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Death Valley's Secret Stash
(Men's Journal)
“ONCE UPON A TIME there was a certain utility to climbing mountains: to get the lay of the land, to see which way to run the wagons, to be the first to do it. That time is gone. And yet there we were, on a long haul to the top of the biggest mountain in the lower 48, deep in the Mojave Desert, in the dark, with skis on our backs....”
Really Old Masters, from 16,000 Years Ago
(New York Times)
“WE WERE INSIDE RESTRICTED AREA R-505 of the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, rolling in a minivan across the vast salt pan of an extinct Pleistocene lake...”
The Battle to Be World's Most Traveled Man
(Men's Journal)
“NO ONE IS THE WORLD'S MOST TRAVELED MAN,” says Bill Altaffer, hunched over the dining room table at his second home in Mammoth Lakes, California, beneath a collection of spoons and exotic masks...”
Skiing California's 14ers
(Eastside Magazine)
“FROM A DISTANCE it looked perfect. Perfectly epic...”
Rituals: A Fire Must Be Fed
(NY Times)
“FOR NEARLY A WEEK the forecasters had been watching the next big system: a straining mass of gelid air down from the Aleutians, stalled off the California coast. Then a part of it began to move...”
Paradise and Safe Haven on Hawaii
(NYT, International Herald Tribune, SF Chronicle)
“RINALDO BRUTOCO AWOKE to the sound of myna birds and leaf blowers...”
Rituals: The Last Run
(NY Times)
“I WAS SOMEWHERE below the knob on Horizon Ridge, midway through a long solo slog from the Ostrander Ski Hut in Yosemite, dogged by deep slush, mud, a too-heavy pack and a hopelessly broken binding...”
Bond of Brothers in a California Wilderness
(NY Times)
“HAVING JUST SCRUBBED OUT AFTER AN EMERGENCY C-SECTION, Jonathan Bourne, an anesthesiologist at Mammoth Hospital in Mammoth Lakes, Calif., threw his pack and skis into his brother’s secondhand Suburban and slid into the passenger seat...”
Wild Ice
(NY Times)
“WE DROVE UP INTO the High Sierra at first light, on roads that by the end of the day would be open only to travelers on cross-country skis or snowshoes...”
Damn Cute Menace
(Los Angeles Times Magazine)
First Place Magazine Feature, 2007, Outdoor Writers Association of California
“THEY COME IN OFF the utility lines. Like airborne chipper-shredders they dispense with the season's pecans, tear yards of bark from the avocado tree, send half-chewed fruit, seeds, shells, leaves, whole limbs crashing to the flagstone...”
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Online
(Matador Network)
“WE'D PICKED UP A HITCHHIKER on the way out of Mammoth. He was wearing a dark suit, a pressed white shirt and tie, and a porkpie hat. He held a document folder on which he’d written:
INDEPENDENCE (THE TOWN)...”
Twilight of the Travel Guidebook
(Matador Network)
“IT'S ALWAYS BEEN A BASTARD GENRE, of dubious utility, of uncertain reliability, generally unpleasant to sift through, practiced in a great percentage of cases by amateurs and hacks — or worse: boosters and opportunists —, and inherently quick to obsolescence. Now, finally, in the age of GPS, Wi-Fi, googlemaps and lithium-ion batteries, maybe it’s time we let it go...”
Traveler’s Omertà: Is There No Place We Should Keep Secret?
(Matador Network)
“YOU BEAT YOUR WAY to the next great “undiscovered” village, the last “lost” culture, the ultimate “secret” beach. You write about the wonder of the place. Maybe you give it away for free; maybe you get two bucks a word for it. But in your wake the wonder is gone. The place will never be the same again...”
(Matador Network)
“HE'D SUCCESSFULLY WEATHERED his first slabs of dark-chocolate cake, had begun to stand on his own stubby feet for seconds on end, had shown a precocious interest in beer bottles and off-width crack climbing. Now seemed as good a time as any...”
Do Freebies Undermine Honesty in Travel Writing?
(Matador Network)
“PERHAPS THE BEST WAY to maintain independence as a travel writer is to have a large trust fund, or a productive uranium mine.”
(Matador Network)
“IT'S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN: wildfire season. Los Angeles is burning. Like in the Bad Religion song...”
(Matador Network)
“CHRIS IS WEARING A TRENCHCOAT, calf-length Indian moccasins and black sunglasses. He is not the original Dude, he says. “It’s just that they made a movie about a guy who’s life mirrors mine in a way that’s crazy...”
(Matador Network)
“SOMEWHERE BETWEEN 189 and 217 nautical miles off the coast of Yemen (depending on your source of information), and some 130 off the coast of Somalia, like a tiny, glittering tongue-stud in the gaping maw of the Gulf of Aden...”
Book Excerpts
Yosemite & the Southern Sierra Nevada
(Countryman Press/W.W. Norton)
“IN THE SPRING OF 1868, less than a month before his 30th birthday, a wild-haired itinerant college-dropout by the name of John Muir, "with incredibly little money," and no guidebook, stepped off a Panama steamer at the Port of San Francisco...”
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Best Guidebook, 2010
2009 Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award