Solitude, Backpacking and the Art of Leadership

Solitude is not the same as loneliness. It is only when we long for company that we feel lonely. It is as if our life consists of many pieces of music, each in various stages of composition. Sometimes we are content with the music we have but sometimes we become aware of our loneliness only […]

Eulogy to my Hiking Boots

The time has come for me to live and you to die and we both know which is best. Your waxed form never again to face the thudding Sierra nor the blistering desert. Never again to feel the living earth nor the hellish hail. My friends, your wizened and cracked faces bring comfort, but a […]

Being Alone With Style

I used to think having style was about how one appeared to others, something that extroverts needed to know about, not nerdy introverts like myself. However, style is more than just fashion, it’s the total way we express our inner being outwardly, whether it be clothes, accessories, speech or how we carry ourselves. Strangely enough, I […]

How Many Things Don’t You Want?

Because life is simpler in the wilderness, most people learn quickly that taking too much gear with them on, say, a backpacking trip, is dysfunctional and potentially life threatening. With diligent planning the solutions are usually obvious. For example, if you are feeling cold in the wilderness you can put on every single piece of […]

The Mountain Of Truth

One of my favorite fictional characters is “Doc” in John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row”. Not many people know that Doc was based on the real-life figure of Ed Ricketts who categorized specimens from tide pools and then sold them to schools and collectors. Ricketts was an interesting personality in his own right. His significance in marine […]

Whisky’s For Drinking, Water’s For Fighting.

Whenever I do some serious backpacking I’m reminded of the central importance of water to our existence, particularly here in the American West. The earliest articulate description of the problem was made by Colonel John Wesley Powell (1834-1902), the famous ethnologist and geologist who was the first to run the Colorado River through the Grand […]

Playing The Game Of Life

During a long career as a financial planner, I have had the privilege of looking through a window into the intimate lives of hundreds of individuals. Many of these have played the game of life with consummate skill and have achieved considerable success in their chosen endeavors, both financial and non-financial. However, it is also clear […]

The Backpacker’s Guide To Wealth

Having just returned from a few days backpacking in the Superstition Mountain Wilderness in Arizona, please forgive me for waxing lyrical about the unlikely connection between backpacking and wealth. The primary goal of backpacking is to survive a trip to places that are often difficult or impossible to get to by any other means than […]