Well, well, well. The skies finally released a few blessings on Jackson Hole and everyone's out to play. Someone was so overcome with joy and smiles that he whipped up this short full of point-of-view footage riding in the fresh powder. Hope the happiness rubs off onto you today.
* * * The Sunday Morning Chillax? Here's the idea. It's Sunday. You're up early. You're enjoying a cup of coffee in the quiet morning while your kids sleep in. No need to read, this is always a video; something to give you happy thoughts about mountains, fresh air, stoke, fun, or being outside. Enjoy. Relax. Not guaranteed to be weekly . . . hey, you get what you pay for.
Caia Koopman created the art on these skis and snowboard from Rossignol. She's a lowbrow artist contracted by Oakley, Rossignol and a few gear makers to create signature designs, and as you can see her work is bold, assured, and whimsical. Much like the 4-year-old girl I raise, if I may inject that. You try getting her bathed, brushed, chilled out with a book and finally to bed and you'll see for yourself. I need a drink just thinking about it.
The line of Rossignol boards and skis is significant not just because of the fanciful feminine artwork . . .
We've written about the wonders of sling bags for the ultimate outdoor adventure diaper bag before. It all started with the JJ Cole sling diaper bag because we owned one and loved it. Sadly you can't buy them any more. JJ Cole cut it from their product line and the only thing that soothes our heartache is our unrelenting quest for a similarly awesome, good looking, functional sling bag.
Well, we've stumbled upon some good news, and Patagonia's Atom sling bag scores some big points . . .
I stopped and looked around for another way. He, on the other hand, rolled by me on the passenger side, draped a wrist at 12:00 on the wheel, and entered the sludge at a creep. Life as we knew it unfolded in slow motion. The front tires touched the water and went down. They didn't stop, but they sank with such a dreamy, cartoonish pace that those of us watching had enough time to process, react, and theorize. So, we laughed . . .
If you've been to this space before, you might already know about our little love affair with funky and cool campervans. But this Volkswagen LT 40 inspires a whole new level of bliss and wonder for classic, or not-so-classic, Griswolding. Uh oh, and she's for sale. Alas, she's all the way across the pond in Scotland. It's a 1988 unit that underwent a two year rebuild by a dad who intended to take his family of five through Africa, but as Jed from Campervan Culture tells us, the plans changed. The project was completed in 2010, including a shiny new 2.4 TD motor. It's almost a shame to put so much energy (and cold, hard-earned cash!) into a such a significant project only to have to part with her before a grand voyage. The van in its current state has hardly been driven around the block with a mere 3400 kilometers (2100 miles) on that new engine.
Watch this video and hang on till 0:38 and enjoy the sweet sound of her purr . . .
As a nine-year old girl with big, brown, criminally beautiful eyes tells me you're not supposed to call people weird. They're "artsy." So, I have a bunch of artsy friends who like to make a tradition out of gathering deep in the desert totally off the grid on the weekend after Thanksgiving. It starts with all participants knowing just three things:
Who's coming and how the responsibilities of food, drink, firewood, and frisbees are divvied up
A location in the form of a geodetic datum
That we're going to make a couple pots of feuerzangenbowle, the stuff you see ablaze here
A year ago, the Disney movie Tangled landed in theaters and stole the hearts of little girls and their weepy, misty-eyed dads. The old folk tale of Rapunzel and her locks shouldn't be too foreign to you. The most famous version, before Disney's, was likely the one that's found in Grimms' Fairy Tales, the compilation of German folk tales assembled by the Brothers Grimm in the 19th Century. As you can expect it's not quite the same as the movie, but the nuts-n-bolts are the same . . .
This year, I've avoided to the core penning out a gift guide for you. Everyone's doing that now. But what I will do is show you one thing that's surely going to make a fella like yours truly feel kind of special. I say that because these beauties from Nau (pronounced "now") are proof of love at first sight. A friend linked to these on Facebook today and effectively flushed this chump.
Why?: the usual. They look good, are priced for us lowly working class, and up the muchly-over-hyped green factor . . .
The most likely main attraction to adventure travel is that is has so few boundaries, only the ones you put in place. Notwithstanding the joyous red tape of border crossings. Rise as early as you please, or don't. Ride a bike to see the Louvre if you want. Drive nothing but dirt roads from Montana to Mexico. Pub crawl. Piggyback ride to the park. And so on. While creating memories along the path of your own adventures is the ultimate point, hearing the stories, seeing the pictures, and watching the videos of the wild or mild adventures undertaken by others fuels inspiration, laughter, and connectivity. This here is a hat tip to folks of the Adventure Travel Film Festival because they bring all three of those things together in this presentation of short films.
Down in the ol' grungy southwest U.S., you'd think we'd be more tuned into the upsides of the poncho for our winter kit. Especially for the kids. Ponchos are the warm garment of choice for native Andean folk and other pre-Hispanic cultures of Central and South America. But the poor things get misrepresented and misconstrued from the bad guys with straps of bullets around their chests in old Clint Eastwood flicks, to the late night infomercials extolling the virtues of the blanket with sleeves called the snuggie. Add to that, outdoors folk tend to hear the word poncho and think, "That's a plastic thing inside the pocket of my emergency kit I got for 99 cents in case it rains." It's no wonder we just don't see classier version of ponchos at all.
To hear my wife tell it, I present no shortage of difficulty when it comes to Christmas trees. She's probably right. Before our second Christmas I barnstormed with fury that we forget a tree and get a cactus instead, because that was something we could plant in the yard after making a spectacle of it. Well, that unfestive suggestion grew no wings and did not fly. We still found ourselves at a tree lot, looking for something perfectly triangular and uniform and just tall enough and something more or less out of a storybook and everything else that just doesn't come naturally to things that are, well, natural.
We bought one. Probably for 60 bucks. The whole experience left me dissatisfied . . .
Home is where the head is . . . oh, wait, that's not saying. But it could be the truth. If you're the sort of person, or if you know the sort of person, who can whittle hours away pouring over maps, these handmade Australian pillows might call out to you . . .
Remember the moment you learned that you were definitely going to be a real parent in under nine months? You saw the stick turn pink, or got word from the doc, or, like my wife said to me on the way to bed one night before letting the waterworks of happiness loose, "Well . . . you're going to be a dad." For the next 24 hours or more, it's a collision of far too many emotions to list, and plans and fears and bright ideas and joy. Or not. Depends what you went through. Eventually, though, things calm down and whether by design or nature or pressure you might start to make some decisions about the kind of parent you want to be, and the kind of contribution to humanity you want to make by raising some children.
Aamion and Daize Goodwin are on a round-the-world trip with their two little ones, Given and True, and have certainly made a conscious decision about the kind of parents they want to be.
After a moment of hushed awe, may the words of many Jeep addicts, critics, connoisseurs, and paramours fall upon your ears with a smile: this thing is downright sexy. For nearly 10 years now, American Expedition Vehicles (AEV), an inventive if not inspiringly diabolical company in based in Montana, has been producing a much-admired franken Jeep they call the Brute. As simple as I can state it, the Brute is a not-so ordinary converted Jeep with a lift, larger tires and modified body with a pickup truck bed behind the two-seater cab. The awesome of a Jeep packaged up with the utility of a truck. AEV also offers a 470-hp (not a typo) Hemi engine conversion making this beast, in the words of the company's president and founder, Dave Harriton, "more AEV than it is Jeep."
The problem, aside from the colossal ding to your Swiss bank account, is . . .
She found the tree with the right branch, but it took some time to find. As you can see, good, strong branches that are close enough to the ground yet far enough from the tree are few. But that's exactly what you need for a proper rope swing. My wife found the one that worked.
I lassoed the branch, tied off the webbing, tied a big figure eight on a bight . . .
Yesterday, I took my 4-year old daughter to the gear shop to buy some new warm gloves and hat. Kids being kids, we can only find one left glove out of a total of three pairs she owns. We have some adventures planned this fall and winter so we had resupply this department.
When we arrived, we found a whole 16' row packed full of gloves and hats just for kids. She couldn't contain herself.
You can share a lot within a little bit of space. Take the cockpit of a tandem kayak you're sharing with your sweetie. Or child. Small space, sweet experience. Then there's the medium on Twitter in which you're restricted to expressing a pithy thought within 140 characters.
Ross Garrett works for The Surfer's Journal, administers his own Twitter account, and, as you'll see, has a 3-year old son. The brief tale he tells of taking a paddle . . .
There is little chance that anyone's pancakes on planet Earth can beat those of Chris "BajaTaco" Marzonie. He has the temperature dialed in just right on his camp stove that toasts each pancake with a joyous, nameless heavenly color. The sweet-scented steam rises with a gentle whisper. But is that all?
No, there's more. It gets much better. He custom tailors each one to the indulgences of the stomach to which it's destined . . .
Now, how is this connected? It's a grand undertaking to find a cogent and authentic way to associate the anarchy of punk rock with family-friendly outdoor adventure. But I'm going to give it a shot, right here, right now. I've made worse decisions in my life.
You need some kind of contraption to get you and the munchkins to the crag. To the break. To the trailhead. To the put-in. Or you just need a machine to get you down a dirt road that'll get you to a sweet spot on the coast of Baja. But vehicles reach into your life far beyond "a thing to get me from A to B." They become an extension of your personality, for better or worse, and I like to think of it as a delicate coalescence of superfluous love affair and absolute necessity. I could be wrong.
In the quest for the ultimate adventure vehicle, family or no family, love at first sight is rare. Maybe not impossible, but certainly rare. When we bought this 2005 Nissan Frontier Crew Cab, we also had a 2002 bright red Jeep. So I wasn't sure, really, how I'd get along with this new truck. But we drove it home and went about the business of, oh, slowly tweaking some things to make it suitable for our style of travel while adhering to the old wisdom: "Pay no attention to anything not nailed down."
I'm sure there are several lovely ladies out there who see the affection between a dude and his truck and think, "Can that stupid thing shave its legs and look half as good as I do in a skirt? Didn't think so. Neither can the truck."
Conversely, I know more than two or three dudes who want nothing more in life than a pretty lady under his arm, a complete set of 2.4 kids in the backyard, and a Toyota Hilux in the driveway. It's the trifecta of perfection . . .
A mother and son get around on two wheels at University of Arizona
Progress comes in many forms, and it seems like more people riding bicycles is a reasonable sign of it. Michael Mckisson of TucsonVelo.com, who let us share this photo, just posted a report that bike commuting for 2010 in Tucson, Arizona saw an impressive resurgence by 58 percent from 1.9 percent in 2009 to 3 percent in 2010. This also moved Tucson to the 6th position on the list of top U.S. bicycle commuting cities . . .
Surfing, skiing, riding bikes, and climbing. These are the outdoor pursuits that come easier to the little ones than many of us realize. That is until we see our kids give them a shot. That's when we're delighted and surprised, or surprisingly delighted, to see them try, maybe fall a bit, but also get back up and keep going with no shortage of stoke. This video should really get you excited. Watch little Jaime. He's just 4 years old and cranks 5.10b in the gym on lead.
My buds bombed my inbox a few times this summer. Several of them hit the backroads of the American west on solo trips, just Dad and the kids. Nearly every one told me some variation of this: "Just got home, bro! I'm beat, exhausted, dirty, smelly, didn't get enough sleep, didn't rest enough, it was more work than it was relaxation, totally kicked my ass, but I'm looking forward to doing that again!"
They so perfectly summed up parenthood, didn't they?
