar appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

A few years back I was nearing the top of the Mount Mitchell Trail when I came across a group of youngsters intently examining the balsam firs that begin appearing above 5,500 feet. As they probed about, an older fellow explained what they were seeing. The gentleman had a professorial look; not surprising, I soon discovered, considering these were forestry students from N.C. State. I lurked in the shadows and got a free education on the challenges of life above 6,000 feet in a Southern Appalachian forest.
Sure be great if you didn’t have to go to school to get this kind of education, I thought.
Last night, I discovered, you don’t.
Before a packed house Tuesday evening at Quail Ridge Books & Music in Raleigh, Steph Jeffries and Thomas Wentworth discussed their just-released guide, “Exploring Southern Appalachian Forests: An Ecological Guide to 30 Great Hikes in the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia” (UNC Press). It’s a scientific look at the forest written for a lay audience.
Jeffries and Wentworth are uniquely qualified to write “Exploring Southern Appalachian Forests.” As N.C. State professors — she in the Department of Forestry, he in Plant and Microbial Biology — they’ve been exploring these woods for years. On one outing with students several years ago, Jeffries yelled to Wentworth: “We need to write a book about this.”
“Exploring Southern Appalachian Forests” is peppered with insights that can’t help but make a hike all the more enjoyable. A sampling:

• Hope for the balsam fir. Most folks who’ve poked around much above 5,500 feet are aware that the balsam fir population has been taking a hit from the balsam wooly adelgid since the 1950s. Wentworth showed a shot of skeletal balsam fir tree trunks atop Clingman’s Dome to illustrate the point. Then he showed a shot of thriving balsam fir saplings in the same area. It’s too soon to tell if the balsam firs are coming back, he said, but it’s a hopeful sign.
• Freeze your branches off. If you’ve ever hiked an exposed mountaintop and wondered why the trees only have branches on one side, there’s good reason. In winter, Jeffries said showing a slide of one-sided trees atop Grandfather Mountain, ice accumulates on the west side (from which most winter storms move in); the added weight snaps off the branches.
• Life’s a beech. Hiking the mile-long Summit Trail at Elk Knob State Park, I’ve often wondered why the ramrod-straight trees near the trailhead are so different from the gnarled ones up top. Turns out they’re both beech trees, but the ones near the top are  exposed to howling winds and rugged weather, and end up being shaped by their environment.
• Fire good. Everyone fears a forest fire, right? Humans, perhaps, but not certain trees. The table mountain pine, for instance, relies on periodic fires to release its seeds from its resin-sealed cones. Human efforts at fire suppression over the years are threatening the pine’s ability to reproduce.

In addition to great insights, “Exploring Southern Appalachian Forests” provides the practical advice — including trailhead directions, GPS coordinates, trail length and difficulty — to plan and execute a hike on the 30 trails covering more than 100 miles in the book.
A great addition to your guidebook collection if you’ve ever stopped and puzzled over why a tree appears to be growing out of a rock. FYI, that tree would be a yellow birch, which can take root in the thinnest of soil — a bed of moss, for instance.
It’s in the book.

* * *

Like us on Facebook and get health, fitness and outdoors news throughout the day.

GetGoingNC.com

Promote Your Page Too

The post Sylvan Sleuths Explore, Explain Southern Forests appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

According to the weather prognosticators there’s a good chance we won’t be able to venture out for the next couple days, nor will we have power. To me, that translates to the JetBoil with a full canister of fuel, my headlamp with a fresh threesome of lithium AAAs and my iPad stocked with several hours worth of adventure reading.

Here’s a look at the adventure stories I’ve stocked up on my iPad. Feel free to let us know what’s on yours.

“Breaking the Waves,” by Ariel Levy (The New Yorker, Feb. 10, 2014,). Diana Nyad made a name for herself as a distance swimmer in the 1970s, swimming around Manhattan Island, swimming from Bermuda to Florida, trying to swim from Havana to Florida. Then, at 30, she retired and didn’t swim a stroke for 30 years. What happened in the interim and why, at 60, did she decide to try the 111-mile Cuba/Florida swim again? Find out here.

“Thicker Than Water,” by Tad Friend (The New Yorker, Feb. 10, 2014). In the same issue of The New Yorker is the tale of a fishing trip off Nantucket gone bad and the pathology of a fishing family that nearly cost a fishing party its lives — and ultimately saved them. Read the story here.

“Into the Pines,” by Patrick Michels (Texas Observer, Feb. 5, 2014). Jeffrey Holliman’s woes were mounting. He owed one ex-wife $75,000 in back child support, another $50,000 for the same. He owed a former employer $140,000 in court-ordered restitution for money he’d embezzled, and he had a running tab of $60 a month for his probation. “Holliman stayed with his brother for a while and then with his son, who was 23 and earned his living at Arby’s,” writes Michels. “But Holliman realized he was a nuisance. He felt trapped. So he left.” With only a tarp and a knife, he walked into the woods to live in September 2012. His story of survival, complete with frequent break-ins, can be found here.

“Tales from the World Before Yesterday,” a conversation with Jared Diamond (Edge, Feb. 12, 2014). Jared Diamond is professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles and author of several books, including Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,; the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the widely acclaimed Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies, which is the winner of Britain’s 1998 Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize; and his just-published The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?. Here, he sits down with John Brockman “to listen to this master story-teller hold forth on the windows to our past, whether the topic is rare birds, ‘primitive peoples’, birth practices, the lives of the old, war, or the characteristics of all human societies until the rise of state societies with laws and government, beginning around 5,500 years ago.”

“GPS and the End of the Road,” by Ari N. Schulman (The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society, Spring 2011). As a hike leader, my favorite — and most frequent — question: “What’s the address to the trailhead?” Often, this question is asked of a trailhead in  a national forest or, better yet, on the doorstep of a wilderness area. More and more, map reading is becoming a lost art. “The decline of driving, and of finding our own way around, means that we are losing a broad set of skills and practices,” writes Schulman. Find out here about the implications of our map-reading deficiency.

“River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey,” by Candice Millard (2005, Broadway Books). The best way to jump into a great adventure tale is by diving in with four or five hours to spare. Roosevelt may have been one of our more notable Presidents, but above all he was an explorer. When his comeback bid with the Bull Moose Party failed in 1912, Roosevelt embarked on the adventure of his life, to find the headwaters of a Brazilian tributary feeding the Amazon. It was a journey that nearly cost Roosevelt his life. Download the book here.

* * *

For more tales of adventure

Longreads This online aggregator of the long form finds gems of all stripes worldwide. To find adventure stories, search “Adventure.” Log on here.

The Outside Canon. The folks at Outside magazine have compiled a list of their favorite adventure books and broken it down by categories, which range from Climbing, Bicycling and Fishing, to The World’s Great Places, Modern Masters and Young Turks and Journeys to Hell. Find the canon here.

* * *
Like us on Facebook and get health, fitness and outdoors news throughout the day.

GetGoingNC.com

Promote Your Page Too

The post Iced in? Tuck in with a good read appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

1. How Crazy, Drunk Swedes are Stirring Up Endurance Competition: The dirt (and freezing water) behind Sweden’s premiere event, ÖTILLÖ

“Swimrunning” begins this article in Outside Online by Eric Beresini, “is quickly becoming Sweden’s hottest endurance phenomenon, thanks in no small part to an event called ÖTILLÖ (prounced ah ‘till ah), or “island to island,” in English.”

Intrigued by the concept, though I’m not sure a frigid fjord is where I’d give it a try. Basically, it’s a mix of swimming and running, from island to island, across island and island. A new twist in the adventure racing world.

Read about it here.

2. Life After Cancer: Rediscovering the Backcountry

Kate Dowden became an avid outdoors person in college. Then cancer sent her and her body back to square one. She fought back, emerging with an even greater lust for getting out. Think you don’t have time to get out over the holidays? Dowden will make you realize you must grab your opportunities when you can.

Read about it here.

3. 10 More Reasons the Pilgrims Came to America

“Everyone knows that the pilgrims left England in order to escape laws enforcing worship under the Church of England,” begins this Thanksgiving leftover. “But the truth is, that’s only one of the reasons they hoisted their tights, buckled their hats, and set sail across the Atlantic. Yes, they left as an act of dissent—but also as an act of descent. Here are the other important reasons the pilgrims came to America.”

Our favorite reason? No. 3: “No roads, just tons of singletrack.” Worthy of a quick laugh.

Read about it here.

4. The Pursuit of Happiness: Launch the new year with these simple, life-improving strategies

Striving for a happier 2014? Science — including some conducted this year at UNC Chapel Hill — says you can make it happen by following some simple recommendations. Fourteen, in fact, suggests this article by Mike Steere.

Read about it here.

5. Weekend Cabin

Weekend Cabin is a somewhat regular feature of the online Adventure Journal that appeals to those wistful moments when you dream of  a little place of your own way out in the woods. This week’s cabin at Lake O’Hara, Canada, is a pricey weekend escape, most are about more permanent diversions.

Read about it here.

The post No time to play? Then read about it appeared first on GetGoing NC!.