Intro

This issue doesn’t have a theme, but stories of relationships predominate. A man takes his girlfriend, a relative newcomer to climbing, on a two-week big-wall ascent of El Cap. A woman wrestles with saying goodbye to her dog. A son takes his seventy-nine-year-old father on a twenty-eight-day trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. In each, adventure is both a mirror and a prism, reflecting and refracting relationships in unexpected ways.

When my mom was seventy-seven, she boarded a plane in Northern Virginia, flew west to Las Vegas, scrambled into a white camper van of uncertain dependability, and entrusted me to be her guide for the next seven days, during which we’d spend far more time on Utah dirt than county pavement. The last time she’d slept outside had been twenty years before, when I thought it would be a good idea to introduce my parents to my wife-to-be by taking them all camping in Baja. After dinner that first night on