WHITE RABBITS

There is a (believed to be) century old superstition that when the smoke from a campfire blows in your direction, you must repeat these words aloud to change it's path:I hate white rabbits,I hate white rabbits,I hate white rabbits.Some variations require hopping on one foot while reciting the verse. Either will make your not-so-informed friends laugh. Was anybody else taught this growing up?

Quinzee

Head on over to Winter Campers and learn how to make a quinzee and a variety of other snow shelters for the coming season:

A quinzee (also quinhzee) is a combination of an igloo and a snow cave. Quinzees are suitable in marginal snow conditions, or when a crust is not available for igloos, or when there is not enough deep packed snow for a snow cave. On the flip side a quinzee won’t last an entire winter season as do some igloos. Usually quinzees are made for 2-3 sleepers.Quinzees require a fair bit of work to complete and are usually used when spending more than one night in the same spot. If built properly a quinzee will be warmer to sleep in than a tent.

Youtube: Iris Dement and Emmylou Harris - Our TownMP3: Iris Dement - I've Got That Old Time Religion In My Heart

And We're Back..

My belly is full of quinoa, avocado and ceviche. My body is covered with bone necklaces and alpaca wool. My feet live in a new pair of custom made boots and my nose is burned from the Andean sun. My head remembers Incan ruins and Swiss friends, my wallet remembers "AMIGO, AMIGO." My pack is jammed with gifts for loved ones and my journal is still in the plastic wrap. My ass hurts from the saddle of Apu and my lungs can now breath a bit easier.To quote Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia, "I haven't got any special religion this morning. My God is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don't need any other God."It's never nice to be back from vacation, but the sun is a shining and that's okay by me.MP3: The Strokes - What Ever Happened

Grandma Gatewood

Emma Rowena Gatewood, better known as Grandma Gatewood, was the first woman to hike the Appalachian Trail. She did it in 1955 at the age of 67, wearing Keds sneakers and carrying an army blanket, a raincoat, and a plastic shower curtain which she carried in a homemade bag slung over one shoulder. 

Fjällräven + Cold Splinters Presents...

Fjallraven Outdoor Club: Breakneck Ridge from Fjällräven on Vimeo.

A couple of months ago, over several glasses of sparkling italian wine and pizza, my friends at Swedish outdoor brand, Fjällräven, and I decided to collaborate on a video project that detailed how you get to popular hiking and camping destinations around New York City without the use of a car. The first of these 8mm videos, Breakneck Ridge, is up and running above. There are many more to come, so keep your eyes and ears out for 'em.

Hull Cook

During the late 1920s and early ’30s, a small hut stood at the Boulderfield (12,750 feet) on Longs Peak in Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park. The Boulderfield is 5.9 miles into the Longs Peak hike and the beginning of the hike's most difficult portion. Guests could hike or ride horseback to the Boulderfield Shelter Cabin, spend the night in a bunk with a hot meals, and climb the 14,259-foot peak in the morning, usually by the north face, which was equipped in those days with steel cables for hand rails. For two or three years during the early ’30s, Hull Cook worked at the Boulderfield Shelter Cabin. He and Clerin Zumwalt, aka Zum, became famous for their rescues on the park's only fourteener. Hull is pictured on the left in middle picture. Each morning the guides used to shout, "Indian's a-comin'!" as they spotted the first hikers at the edge of the Boulderfield.Back in April, the Colorado Mountain Journal posted some of Hull's memoirs from his time at the Boulderfield. You can read them here:

As hotels go, ours was tiny and Spartan. We called it “the cabin.” There was no electricity and no running water, unless you ran while carrying it from the spring. There was also almost no privacy. It was a two-story structure, the upper floor accessed by a ladder hinged to the ceiling of the ground-floor room. By Hilton standards it was indeed small, only 14 by 18 feet, so the space had to be efficiently utilized. Upstairs, springs and mattresses were placed directly on the floor, three on each side of the stair hole, and above the stair hole was a double-decker single bed. This arrangement could accommodate 14 people in relative comfort, unless someone had to go to the bathroom during the night, in which case comfort might be called into question. He or she would have to stumble over fellow sleepers, descend the ladder and seek relief outdoors, presumably making the effort to follow the dark rocky trail to the distant privy. No lights. Possession of matches or flashlight was desirable even to find the place, and to obviate the need for a somewhat unsanitary old-fashioned pot, and although canvas curtains could be drawn between the beds, there would have been few people with the callous temerity to use it in such a setting of crowded togetherness. If you rolled over you were apt to find yourself in bed with a stranger, possibly not all that bad if it happened to be someone of the opposite sex.

Good Ol' Kathy Mumford

A few days ago, Kathy Mumford (pictured here) became the first woman to finish the Northern Forest Canoe Trail, a 740-mile canoe route through New York, Vermont, Canada and Maine. Along the route, she passed through 22 rivers and streams, 56 miles of lakes and ponds, 45 communities, three national wildlife refuges and more than 55 miles of portages in 62 carries.“My kids were grown and gone, I’d been laid off from a job that I loved and was sending out resumes but getting no response,” Mumford said. “So I said, ‘You know what? I’m going camping.’”The trip took 58 days, and because of the size of her boat, a 35 pound kayak not rated for anything above Class 2 rapids, and a promise to her mother, Mumford portaged around the big rapids. She also kept a journal everynight ("really just one long run-on sentence") that I can imagine will be a book soon enough. Rightfully so.Nice job, Kathy Mumford. That's pretty studly. Full story at the Bangor Daily News.

BIG BEND REGION COLORING BOOK

The Chihuahuan Desert straddles the U.S.-Mexico border in the central and northern portions of the Mexican Plateau, bordered on the west by the extensive Sierra Madre Occidental range, and overlaying northern portions of the east range, the Sierra Madre Oriental. On the U.S. side it occupies the valleys and basins of central and southern New Mexico, Texas west of the Pecos River and southeastern Arizona. The Chihuahuan has an area of 139,769 sq miles, making it the third largest desert in the Western Hemisphere and the second largest in North America, after the Great Basin Desert.Above are drawings from the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department's BIG BEND REGION COLORING BOOK, which includes Big Bend Ranch State Park, the largest state park in Texas, with over 300,000 acres of Chihuahuan Desert wilderness and 66 miles of trail. Have at it.

Anza-Borrego

Anza-Borrego Desert State Park is named after 1700s Spanish explorer Juan Bautista de Anza (also the namesake for the Juan Bautista de Anza National Scenic Trail) and from the Spanish word Borrego meaning Bighorn sheep. With 600,000 acres that include one fifth of San Diego County within its borders, Anza-Borrego is the largest State Park in California, and after New York's Adirondack Park, it's the second largest one in all the continental United States.MP3: Sugar Minott - Good Thing Going*MP3: Sugar Minott - Just Don't Wanna Be Lonely

MSR Pocket Rocket

MSR Pocket Rocket is no doubt one of the best purchases you'll ever make. The little, water-boiling, quesadilla-making 3 oz. stove has been a staple in my pack (and I'm sure most of yours) for many years, and using it is always one of my favorite parts about camping. There are few things better than getting to your campsite, setting up your tent, pulling out your Crazy Creek and finding a good flat surface so you can cook your dinner and read your book. (The Pocket Rocket and Crazy Creek Hexalite should be packaged together. They're peanut butter and jelly.) The stove is small, cheap ($30 or so), has great heat control and is as reliable as the ol' Subaru. The design is so simple, you feel like you're using something 100 years old.If you don't already have a Pocket Rocket for your summer/fall excursions, go try one out. You'll like it so much that you'll want to cook dinner on your bedroom floor when you get home from work.**In any proper "review" you're supposed to list the negatives along with positives, and if I were to do that, I'd have say something about canister stoves and below freezing temperatures, but there's no reason to think of that torture right now...