Outdoorism

One way I inspire myself to keep heading outdoors this time of year is to put together a calendar made of my favorite outdoor photos from the past year. It gets a little easier to do every year, and now it’s pretty easy to share and even sell your creation. Here is the official Outdoorism [...]

Maps are a part of almost any outdoor lover’s life. For some of us, they grow from simple planning tools into an almost mystical art form. We start to feel the potential for endless new outdoor experiences when we look at the printed image of a map. As we use them, our maps can invoke [...]

My outdoor values were being heavily suppressed when I lost my fashionable dot com software engineering job in 2001. I bravely set out on my own as a freelance developer. This allowed me more and more outdoor time as my contracts shriveled up along with the tech sector economy. I didn’t think of it as [...]

I can feel the colors out there changing. Each day is different. It’s impossible to catch more than we miss, but it’s fun to try!

Most of us cannot live an entirely outdoor life, even if we like to dream about it. If our passion is strong, perhaps we venture outdoors for months at a time, but in my case at least, this is preceded by many more months of indoor preparation. There is a dynamic interplay between our indoor [...]

Until I learned what I truly value, my life was essentially dedicated to the values of others. It was in the outdoors that I discovered the values I feel certain are my own.
We talk about our values all the time, treating them as a given. That’s appropriate, because most of the time I think they [...]

If I had to choose someone to take care of the lands I love to explore, I’d choose someone like Mike Dechter. He does a number of jobs for the Santa Fe National Forest, but found time to respond to an inquiry I made and give me an interview. Mike expresses how the outdoors inspires [...]

It’s easy to visit the outdoors, see all the grand sights that await you there, and not realize that the places we visit are changing. Mountains especially seem stoic, immovable, and almost changeless. We take our pictures and make our memories in an instant, and take home an impression of a place during only that [...]

It’s easy to underestimate Tom Hickey if you don’t get into a conversation with him. A retired tax accountant who lives in Santa Fe, I met him atop Desolation Peak above the Santa Fe Ski Basin on an afternoon hike. His stiff-kneed walk gave me the impression of an overambitious senior citizen. He was also [...]

I was climbing at the popular Las Conchas trailhead in Santa Fe National Forest when my curiosity was piqued by two 45-foot beams on a truck near the highway. When I saw what they were for, I had to document the way these huge beams were being moved into the backcountry:

The bridge builders were from [...]