A few Appalachian Trail thru-hikers had a noisy night on the trail amid the killer storms that devastated broad swaths of Alabama and Georgia on Wednesday. It reminded me of some of the harrowing tales of beastly weather I’ve heard…
Picture the scenario: you’re pushing 50, you’re 40 pounds overweight and you’re an incorrigible couch potato. A day’s gonna come soon when somebody in position to get away with making unreasonable demands is going to lay it on the line:…
I was all set to write a post on how to create a mobile version of your hiking blog; then I discovered that if you use many of the popular blogging sites — WordPress.com, Blogspot, Tumblr, and Posterous — then…
Blog: Jeff Clark’s Meanderthals Niche: Hike reports from mainly western North Carolina, with a few diversions to the American West. Nitty gritty: Clark is a consummate hiker/geek: a retired techie whose Internet Brothers site has gobs of tech-related gems. His…
Hiking blogs are the slot canyons of the Web: they dwell in a narrow niche. While some of us glom readership from folks Googling the trails we write about, some of our most avid readers are other bloggers. So, hiking…
Awhile back I started a list of hiking and camping bloggers on Twitter, which can come in handy despite its potential for becoming a soul-sucking time sink. I talked to a guy the other day who summed up Twitter’s appeal:…
I have welcome news: our planet is going to be just fine. We’re the ones in trouble. In all the hype about “sustainability,” something seems to get forgotten: there are scads of sustainable populations of strange invertebrates living 18,000 feet…
Tonight’s American Masters episode, “John Muir in the New World,” concluded as required with an accounting of Muir’s failed quest to keep this dam from being built in Yosemite National Park’s Hetch Hetchy Valley. The leading experts agreed that some…
It’s OK to hike in the park down the street. It’s OK to walk a half-mile in the woods and call it a hike. It’s OK to take the kids car-camping in the state park and make .75 miles per…
