Get Out!

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 ...

Here's a fun XtraNormal "movie" titled Campground Regulations inspired by Chestnut Creek Campground at the New River Gorge. It's made by GO! contributor Attila Horvath.

What’s your first memory of camping? There’s a good chance that it’s a memory from your childhood, a camping trip with your family. It’s not lost on me that I am very lucky to tell you I had been camping in Joshua Tree, Yosemite, Yellowstone, Mono Lake, Bryce Canyon and the Grand Canyon by the time I was 10 years old. My parents – my dad led the charge – took nine (nine!) kids to national parks for summer vacation every year. When we moved East, we eventually made it everywhere from Acadia to the Everglades. While ours was the typical drive-the-motor-home-to-the-sign-and-take-a-picture family, it was these camping beginnings that set me on my way to outdoor adventure sports in adulthood. When my dad and I took a trip to Alaska together, he lost 11 pounds without trying – I was an adult by then and insisted on actually mountain biking and hiking. I don’t need to tell you – though I have in many of these pages – the benefits of outdoor adventure sports. The importance of skills a young...

As Get Out! readers know, I haven’t shied away from posting some stories in the mag with four-letter words ( How to Sh*t in the Woods , If you Can’t Duck it, F&@# It ). Most readers don’t seem to have strong feelings about it one way or another. Some wrote to compliment the stories and a few wrote to let me know they were offended by these words. My favorite was someone accusing me of not having the vocabulary to do better. I thought about culling the site for words that he probably wouldn’t know how to define and e-mail the list to him, but I’m too lazy and disinterested to do that. I am interested, however, in language and in the idea of offensive words. George Carlin has already said most of the good stuff on this topic, but I am intrigued about how we as a culture make certain words taboo. They are, after all, just words. (I am rubber, you are glue, bounced off me and stuck on you!) When I informally polled my friends on this topic, the only ones with concerns were parents – th...

The problem with gear reviews is that, with a brand new piece of gear, you can’t apply perhaps the most important test: the test of time. I’d like to re-review a selection of products from the last couple of years to report how they’ve fared: The Good MBT anti-shoe . After a year, this shoe looks practically new and still provides a supportive, comfortable stride for my (often aching) back. Worth the $250 you’ll have to kick down if you’re willing to take care of these shoes. Sierra Designs Spark 15 sleeping bag . I had sworn off Sierra Designs after purchasing a raincoat from the company that was neither waterproof nor breathable – in fact, it was the first thing to get soaked and the last thing to dry out – which I found out the hard way, hiking the Colorado Trail. But the Spark was the only 800-fill down bag I could find at the time of purchase, so I went for it. Turns out Sierra Designs knows what they’re doing with sleeping bags. This bag is so warm I’ve dubbed it The Furnace. ...

While we were reporting a destinations article on Breaks Interstate Park for Get Out!, photographer Attila Horvath and I situated ourselves at the Towers Overlook above the Russell Fork, which is the whitewater run that snakes its way through the park. As we sat at the overlook, the fog lifted like a stage curtain and it revealed a view complete with an oxbow in the river, which cuts the steep gorge. I asked Attila how deep he thought the valley was at that point. “Let’s see,” he replied, “Seneca (Rocks) is about 900 feet above the valley …” I could tell he was thinking the same thing I was. First, what’s a good point of reference? For us, Seneca Rocks, WV is a good reference point for 1,000 feet – Seneca’s South Peak is about 900 feet above the river and we are intimately familiar with the rocks, since we’ve started at the bottom, topped out, and returned to the bottom so many times. The Russell Fork Gorge was definitely less than 1,000 feet. Here’s why I asked: As I did research on ...

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...

New Year’s resolutions are a great way to take some time to think about goals for the next year, but there’s reason to be cynical about them. As John Katsares, personal trainer coordinator for Ohio State University’s Recreation and Physical Activity Center says in our article, Make Your New Year’s Weight Loss Resolution Stick , the New Year’s resolution attendance ‘bump’ at fitness centers usually is over by Valentine’s Day. I have a goal that I’d like to achieve in 2009: climbing in Yosemite. But I face stiff challenges, including fitness (I’ve had some injuries in 2008), time (I launched a magazine in 2008) and money (I launched a magazine in 2008). But over the course of the last year, I’ve either been reminded of or learned about a few tricks to help me reach my goal. For one, the ultimate motivators are buddies and goals . My 2009 goal is stated and I have two people who want to reach this goal, too. Hopefully, we’ll keep each other on track. We also have mini climbing goals to pr...

I’ve been thinking of what to give my niece and nephews (all under 10) for the holidays. The holiday would be Christmas in their household, but the question applies to all holidays and gift-giving celebrations. Well I’ve got my own little agenda with this one. They live in a household where they don’t go outside often and they watch a lot of TV. I, of course, want to turn them into environmentalist outdoor lovers and future backpacking, biking, climbing and paddling partners. Plus, I want to lead by example and try to move toward a zero-waste holiday event. Tall order, huh? Here are my best ideas: 1. Vintage outdoor gear. Think about it: what would be more meaningful to you, a new Swiss army knife or the knife your great grandfather used while in the Swiss army? A no brainer. My version is this: I am going to take a retired climbing rope and cut it into jump rope-sized sections. They can jump rope with their sections, but I will also use the ropes as a chance to teach them some basic...

In the course of my job as editor of Get Out! magazine, I talk to a lot of outdoor adventurers. When I talk to cavers, it’s usually a different experience than when I talk to others. I get a lot of suspicion – who are you, what’s your agenda and so on. When I ask them about their favorite caves, I often receive no reply. While this behavior can be off putting, there is a very good reason for it: cavers guard their favorite caves like nobody’s business. If you join a grotto – a local caving club – they are likely to first take you to a so-called sacrifice cave. That is, they’ll take you to a place that isn’t that great or pristine in order to check you out. Only when you prove your conservationist cred – and only after they’ve had a chance to teach you a thing or two about cave conservation – will they introduce you to an underground world you never knew existed. My favorite cave is right here in the Ohio River region. A couple of friends and I pieced together word-of-mouth information ...

While thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, my friend Greg willed an amazing thing. He wanted to get to the nearest town and he said, “At the next road crossing, a blond in a convertible is going to pick me up and take me town.” Guess what. You got it – Greg stuck out his thumb and a blond in a convertible picked up him and took him to town. That, my friends, is trail magic. People who hike the legendary AT know a thing or two about trail magic. It occurs thanks to trail angels – those random people who help hikers by offering them rides, food, drink, sometimes even a place to stay. I think back on a lot of people who have helped me through the years. There was the woman who yelled words encouragement from her car when I was completing a triathlon (something to the effect of You Go, Girl!); the many other rock climbers who have shared ropes with my team on a rappel; the people who have picked me/us up when trying to return to our car after a backpacking trip; and, of cou...

During the time I was compiling the feature story Best of the Ohio Valley : Rivers, Waterfalls, Swimming Holes, my partner Attila and I took a hike to a rocky outcropping in West Virginia that we had eyed for years. The temperature hit something like 93 degrees that day. On the way to our destination, we eyed what looked to be a superb swimming hole. On the return hike, we ambled down to the creek and – sure enough – found a mini cascade emptying into a beautiful, deep pool surrounded by a little rock outcropping, sycamore trees and boulders. We hadn’t planned on a swim, so we took off our clothes (yes, we went skinny dipping) and I waded in far enough to see where the water was deep enough to dive. It was so cold that I surfaced yelping with shock and delight. I swam around the little pool and then returned to the rocks to air dry. It was pure bliss – one of my favorite moments of the summer. I had the thought that every kid – hell, every adult for that matter – should have the...

Note: Material this entry refers to might offend. One of the small pleasures of rock climbing is coming across that perfect climb name – one that cleverly describes the route (Totally Clips, Handsome and Well Hung) or the experience you can expect to have on the climb (Just Say Yo to Jugs, Not on the First Date, Mid-Height Crisis) or just has a fun reference (Where’s the Beef and Where’s the Bolt, Jimi Cliff, etc.) One of the not-so-small displeasures is coming across the far too many misogynistic names of climbs. So what to do? I’ve begun renaming these climbs – I just cross out the old name in my book and my friends and I come up with a new name – and I invite you to join me. And be sure to tell other climbers, guidebook authors, publishers and especially the dudes who names these climbs that it’s not funny to name a climb that attempts to degrade half of the world’s population (although the name really reflects on the person who named it that). Funny is funny, even when it’s s...