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 [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]