Get Out!

Last time my partner and I were climbing at the New River Gorge , we decided to try some new routes, so we cracked opened the guidebook. We wanted to hit high quality routes, so we looked for a star rating next to the route name. We chose some 5.6s and 5.7s. For those of you who don’t climb, that’s on a 5.0-5.15 scale. Routinely, the guidebook rated each moderate route – every one an aesthetic crack climb easy to protect and requiring some technical skill – “good for its grade.” Meaning: good but … But what? Good if you can’t handle the harder stuff? Good if you’re having an off day? Good enough for shitty-ass climbers like yourself? Good but I can’t admit it if I regularly climb 5.12? “Good for its grade” is never in the description for harder routes. Well I’ve been on a multi-pitch 5.6 route at Seneca Rocks that beat every single (all right, the very few) 5.11s I’ve ever climbed. And guess what? I don’t feel like I have to make excuses for climbing a route that I thoroughly enjoy, w...

I remember vividly the photo in the gear catalog: Someone cozily tucked in to their tent with the copy (paraphrasing), “You can’t get junk mail here.” That captures for many of us why we desire wilderness. No junk mail. No e-mail. No phone calls. Google recently announced that it will start taking images of bike paths and hiking trails as part of its Street View option on Google Maps. But do we really want Google taking images of trails? What’s the idea behind that? To look at the trail on your iPhone instead of hiking it? To look at images of the trail while you’re hiking it? Absurd. More importantly, what does this mean for privacy? In our regular lives, there is no privacy. A camera takes a picture of you driving or walking across the street. You can always be tracked down via your cell phone. Google knows what websites you’ve been searching, what books you’ve purchased online and who knows what else about you. I go to the backcountry (even the frontcountry) to get away from that. T...

Have you ever thought of opening your own campground just so you could do it right? I have. Too many campgrounds have been designed (if they’ve been designed at all) by people who don’t use them. I think the only perfect campground in the Ohio River region exists in my mind’s eye. Let’s start with why we choose to go to a campground. There are usually two main reasons: price and convenience. A backcountry site is often free and better than a campground, so a campground is not really competing with a backcountry site. It’s competing with and beating a hotel on price – usually. Some of the worst “campgrounds” – RV ghettoes – are some of the most expensive. I once pulled into a KOA out of desperation and a “campsite” was $54! No thanks. But really, we usually camp for the experience of being outdoors or to launch our hiking/mountain biking/rappelling/paddling/geocaching/whatever adventures. Here’s my starter list for the perfect campground: Privacy. At the perfect campground, you should ...

I had the pleasure of taking a 9-year-old girl on her first rock climbing outing last weekend at the Hocking State Forest Rock Climbing and Rappelling Area . Then I had the – well, I wouldn’t say pleasure – of seeing her Junior Girl Scout Badge Book. Flipping through the guide, I truly couldn’t believe some of what I saw. Did you know that young Girl Scouts can earn a badge for Looking Your Best? I am not making this up. The actual sew-on badge features a hairbrush, a comb and a mirror. Then here’s the badge big oil somehow managed to get into the Girl Scout curriculum: Oil Up. The badge is an oil derrick and it only goes downhill from there. (In fairness, the guide has a photo of a bear with spilled crude oil on her fur. She is definitely not looking her best.) It’s not all bad, of course. There are plenty of standard badges – Swimming, Adventure Sports, Finding Your Way (compass skills) and Being My Best. There are even some progressive elements in the Girl Scout Badge Book – the Car...

The tagline for Get Out! magazine is “outdoor adventure in the Ohio River region.” As an outdoor adventurer, I only occasionally ask myself what adventure is. Sometimes it’s like porn: you can’t define it, but you know it when you see it. According to Merriam-Webster.com, adventure is defined as: 1 a: an undertaking usually involving danger and unknown risks b: the encountering of risks 2: an exciting or remarkable experience 3: an enterprise involving financial risk It’s interesting that the dictionary definition of adventure largely invokes the word risk. If adventure were strictly defined by risk, then driving a car to the trailhead would be the most adventurous part of your trip (see What Will Really Kill You Outdoors ). But there is some truth to that – backpacking in bear country is definitely adventurous and largely because it’s so risky, or at least it feels risky. Ditto whitewater rafting, skydiving, rock climbing, BASE jumping, biking in rush hour traffic and so on. I’d like...

I was trolling through some of the regional outdoor blogs I post on getoutzine.com and came upon this one, from Bird Watcher's Digest: Spark Bird . It's a great concept: what bird sparked your interest in your lifelong pursuit of bird watching ? I knew my answer immediately. When I lived in Colorado, I spent many an afternoon cycling on the roads where the high plains meet the Rocky Mountains. I wasn't a birder at all. Nor was I much interested in the world around me except to play in it. But there was this beautiful - beautiful! - bird song that demanded I listen. Now I am demanding, or at least requesting, that you listen . Every time I jerked my helmeted head around to see where this song was coming from, a bird with a yellow breast with a big black V was sitting there on the fence. Could spotting it get any easier than that? I borrowed a friend's Peterson's Guide to Western birds and there it was - the Western meadowlark. Now I am only a backyard birder, but the...

Actually, everyone isn’t a critic, but it can sometimes feel that way. For example, I was once at a party and met a guy who was training to swim around the island of Manhattan. Wow. I was really impressed, excited for him, peppered him with questions about his training regimen, congratulated him in advance for even dipping one toe into the frigid and polluted water. Then I mentioned the woman (Alison Streeter) who has swum across the English Channel something like 43 times – you know, the chubbiest elite athlete you’ve ever seen. She rocks! His tone turned on a dime and he began to badmouth her for some kind of insanely insignificant point. I think she puts Vaseline between her thighs to prevent chafing or something like that. To him, this all but disqualifies her feats. My mental reaction to his criticism was, what an asshole. My verbal response wasn’t too much nicer, something like, “Yeah, she sucks. Swim the English Channel? Hey, a fish could do that.” But this isn’t the way I wa...