I hate to admit it, but part of living my outdoor dreams has been the realization that I don’t have the online time to write about my experiences here the way I had hoped. Initially I thought that this site might help me (and you) earn income in outdoor-oriented ways, and I have found my [...]

I’ve finally taken the leap and launched into a completely mobile lifestyle, working online and living with my wife in our camper. We’ve been getting lots of outdoor time in new places. The joy of this is tempered a bit by some of the chaos swirling around us. We left New Mexico in the midst [...]

Our dedicated Weekend Warrior Kate Calder announced her new photo blog, WanderLore.net. Kate’s photos have always been a source of outdoor inspiration for me, and now we can get a regular dose of them, presented in her own way. Thanks Kate!

Greetings! True to my word, I’ve remained quiet but dedicated to outdoorism through 2009. I’ve continued to work toward independence in the Weekend Warrior mode by developing a clientele as a location-independent freelance software developer. I couldn’t have done it without solid support from my wife in her more reliable day job. After a year [...]

Outdoor values can suffer when economic, physical, or emotional hardship sets in. This is evidence that the outdoors has evolved from our source of life and survival to a conquest, from a conquest to an abstract idea, and from an abstract idea to a leisurely adventure. Hardships tend to press us back down the chain, [...]

The latest issue of Rock and Ice magazine has a feature article on jobs in climbing jobs that follows the Lifemaps format closely, and is based on a survey of 300 career climbers. You can read a good portion of the article online. There are some surprising contrasts in incomes and job satisfaction, but most [...]

Sometimes I think I should leave all my gadgets at home when I go outside. Do I really get a full outdoor experience when I’m fiddling with a camera, a GPS receiver, or an MP3 player? Often, these things distract me from what I love most about being outdoors. Then I’ll be at home surfing [...]

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 [...]