Tag: Outdoors
Dispatch from the Yukon Quest Trail
by Eva Holland | 02.07.12 | 3:57 PM ET
I’m on the road this week, doing some writing and social media work for the Yukon Quest.
For those unfamiliar with it, the Quest is a 1,000-mile sled dog race that runs from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Whitehorse, Yukon (my hometown). I’m following along, and on the trail with me is a traveling crowd of volunteers, veterinarians, race officials, “handlers” (assistants to the mushers), and friends and family. We drive from checkpoint to checkpoint, meeting up with the dog teams whenever they intersect with the sparse road system. I’m writing this from Central Corner, an outpost on the Steese Highway just south of the one-time Gold Rush town of Circle City.
Never seen a long-distance dog sled race? Here’s a video that gives you a real sense of the scene at the start line back in Fairbanks:
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Yahoo! BuzzOn Coastal Time
by Pam Mandel | 08.19.11 | 11:07 AM ET
Kalaloch Beach. (UJ Sommer) Years pass. Life changes. But for Pam Mandel, one thing stays the same: her love for the Olympic Peninsula.
Travel Movie Watch: ‘The Loneliest Planet’
by Eva Holland | 08.17.11 | 7:01 AM ET
The Loneliest Planet premiered at the Locarno Film Festival last week. It’s an adaptation of a travel-themed short story, “Expensive Trips Nowhere,” by World Hum contributor Tom Bissell, and it stars Gael Garcia Bernal of “The Motorcycle Diaries” fame. The story follows a pair of young backpackers on a guided hiking expedition in the Caucasus Mountains, and judging from this Variety review, it’s a must-see:
Much of the pic’s first hour unspools through continuous handheld shots of the threesome trudging along with backpacks, telling stories when they’re not silently concentrating on navigating treacherous terrain. At regular interludes, long-distance shots observe them dwarfed by the landscape as Richard Skelton’s haunting, rhythmic, ethnically inflected score intones in the background.
An encounter on the trail turns into a near-life-threatening test of manhood that Alex [Bernal] arguably fails. Thereafter, none of the characters discuss what happened, but it casts a profound pall over the adventure, shifting allegiances and sympathies among the threesome. ...[V]iewers may recognize a core emotional truth about how deeply travel tests relationships, how a single instinctive action can shift the ground irrevocably between people, and how no words can make things right.
‘Any Bears Around Today?’
by Kim Mance | 12.30.10 | 12:35 PM ET
iStockPhoto Kim Mance ventured into Canada's remote north looking for polar bears. She didn't anticipate becoming prey.
A Pilgrimage to Vailima
by Catherine Watson | 10.06.10 | 11:28 AM ET
By Catherine Watson An hour into her quest to visit Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa, Catherine Watson ran out of water and lost the trail. What would persistence bring?
Free Admission This Saturday at all National Parks
by Eva Holland | 09.24.10 | 9:38 AM ET
The latest in a series of fee-free days falls this Saturday at all 392 U.S. national parks. Enjoy. (Via Arthur Frommer)
Dispatch From the Moscow Heat
by Michael Yessis | 08.06.10 | 11:23 AM ET
World Hum contributor Jeffrey Tayler recently returned from Paris to his Moscow home, where soaring temperatures and wildfires have crippled the city and other parts of the country. Tayler reports from the brutal—and alcohol-soaked—scene for the Atlantic:
Another Russian saying has it that, “Heat isn’t vodka, but we feel drunk from it all the same.” Which hasn’t stopped a good number of metaphorically heat-wasted Muscovites from turning literal and tippling their way through this interminable zharishcha. I walked outside this morning to find a gang of bare-chested fellows, with shaved heads, sweaty snouts, and stretchmarked potbellies, sitting on the guardrail near our doorway, guzzling beer and smoking, and for good measure, belching and swearing about the heat. Any walk around town reveals similar scenes: men have at times dispensed with much of their clothing, and carrying a beer (plus lit cigarette) is now de rigueur. This is legal: there’s no law banning open containers of alcohol in Russia. Except that in Russia, beer hardly qualifies as alcohol. (Unless possibly it’s that 12-proof brew marked krepkoye.) Beer is more like a training beverage. But vodka is considered alcohol, and thus possesses, many would point out, curative properties for whatever ails you. So fighting noxious heat with medicinal doses of vodka makes perfect sense. And I don’t mean some dainty cocktail, like, say, a vodka collins. The idea of mixing vodka with anything except more vodka is an abomination. Why dilute the healing fun?
Paddling the Alaskan Food Chain
by James Michael Dorsey | 07.19.10 | 11:45 AM ET
James Michael Dorsey was enjoying a quiet kayaking outing on Alaska's Inside Passage. Then he spotted a dorsal fin.
Tim Cahill: ‘Literate Outdoor Writing’ Isn’t Done Yet
by Eva Holland | 06.29.10 | 9:18 AM ET
In the San Jose Mercury News, World Hum contributor Peter Delevett interviews Tim Cahill about the origins of Outside magazine, risk and fear on assignment, and the state of outdoor writing in America today. Money quote:
Here was the main idea behind Outside: We were tasked to come up with an outdoor magazine, and three of us spent about six months reading every magazine there was. And they were all service-oriented: they’d tell you how to paddle a canoe the right way. Our concept was that there’s a great strain in American literature of outdoor writing, from James Fenimore Cooper through Herman Melville through Mark Twain through Hemingway and Faulkner, and that we could continue that strain of literate outdoor writing. And at first, in 1976, we were made fun of, because it was thought by a lot of the critics, “Literate people don’t go outdoors.”
Well, once again that great strain in literature has been subsumed, this time by technology. I think it always will come back; just in what form and how is the question.
Cahill’s “Road Fever” appeared in our list of the 100 Most Celebrated Travel Books of All Time. He also offered his thoughts on creating “literature adventure stories” in this video.
Oil Spill Update: Heartbreak on the Gulf Coast
by Michael Yessis | 06.28.10 | 1:28 PM ET
Two more moving pieces on travel and the oil spill in the Gulf: World Hum contributor and Lonely Planet’s U.S. Travel Editor Robert Reid writes about a “sobering and powerful” trip to the Florida panhandle last week, and Carl Hiaasen gets angry about the oil washing up on Florida’s shores. He writes:
It might be difficult for someone who was born and raised far from a beach or a bayou to visualize a place they cherish being poisoned and defaced on such a massive scale.
Or maybe not so difficult. Imagine if 120 million gallons of crude oil were flushed into the Minnesota headwaters of the Mississippi River, and for months the sludge was allowed to seep down through the veins of America’s midwest.
Now you begin to get the picture—the heartbreak, the helplessness.
Previously, Tom Swick wrote for World Hum about the situation in the Florida Keys.
What’s the Next Foodie Eco Trend? ‘Entrepreneurial Foraging.’
by Jim Benning | 06.01.10 | 2:10 PM ET
What’s “entrepreneurial foraging,” you ask?
That would be the businesses sprouting up around foraging for miner’s lettuce, mushrooms and other food growing wildly, even in urban environments. Think mushroom-hunting safaris.
Writes Greg Beato in Reason:
All across America, enterprising eco-aggregators are engaged in the somewhat paradoxical pursuit of commercialized foraging, leading mushroom-hunting safaris in forests and selling wild-harvested dandelion roots in bulk on the Internet. Iso Rabins, a 28-year-old resident of San Francisco, joined their ranks two years ago, when he started organizing “wild kitchens,” paid events where diners enjoy “rambling dinner[s] of wild foraged foods” in private locales around the Bay Area. A few months later, Rabins added home delivery of food boxes to his menu of services.
(Via the New York Times Ideas blog)
Pirates to Captain: Just Tell Us Where the Tourism Boats Are
by Michael Yessis | 05.14.10 | 11:53 AM ET
Chilling story by Sean Flynn in the latest GQ. He recounts the sagas of two hijacked boats in the Indian Ocean and tells how tourists—and tourism—are increasingly targets of pirates. One exchange:
“Tourism?” One of the pirates was close now. “Tourism boat?”
Roucou nodded. “Yes.”
The pirates broke into wide smiles, congratulating themselves, celebrating.
“Where is tourism? Where?”
“No tourists,” Roucou said. “There are none. They’ve all gone.”
The pirate scowled, then dispatched a few of his men to search the Explorer. They returned, confirmed there were no passengers on board. The pirates were no longer pleased.
“Where tourists? Where?”
The tourist boats were a few hours to the south, three of them near Assumption Island. Roucou had seen them earlier that day: the Sea Bird, the Adventurer, and the Hebridean Spirit, with nearly 200 passengers and crew among them.
“There are none,” Roucou told the pirates. “There’s only us.”
He’d answered quickly and surely, but the pirates did not believe him. Eight of them took most of the crew to the aft deck, and three stayed with Roucou and his chief engineer in the wheelhouse. One of them used the Explorer’s satellite phone to call a contact in Somalia, who spoke perfect English. He put Roucou on the line with a man named Abdi.
“Tell them where the tourism boats are,” Abdi said, “and they will let you go.”
Photo You Must See: Rolling Clouds on Table Mountain
by World Hum | 05.13.10 | 11:22 AM ET
REUTERS/Mike Hutchings Taxis and buses wait for tourists as clouds engulf Cape Town's iconic Table Mountain
Waiting for Oil in the Florida Keys
by Tom Swick | 05.11.10 | 10:56 AM ET
iStockPhoto On a visit to the islands, where some are now contemplating the unthinkable
Travel Movie Watch: ‘180 Degrees South’
by Jim Benning | 05.04.10 | 2:37 PM ET
180 South looks like a great new outdoorsy travel documentary. In it, Jeff Johnson retraces a 1968 road trip from Ventura, California, to southern Patagonia undertaken by Yvon Chouinard and a few others. The film features surfing and climbing, and, it seems, a healthy dose of philosophizing about travel and life.
It’s touring the country now—dates and locations are listed here—and it comes out on DVD in June. Here’s the trailer:
Why I Walk
by Bill Belleville | 04.29.10 | 10:57 AM ET
iStockPhoto No, it's not quick or expedient. But it offers something other modes of transport can't. Bill Belleville on traveling by foot.
Let’s See What’s Down There
by David Grann | 03.24.10 | 10:10 AM ET
iStockPhoto In an excerpt from his new book, David Grann takes to New Zealand's high seas on a quest for elusive giant squid
The Accidental Tsunami Rider
by Jill K. Robinson | 03.10.10 | 11:50 AM ET
iStockPhoto After Chile's earthquake, Jill K. Robinson paddled her kayak into California's Half Moon Bay and felt the energy from a hemisphere away
Photo You Must See: Shaun White Flying Over Vancouver
by World Hum | 02.18.10 | 12:59 PM ET
REUTERS/Mark Blinch Before winning the gold, Shaun White competes in the men's halfpipe qualifying on Cypress Mountain at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics
Forests to Burn
by Joshua Berman | 02.12.10 | 10:56 AM ET
Photo by Joshua Berman Joshua Berman spent a glorious summer exploring some of America's most beautiful wilderness areas -- with a drip torch in hand
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