About the Author
The author, Belmont Bowl, MT (ca. 1971) 
Winner: 2009 Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award
CA Outdoor Writer of the Year, 2008
(Outdoor Writers Association of California)
Best Guidebook of 2008
(Outdoor Writers Association of California)
Best Magazine Feature, 2008
(Outdoor Writers Association of California)
DAVID PAGE has run sled dogs into the Maroon Bells, seined for salmon off the Kenai, hunted for T-Rex eggs in Patagonia, and traveled from the Algerian Sahara to Paris in the back of a Belgian floral delivery van.
He has written for the Discovery Channel, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Eastside, Backcountry, Men's Journal, and The New York Times. He is a contributing editor at-large for MatadorNetwork.com, and author of the critically-acclaimed Yosemite & the Southern Sierra Nevada: A Complete Guide (Countryman Press/W.W. Norton).
He lives on the side of a volcano in Mammoth Lakes, California, with his wife, his two young sons, and their illegal migrant canine.
Print:
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)
“ONE RECENT WINTER NIGHT, 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...”
Online:
Adventures in Weaning
(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....”
Writing Fire: A Brief Anthology on the Burning of Los Angeles
(Matador Network)
“IT'S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN: wildfire season. Los Angeles is burning. Like in the Bad Religion song...”
How to Get to Socotra
(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...”