6:25am: LOD (Leader of the Day) Faren groggily hears her small watch alarm go off. Time to get up! Her faithful tentmate Mike ensures she dutifully gets out of the tent to fill the two silver pots with water for breakfast. She starts up two MSR WhisperLite stoves, and puts the water on. 7:00am: With

A WRFI summer semester entails full days of travel and academics divided between front country and backcountry in our investigation of ecology, conservation, and management in the Y2Y. By the time we got through section 2, that travel part was pretty straightforward. Are food bags are better proportioned and we pack our packs in half

As a believer of global climate change, there’s something quite sensational about getting to see what I spend my life learning about, studying, and vocalizing first hand. Hiking to the topmost edge of a lateral moraine – quite literally in the space between spaces – where a glacier moved the Earth, where it scoured the

Canadian switchbacks? From spending time hiking through the Lewis and Clark Wilderness, Yellowstone, Lee Metcalf and other state areas my sense of trail design was pretty firm. Setting foot on Canadian trails is a whole another experience. The Canadian trails for example in Waterton National Park specifically the Goat Lake trail was deceptively labeled to

After five backpack trips, roughly 28 days total spend in the woods, and 57 nights of camping, here are at our last backcountry campsite of the summer. As Jerry Garcia puts it ever so perfectly, “What a long, strange trip its been.” Thinking back to day one when we were all strangers driving together across

Having spent most of my life growing up on the East Coast, particularly in the southeast portion of Tennessee, I haven’t had that much exposure to snow, let alone glaciers. Bring here in British Columbia has not only given me the opportunity to visually see them, but to walk on and touch them as well.

The water was gin clear as it slithered over the painted rocks which ranged in color from blue to orange to red.  Water so cold and crisp that it could stunt even the largest of man’s most feared animals.  GreenForkRiver, holder of this water, is majestic the way it cuts deep in the earth, meandering

Human beings are really big.  There isn’t a place on the planet we don’t touch and we’ve come up with technologies to circumnavigate just about any challenge Nature throws at us.  We even consider disregarding the laws of thermodynamics governing energy transformation and entropy when we assume that there is an infinite supply of resources

High-ho, high-ho, it’s off to hike we go…to ScapegoatPeak that is.  And high-ho it sure is!  As we embarked on the day’s adventure, I felt like I was living a fairy tale.  As we walked through sun lit meadows and around steep ridges, I saw the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.  Her

As a Tucsonan, snow is rare for me to see.  As an Arizonan, camping during a snow storm is even rarer.  In Upper Teepee Basin of Montana not only did I get to sleep through a snowstorm in a tent, I got to eat dinner during it, taste the snowflakes on my mouth, hang all