Writing

Two long pieces of personal narrative, one from a winter expedition in Idaho and one from the Appalachian Trail. I put them here because the same habit of noticing runs through both of them and through everything else on this site.

Memoir · 2011

No Hurry

Written from The Appalachian Trail in 2011.

In March of 2011 I set out to hike the Appalachian Trail, Georgia to Maine, and to live-blog the whole thing from an iPhone. I made it to Pearisburg, Virginia, about 650 miles in over three months, before coming home. This is the account of those months: the gear, the people, the weather, three separate encounters with hypothermia and a hypoglycemic seizure that nearly killed me at a shelter in the Smokies. Also the small unhurried mornings, the trail names, the unreliable cell service, the strangers who happened to show up exactly when I needed them.

A long read. I’ve split it into chapters.

Read

Essay · 1992

Wilderness Challenge

A retrospective from 1992.

An Outward Bound–style ski-and-winter-camping trip through the mountains of northern Idaho and southern British Columbia, taken as a required school expedition in January of my year at Rocky Mountain Academy. Seventy-pound packs, telemark skis none of us knew how to use, a broken ankle several days in, a makeshift sled, and a valley I still remember, dark on the right and sunlit on the left. “The valley of light and shadow,” Christina called it.

Read