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“If you’ve got the warm gear, you’ve got it made.” This was the mantra that got me through many of my early winter camping experiences in the wilderness areas of Kentucky and Tennessee. In those Southeastern environs, you never know what you’ll get in the winter wilderness – mild temps and sunny or twenty below with freezing rain encapsulating the landscape in a cocoon of ice – all extremes are fair game. Much of the time, I didn’t even use a tent in those days, electing instead to sleep in “rock houses,” the characteristic deep overhang features of many cliffs in the region, used by camping parties for millennia.
Regardless, the thing I learned to love the most about winter camping in such a populated Eastern State is that everybody else stays home! I could visit the most popular trails with their spectacular waterfalls and stone arches, and I could camp a half-mile from the trailhead without seeing a soul outside of my party all weekend. Deal with the cold and the rest is easy.
Continue reading “Camping Around the Calendar” »
My Life in an Urban Sea-Level Ski Town
“Why don’t you stay in the wilderness? Because that isn’ t where it’s at; it’s back in the city, back in downtown St. Louis, back in Los Angeles. The final test [of a wilderness adventure] is whether your experience of the sacred in nature enables you to cope more effectively with the problems of man… You go [to nature] to re-establish your contact with the core of things, where it’s really at, in order to enable you to come back into the world of man and operate more effectively.”
–Willi Unsoeld: mountain climber, theologian, founding faculty at The Evergreen State College
I love snow. I love skiing it, climbing it, studying it, camping in it, and talking about it. And I live 52 miles from my home ski area. At sea level. In a city of over 600,000 people. “Wha-?” You ask. “Exactly,” I say.
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