As a teenager, I struggled with alcohol addiction. I was able to find my healing by going back to what my Nipmuc ancestors called the Original Instructions. These are the teachings that instill our sacred…
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Adventure, Love, and the Land That Shapes Us: Stories from the AMC Community
It’s time to pass the mic. Earlier this year, we put out a call for AMC stories in honor of our 150th anniversary. Stories of epic adventures, sweet connections, high mountain summits, and memories from AMC huts and lodges started coming...
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The Swiss Miss Fire started on a hot August day in 2017. Deep in the 100-Mile Wilderness, 300 feet from the Appalachian Trail, someone had stopped to make cocoa on Columbus Mountain. “It was in…
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I. One of my oldest memories survives from an unknown year in the early 1980s, when I was 6 or 7, and takes place near the top of a long-since-forgotten mountain in Acadia National Park….
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During years of appointments, my doctor and I have spent as much time talking about our hiking trips as about my age and medical diagnoses. A while ago, he casually said, “People who have the…
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This is an excerpt of a story that was originally published in the Winter/Spring 2016 issue of Appalachia Journal. This is a love story. Its background contains a wife and husband; its foreground features a…
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What follows is an excerpt from Desperate Steps: Life, Death, and Choices Made in the Mountains of the Northeast, available now from AMC Books. The screen door on the ranger’s cabin slammed hard in the…
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Afoot and afloat in Maine’s most beguiling backcountry My introduction to Maine’s famed 100-Mile Wilderness region came in early July of 1974, when a junior high school friend and I concocted a plan to hike…
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