IT’S NOT EASY running a new independent publishing imprint dedicated to wild nature when wild nature itself calls. Talk about distractions! There are a thousand and one details I ought to be taking care of to make certain that The Earth Beneath My Feet doesn’t sink without a trace when I launch it on
WINTER HAS RETURNED to the foothills of Colorado’s Front Range, as it so often does this time of year. Mid April? Spring? Hah! With flakes wafting down and cold nipping at one’s exposed digits you’d barely know it. Which made it the perfect time to share a night in the hills with Igloo Ed. Igloo Ed is
Or, The Unexpected Benefits of Sleeping Without a Tent. ONE OF MY goals this year (aside from successfully publishing The Earth Beneath My Feet) is to sleep out at least fifty-two times. That’s once every week on average. Fifty-two mountain nights. As quests go, it should be easy, right? Once upon a time it would
The location wasn’t anywhere well known or especially scenic. It was merely a rustic little cabin perched beside a modest little brook, a tumbling watercourse similar to many thousands right across Colorado. At first glance it looked like ‘just another mountain stream splashing across a few ordinary gray rocks‘. Nothing special. And technically, that was
IT WAS A fairly typical spring week along Colorado’s Front Range: snow one day, warmth the next; clear one moment, cloudy the next. As winter ebbed into spring and then slipped back into winter each day brought something new. For a wanderer on foot, it was just about perfect. Despite a busy week I
I’M A LITTLE LATE with this blog… but that’s okay: the snowstorm it covers was a little late too. Storm ‘Xylia’ (and who else dislikes the naming of regular weather systems as though they are hurricanes?) trundled through seven days ago, dropping almost two feet of snow on Golden – but for a while it
TWO WEEKEND’S AGO I camped in Colorado’s Mount Evans Wilderness. To say the February night was cold would be an understatement. Sure, it wasn’t Himalayan or polar cold, but the minus five Fahrenheit (minus twenty Celsius) I recorded INSIDE my tent wasn’t tropical either! For me, it teetered right on the edge of ‘uncomfortable’, a
I WAS ON assignment this week… well, on speculative assignment. A photographer friend kindly suggested my name to a prominent Colorado magazine. They were looking for photos to illustrate a ‘how to’ feature on winter camping and wondered if I had any. Sure I did – plenty. Far too many perhaps. Snow camping shots from
ON THE WAY back from my recent quinzhee stay I meandered by Brainard Lake. In summer the location can be horrendously busy and the atmosphere far from wild, but on Sunday February 14, with the temperature at minus twelve Fahrenheit (minus twenty-four Celsius), and snow burying the land, and no one else about, it wasn’t