Many American families approach the snow and cold of winter as something to be endured, even feared. Scandinavian families, on the other hand, approach the cold as something to be embraced and enjoyed, and they…
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Dispatches from the AMC 150 Relay: One Month In
I have a very normal job… I am following the volunteers of AMC’s 150th Anniversary Relay as they hike, bike, and paddle their way from Virginia to Maine, a journey that is over 2,000 miles....
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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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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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