America’s Best Backpacking and Outdoor Adventures
Sierra Designs Fireside Down Bootie
$70, 15 oz. (men’s medium)
Sizes: men’s S-XL, women’s S-XL
sierradesigns.com
When you’re carrying everything on your back to a backcountry yurt or camping in winter conditions, the matter of finding appropriate yurt/camp footwear can be thorny: You want something really warm, not heavy or bulky, and with an outsole that grips snow so that you don’t take an epic digger while walking to the privy. The Fireside Down Bootie fits the bill perfectly.
By Michael Lanza
The snowcoach rumbles away, leaving us in a wintry silence disturbed only by a slight breeze and the gastrointestinal emissions of a supervolcano that last let out a really big one 640,000 years ago. Back then, it ejected about 240 cubic miles of rock and dust into the sky. Today, as seems always the case with these things, it just sounds a little rude and smells badly.
By Michael Lanza
Fat, perfect snowflakes pour down in a silent, frozen torrent from a blank white page of sky, as if the mountains are inside a Christmas snow globe that someone just shook vigorously. Powder lays several feet deep on the ground and smothers the tall ponderosa pines, looking like dozens of clean, white mittens on their boughs. No wind stirs the still air, and it’s not too cold. The quiet could drown out any negative thoughts.
It’s the kind of day that can make you wish winter lasted all year.
National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis calls climate change “the greatest threat to the integrity of the national park system that we’ve ever faced.”
In an exclusive interview with The Big Outside for my book on parks and climate change, he talks about how the National Park Service is responding to the climate threat, and the possibility of employing drastic measures like irrigating giant sequoia trees.
On a rocky beach during a five-day sea kayaking trip in Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park, I demonstrate how to stake out a tent using stones when the ground won’t accept stakes.