This morning I set out with a couple of buddies on one of their regular adventures and was reminded of a column I wrote a couple years back about free soloist Alex Honnold. Honnold is known as the climber who eschews ropes and other protection — “free soloing,” it’s called in climbing circles.
Tag Archives: backpacking
GetBackpacking! Winter 2022
Take the winter off from backpacking?
Not hardly.
Not when you live in part of the country where you can experience a rare coastal forest escape, hike on the country’s most iconic trail, and explore a high country oasis all while enjoying the cold embrace of the season, minus the threat. Sure, it can get cold and there can be snow. But not to the extent you need extreme weather gear to survive. Rather, winter here offers a stark beauty that can be enjoyed in solitude. And if you really don’t like the “cold,” but can tolerate cool, winter backpacking at the coast offers an experience you can’t have any other time of year.
Why we backpack
Editor’s note: Next week we unveil our first half GetBackpacking! plans for 2022. This week, for the yet-to-be-convinced of the joys of backcountry adventure, we look at the “why” — Why we do this?
Some folks, even avid hikers, have a knee-jerk reaction to backpacking. To the perceived discomfort, the perceived inconvenience, the perceived difficulty. Backpacking’s sometimes negative image is, in our opinion, a perception problem.
When, where to find fall color
Editor’s note: This is a piece we run annually around this time. It has been tweaked, updated and massaged.
When it comes to fall color, outdoors types take the changing of the leaves pretty seriously.
How seriously?
Virginia has a fall foliage hotline — 800.424.5683 — that you can call for the latest breaking fall color news. Operators standing by; in our book, that’s quite serious. And, curiously, quite practical.
5 Special Spots for hiking and backpacking
We’ve been thinking about some of our favorite mountain places to explore come fall, and realized that there are a variety of ways we love to explore them. There’s the day hike: spending a day to see as much as possible, then heading home. There’s the basecamp trip: Either establishing camp in a campground or hiking in a short distance in full pack and setting up camp, then doing day hikes from there. Or, there’s the point-to-point backpack trip. Since we all explore differently, we thought, why not look at all three options? So today, we do.