If you want to drive Route 66, the mother road, skip the interstates and seek out the original alignments—the National Park Service maintains a Route 66 corridor map at nps.gov/subjects/travelroute66. And if you’d rather read than drive, William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways remains the finest meditation on American back roads ever written; it’s been in print continuously since 1982.
Contributors to Road Trip Summer include Sam George, longtime surf journalist and filmmaker; Leath Tonino, frequent AJ contributor and author of The Animal One Thousand Miles Long and The West Will Swallow You; Craig Childs, author of The Wild Dark, House of Rain, and many others; Chandra Brown, writer and founder of the Freeflow Institute; Brad Wieners, director of copy at Patagonia and formerly of National Geographic Adventure and Outside; Nick Paumgarten, staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the memoir The Intangibles (Penguin Press, November 2026); and Greta Rybus, photojournalist based in Hiram, Maine, whose work focuses on climate and culture.
Swimmer’s itch, for the curious and unafraid, is caused by the larvae of parasitic flatworms that normally infect waterfowl and aquatic mammals. When they can’t find a duck, they’ll burrow into human skin by mistake, die almost immediately, and leave behind an itchy rash. Aren’t you glad you know? The good news: You can’t pass it to anyone else, and it clears up on its own. The better news: Toweling off vigorously right after you get out of the water dramatically reduces your chances of getting it. The best news: It’s rare in cold, clear, moving water, which are the swims worth seeking anyway.
Amanda Monthei is a writer and glacial river enthusiast who splits her time between Missoula, Montana, and Bellingham, Washington. She hosts the Life with Fire podcast and has written about wildfire, water, and the outdoors for the Atlantic, Washington Post, and others. @amanda.monthei
Forest Woodward is a filmmaker and photographer based in the Pacific Northwest whose work explores family, landscape, and the quiet spaces between. @forestwoodward, forestwoodward.com
Steve “Doom” Fassbinder and his wife Lizzy Scully run Four Corners Guides out of Scullbinder Ranch in Mancos, Colorado, offering packrafting instructional courses and swiftwater training, as well as bikepacking, packrafting, and bikerafting trips throughout the Southwest and beyond. Doom is one of the country’s first Level 4 American Canoe Association packraft instructors. fourcornersguides.com, @doom_fassbinder
Stephen Eginoire is a photographer, writer, and longtime Doom co-conspirator based in Durango, Colorado. His work has appeared in Adventure Journal, Smithsonian, and The Advocate. @eginoire_photo
The West Coast Trail on Vancouver Island runs forty-seven miles between Pachena Bay and Gordon River. Between May 1 and September 30, Parks Canada limits hikers to seventy-five per day. Reservations open each January and fill quickly. Why such a short season? The rest of the year, the coast is too storm-battered and creeks and rivers too swollen to cross safely. Roughly a hundred hikers are evacuated each season—most from foot and ankle injuries sustained on the ladders, boardwalks, and mud. Pack light, pack dry, and study the tide tables before you go. pc.gc.ca/en/pn-np/bc/pacificrim/activ/activ9
Max Lowe is a filmmaker, photographer, and writer based in Bozeman, Montana. His father, Alex Lowe, one of the most accomplished alpinists of his generation, was killed in an avalanche in the Tibetan Himalaya in October 1999. Max’s documentary Torn (2021), about his father’s death and his family’s life afterward, premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and is now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu. @max.lowe, maxlowemedia.com
Heather Hansman’s Fierce Country: The Untold Story of Three Women Who Ignited America’s Love for the Wild was published by Hanover Square in June 2026. Her previous books include Downriver: Into the Future of Water in the West and Powder Days: Ski Bums, Ski Towns, and the Future of Chasing Snow. She lives in Durango, Colorado. @heatherhansman, heatherhansman.com
Horace Kephart’s Camping and Woodcraft, first published in 1906 and revised through 1917, has never gone out of print. It remains the most thorough English-language guide to old-school woodcraft written, covering everything from ax sharpening to bear-meat preservation. Used copies of the original two-volume set turn up regularly online for reasonable prices.
Martin Hogue is a landscape architect and associate professor at Cornell University whose work examines the infrastructure of American outdoor recreation. Making Camp: A Visual History of Camping’s Most Essential Items and Activities was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2023. His earlier book, Thirty-Four Campgrounds, is a study of standardized campground design in the American West—and which AJ also excerpted. martinhogue.net
Gary Snyder turned ninety-six in May 2026. He still lives at Kitkitdizze, the homestead he built in the Sierra Nevada foothills above the South Yuba River in 1970. The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations, 1952–1998 is still in print and is the best single-volume introduction to his work. For a deeper dive, track down The Practice of the Wild (1990), Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996), and Turtle Island (1974, Pulitzer Prize).
Leath Tonino is a frequent AJ contributor who lives…Leath, where are ya, these days? Our man in the outback refreshingly has no socials—find him right here, in these pages.
Tom Killion is a California printmaker whose Hokusai-influenced woodcuts of the Sierra, the coast, and Mount Tamalpais have been collected in several books, including The High Sierra of California and Tamalpais Walking, both co-authored with Gary Snyder. His prints can be purchased at tomkillion.com.
Self-drive safaris are possible—if not always easy—across much of eastern and southern Africa. Namibia and South Africa have the most developed infrastructure for DIY travelers; Kenya is harder but oh-so-rewarding if you’re willing to navigate the rough roads. The Overlander app (ioverlander.com) is the standard crowdsourced resource for campsites, fuel stops, and border crossings across the continent. Rental companies like Roadtrip Kenya, Bushlore, and Safari Drive provide rigs with rooftop tents and full camping kits; expect to pay $150–$250 per day.
Brianna Randall is a writer based in Missoula, Montana, who drags her family on adventures around the globe in the name of research. briannarandall.com
Dirty Gourmet has been publishing camp-food recipes since 2010. Mai-Yan Kwan, Emily Nielson, and Aimee Trudeau all live in Southern California and all grew up camping with their families. Their cookbooks Dirty Gourmet: Food for Your Outdoor Adventures (2018) and Dirty Gourmet: Plant Power (2023) are published by Mountaineers Books. The recipes in this issue are drawn from Dirty Gourmet.
As always, Three Square recipes are plant-based. Replacing animal products with plants is among the most effective individual actions a person can take to reduce their carbon footprint—a 2023 study in Nature Food found that vegan diets produce about twenty-five percent of the emissions of high-meat diets.
41 issues. 10 years. Independently owned. Printed on 70lb uncoated paper with a soft-touch cover, solar-powered, and shipped in a brown paper envelope. Free domestic shipping.