You’re clomping along with your four-legged best friend down a sunny stretch of trail when, out of nowhere, you hear it—the shcka shcka shcka of a rattlesnake’s tail. The creature is sprawled across the length of the hiking path, and there’s no safe way around. It’s every pet owner’s worst nightmare. If a rattlesnake bites […]
Dear Sundog: I’ve been obsessed with rocks since I was a kid. I’d walk riverbeds and shorelines with my head down, picking up everything that caught my eye and pocketing the ones that captured my imagination. I found a fossilized fern once in a layered stone in my favorite part of my home state. It […]
Most of Mother Nature’s most spectacular shows are all about being at the right place at the right time. Maybe you waited your whole life to witness a total solar eclipse, or perhaps on your last mountain trek you stumbled upon a radial rainbow cloud with your own shadow as the star. In all cases, […]
I first learned about Leor Pantilat the way one learns about lots of things these days: while sitting on my couch and scrolling through Instagram. As an avid hiker and backpacker with decades of mileage in the wilds of California, I recognized the general features of the images he posted—the scoured granite of the Sierra […]
It’s not even novel to say it anymore: top national parks are experiencing an overcrowding dilemma. In 2021, forty-four National Park Service units set visitation records, and, for the first time in history, Great Smoky Mountains crossed the 14 million visitor mark. Last year, 50 percent of total recreational visits occurred in just 6 percent […]
I love pooping outside. One morning in Alaska, a humpback whale breached offshore just as I squatted with my pants around my ankles. Another morning, in Idaho, I watched hummingbirds sip nectar from wildflowers as I crouched at the edge of a meadow. And at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, I sat on a […]
When I moved to Los Angeles 15 years ago, a row of Mexican fan palms lined the street in front of my apartment complex. They were impossibly tall and perpetually arced in the breeze—a postcard view, I suppose, except for the frond missiles that constantly battered my car. I’ve come to love the city’s less […]
In 2018, former President Barack Obama sat down with David Letterman on the pilot of the comedian’s Netflix series My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. It was Obama’s first talk show interview since leaving office, and the most revealing insight into what Obama’s long post-presidency might look like–he was only 55 years old at the end […]
Parenting through a two-year pandemic has been a lot like achieving anything tough outdoors: challenging, sometimes overwhelming, a few tears, but in the end, rewarding. Now it’s time to reward the women who hold it all together. We asked the moms, mother figures, and caregivers of Basecamp—a Facebook group for folks interested in the outdoor […]
It makes perfect sense that the pandemic has seen a run on houseplants. We all want to bring more life to our homes, to feel the beauty and hope of another intelligence. Plants remind us that we are part of nature and, despite all we’ve done, that nature still works. Or can work, with a little […]