Six summers ago, a guy named Fred sat down across from me at a picnic table near Wonder Lake in Denali National Park, the end point on the bumpy 5 ½ -hour bus ride on the park’s only road. We ate lunch and talked about our respective trips to Alaska, where we were from, the [...]

“Bushwhacking is like my third favorite thing to do in the outdoors, behind crotch-deep postholing and getting hit in the head by falling rocks,” I said, shoulder-deep in desert foliage, hands raised like a man fending off a swarm of bees, walking forward in sloppy, almost-balanced steps. I am not a fan of bushwhacking, but somehow [...]

You love snowboarding. Or climbing. Or mountain biking. You’ve been doing it for so long, you can’t remember what your life was like without it. But your new boyfriend/girlfriend doesn’t — yet. So you need to teach them. Here are some tips to guarantee they’ll never understand you or want to go with you, and most likely [...]

I sit on the porch, waiting. It could go either way, because Aluco is part dog, part wolf, and one side will win out depending on the day. Today is a good day. Aluco steps toward me and lightly touches me with his black nose. Slowly, I extend my hand and pet him. I know [...]

I told my friend Dan I was getting tired of having long hair, that I often fantasized about trimming all of it off and leaving just a quarter-inch, fantasized about 90-second showers, no messing with ponytails under helmets, knots, conditioner, paying for haircuts. Dan, a curly-haired man himself who has more than once used the [...]

The Sunday night before my first day of fourth grade, I rolled my black-and-gold Huffy Thunder 50 BMX bike up to the retaining wall on the east side of my parents’ driveway at the end of Crestline Drive. It was about 20 inches high, three railroad ties stacked on top of each other. I had watched [...]