There are so many great options in the United States to choose for your next adventure. So let’s narrow it down a bit and look to the mountains. Mountain towns are fun: enthusiastic outdoor scene, hidden gems, local breweries, and culture. Each town has a unique personality and once you figure out which one matches…
If you’ve never tried backcountry camping, we’re here to get you stoked about it! So you love camping (but only in a car!) or perhaps you’re a pro at tent camping, but only at a site. Either way, we all agree that it’s hard to beat an evening spent swapping stories with friends around a…
Ah, the family road trip. A summer tradition and rite of passage for families across the nation. Audiobooks, music playlists, backseat squabbles, and calls of “Are we there yet?” and “I have to go to the bathroom” add to the mayhem (er, magic). Traveling by car offers SO many benefits—like being able to stop along…
From Montana’s Livingston Range to the Lechuguilla Desert of southern Arizona, the U.S. region known as the Mountain West is brimming with top-caliber hiking destinations. Narrowing down a list of 10 standouts is no small feat, but we took a stab at it anyway, choosing from the eight states that make up the U.S. Census…
Gretchen Pardon was one month and more than 270 miles into her Appalachian Trail thru-hike when she realized she had to leave the trail. It was March 23, less than two weeks after the World Health Organization had officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic, when she walked into the city of Hot Springs, NC expecting to…
Ah, life on the trail and in the mountains. It’s beautiful, it’s challenging, it’s…whoops, not supposed to go that way!? If you love the outdoors, you’ve undoubtedly run into scenarios where your adventure hasn’t gone exactly as planned. You forget to bring an essential piece of gear, wildlife intervenes in unexpected ways, or the weather,…
Getting your kids out into the backcountry with you can be one of the most rewarding experiences you can have as a parent. Hiking by day and reading bedtime stories (by headlamp) in a tent by night will create fond memories of exploring the outdoors. That being said, the first time out is the make…
After a few days in the great outdoors, the last thing you want to do when you finally get home is tackle the task of cleaning your gear—we get it. But, as any outdoor enthusiast knows, gear is pricey stuff—and that’s if you buy it once. However, putting in just a little bit of time…
From the North Cascades and Great Basin borderlands of Oregon, Nevada, and Idaho to the most obscure depths of the Greater Yellowstone and the boreal waterways of the Upper Midwest, plenty of sparsely populated and wild places remain in the contiguous United States. We’re lucky enough to still have headwater basins, desert canyons, and anonymous…
There are two truths about duct tape during a thru-hike…