I went on my very first backpacking trip with college friends to Dolly Sods Wilderness, West Virginia. I borrowed everything from my backpack to my sleeping bag. When we ran out of our initial water supply, my more experienced friends refilled our bottles from the creek and treated the water with iodine or filters. I had never drunk water straight from the creek before and I was completely unfamiliar with the treatment methods. The whole process made me nervous, but as the weekend wore on and I never got a case of diarrhea, I learned that we were fine. Flash forward 25 years and I own not only a sleeping bag and a backpack, but all other accoutrements of an outdoor adventure lifestyle, including a water filter. I also have the knowledge that my water filter (or iodine, or boiling) will guard against pathogens like Giardia, but provide no protection from high concentrations of chemicals. When I first heard of the Elk River chemical spill just outside of Charleston and the “
I never thought I'd be hitting the trail in a pair of pink hiking shoes. Let me explain. (And tell you what that has to do with buying local.) Late this fall I was at the New River Gorge, hiking and taking photos for the second edition of Hiking West Virginia (FalconGuides, on the shelves in 2013). I stopped in at Water Stone Outdoors to buy a new pair of hiking shoes that I hoped would see me through the next two years of writing HWV and then the second edition of Hiking Ohio . All told, I plan to put well over 1,000 miles on these shoes. I selected the stiffest pair of hikers I could find, a pair of 5.10 brand Camp Four women's approach shoes. Soon the trouble started. At first, the shoes weren't comfortable, but hey, I needed to break them in, right? Then my left foot started hurting when I wore them. Then my left foot started hurting when I wasn't wearing them. Turns out, there was a small crevasse (okay, maybe a quarter inch doesn't count as a crevasse) in