At times it seems like the earth is so upset about what happened to the American buffalo that it literally vomits up the remains. It鈥檚 amazing how bones continue to pop out of the ground. I found my first skull in 1999, poking up from the soil at 9,000 feet above sea level in the mountains of southwest Montana. Radiocarbon dating placed the year of the animal鈥檚 death at around 1770, a time when there were still perhaps 30 million of the animals on the American landscape.

Back then the famed hunter Daniel Boone was still encountering buffalo, now known to scientists as Bison bison, as far east as Kentucky and North Carolina. Native Americans living in the vicinity of where I found my skull were largely unaware of the Europeans advancing toward them from that direction. Most had probably heard of white men but had yet to see one. Certainly they couldn鈥檛 have imagined that these strange people would exterminate the herds they鈥檇 relied on for hundreds of generations in just over a century.

I keep finding more and more bones. I found buffalo vertebrae eroding from the banks of the Yellowstone River, with the absurdly long spinous process that gives the animal the distinctive hump on its back. Then I found two skulls in a Yellowstone tributary鈥攐n different days, but not more than a mile apart. One was just the upper-right quadrant of a skull, tipping out of the river鈥檚 west bank. The other was nearly complete, lying flush with the river cobbles in ankle-deep water. When I lifted it up, I was surprised to find a half-dozen juvenile crayfish occupying its sinus cavities.

A month later I would find myself in Fort Benton, Montana, north of the drainage divide that separates the Yellowstone and Upper Missouri Rivers. I was there to be interviewed for the latest project by the documentarian Ken Burns, titled 听premiering on PBS on October 16. Through a career spanning more than four decades and around 40 films, Burns has been doing his own form of bone digging, unearthing the stories that shaped America鈥檚 identity and, at times, haunted its soul. In searching for lessons about America鈥檚 relationship to its wildlife, the complex and centuries-long story of the bison鈥檚 near extinction is indeed fertile ground for Burns to excavate.

Burns told me that he and his team considered the subject of the American buffalo for 30 years before making the film. He recalls giving the film鈥檚 writer, Dayton Duncan, the gift of a tanned buffalo hide back in the 1990s. (Duncan鈥檚 writing credits include the Burns docs Country Music, The Dust Bowl, The National Parks, and Lewis and Clark.) 鈥淪ome films take a long time to incubate,鈥� Burns told me. He said that he keeps dozens of ideas in his head at all times. He resisted my question about how he prioritizes them, because he said that 鈥減rioritize鈥� implied an organized mind. Rather, he compared his ideas to the numbered Ping-Pong balls in a lottery machine. They bounce around in your head, he said, 鈥渁nd then one drops down to your heart.鈥�

It says a lot about the richness of the subject that you can make a two-part, four-hour documentary on the American buffalo without saying much about the animals themselves. The evolutionary history of the species, which spans millions of years and multiple continents, gets less than a minute of consideration in Burns鈥檚 film. There鈥檚 no mention of the animal鈥檚 incredible cold tolerance, which blows away that of a Tibetan yak. (In the 1970s, the director of the Alberta Veterinary Researchers Institute tried to find the point where a buffalo鈥檚 metabolic rate increased in response to the cold. It was still decreasing at minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit, as cold as they could get the room.)

Or of the species鈥� propensity to suffer staggering numbers of deaths even in the absence of any humans: two thousand of the animals expired in the mud of the Platte River in 1867; a quarter-mile-long pile was stacked by a tornado near the Arkansas River; so many were killed by a Wyoming prairie fire in 1864 that Sioux warriors had a hard time getting their horses through the carnage; and approximately ten thousand drowned in Canada鈥檚 Saskatchewan River in 1829.

Instead, the documentary is a human tale hiding inside a film about animals. 鈥淚t鈥檚 the story of us,鈥� said Burns. 鈥淏oth uppercase, as in the U.S., and lowercase, as in us humans.鈥�

The post The American Buffalo Documentary by Ken Burns Looks at the Slaughter鈥攁nd Salvation鈥攐f Bison appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

It鈥檚 tempting for those of us who love the outdoors to think of ourselves as belonging to one of two groups. There鈥檚 my own crew of sportsmen and women, known as the hook-and-bullet crowd; and then there鈥檚 the outdoor recreationists or 鈥渘onconsumptive users,鈥� a term for hikers, climbers, kayakers, birders, mountain bikers, and others who might enjoy being around wild creatures without ever eating one for dinner.

From cold shoulders at the trailhead to outright hostility, the tension between these groups can be traced back to at least 1903, when the preservationist John Muir asked President Theodore Roosevelt, a dedicated hunter, when he was going to get beyond 鈥渢he boyishness of killing things鈥濃�攁 glib question to put to a man whose hands-on relationship with nature later inspired him to protect about 230 million acres of American land.

Even today, while I spend as much time and effort advocating on behalf of wildlife habitat as I do hunting in it, some people who spot me with my rifle are never going to imagine anything but a callous hick who inflicts suffering on animals while littering backcountry roads with beer cans. Of course, the stereotypes run both ways. While a professional nature photographer may advocate for conservation through their work, a hunter may view them as profiting from wildlife without financially contributing to federal and state conservation programs, the latter of which are funded primarily through the purchase of and the collection of excise taxes levied against guns, ammo, archery equipment, and fishing supplies. In 2017, these fees added up to over $2.7 billion.

Such divisions are especially seductive in today鈥檚 fractured political climate of red versus blue and rural versus urban, where we鈥檙e all busy wounding our enemies rather than collecting friends. But there鈥檚 never been a more important time for hunters and anglers and the outdoor-recreation community to come together for conservation. By doing so, we can shift our focus to common foes who would like to undo the legacies of both Roosevelt and Muir by privatizing our public lands, stripping away our access to public waterways, and opening up our 颅remaining bastions of pristine wilderness to industrial development.听

This call might sound like kumbaya bull颅shit unless you consider a couple of well-known case studies that demonstrate the power of unity. The first happened in early 2017, when Utah congressman Jason Chaffetz introduced H.R. 621, the . The bill would have required the federal government to sell off millions of acres of public land in ten western states. The hook and bullet crowd and outdoor recreationists were both apoplectic that someone would want to reduce the acreage of federally protected lands where we鈥檙e free to hunt, fish, climb, bike, and hike. Protesters coalesced under , and the movement grew to a ferocious rallying cry on social media. Within days, Chaffetz posted that he was withdrawing the bill. Normally a suit and tie kind of fella, the congressman appeared in his photo decked out in a camo hat and jacket and cradling a hunting dog.

Case study number two: In April 2017, President Trump ordered interior secretary Ryan Zinke to review 27 national monuments created or expanded after 1996, with an eye toward reducing their size or repealing their status. The move sparked a firestorm of outrage from many of the same organizations that protested H.R. 621. Yes, Trump axed a combined two million acres from Bears Ears and Grand Staircase鈥揈scalante National Monuments in Utah. But there was a hidden upside to the outcry that is rarely mentioned: a partial win for conservationists.

Remember, President Trump had ordered Secretary Zinke to review 27 national monuments, not two. Some of those were certainly red herrings, but others were at risk. 鈥淭here were definitely other monuments they intended to reduce, including Organ Mountains鈥揇esert Peaks,鈥� says New Mexico senator Martin Heinrich. But insiders say that Zinke was surprised by the breadth and intensity of the pushback and acted accordingly. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 want to make light of the reductions that did occur,鈥� says Whit Fosburgh, president and CEO of the , a nonprofit group for sportsmen and women. 鈥淏ut it certainly would鈥檝e been a lot worse if sportsmen and the outdoor community hadn鈥檛 raised their voices the way that they did.鈥�

What鈥檚 it going to take to see more and bigger wins? First, we need to make sure that our disagreements don鈥檛 bleed over into areas where we鈥檙e aligned. You and I might not see eye to eye on removing Endangered Species Act protection from grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (I support it) or revamping existing law to allow mountain bikes into federally designated wilderness (I鈥檓 against it). But we should view those disagreements as luxuries that come from having a wealth of wildlife and pristine landscapes for people to experience. If we lose the more important fight around defending those ecosystems in the first place, the arguments become moot.

Second, the holier-than-thou attitudes and territoriality need to end. Over the past 80 years, hunters and anglers have funded billions of dollars鈥� worth of vital conservation work, and many of us have cultural ties to the land that go back generations. That hardly means we have a greater claim to wildlands or wildlife than anyone else. If you鈥檙e in a situation where a hiker spooked your deer, you鈥檝e got it all wrong: the hiker spooked our deer. Likewise, nonhunters need to recognize the validity of regulated hunting and fishing, even if some of those practices might seem personally off-putting. Sure, hunters remove limited numbers of animals from the landscape for personal use. But with proper management practices and good habitat, those animals are back again the next year. If you strip away someone鈥檚 connection to the landscape, you risk losing their support as well.

Third, we need to start talking more. Some dialogue is already taking place. In April, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard got up in front of a gathering of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers members in Boise, Idaho, to celebrate public lands and told a couple of stories about hunting doves and eating venison. In July, Chouinard and Land Tawney, the president and CEO of BHA, cowrote an calling for alignment among hunters and anglers and outdoor recreationists. Likewise, Fosburgh has moved the needle on conservation issues by working with unlikely allies, including the Audubon Society and the Environmental Defense Fund. Regrettably, these interactions make some people uneasy. BHA caught flack from some of my fellow hunters, who were angry at the group for giving voice to people who might not be 100 percent aligned with their views.

Politicians get nervous about these alliances, too. They鈥檙e comfortable pissing off 49 percent of their constituency, but they can鈥檛 afford to piss off 51 percent. And they especially can鈥檛 afford to ignore the money. Hunters and anglers spend over $63 billion annually in pursuit of their passions. Wildlife watchers contribute some $30 billion. Skiers, snowboarders, and other snow-sports enthusiasts throw down $73 billion. Trail-sports folks shell out more than $200 billion. The total spending of outdoor enthusiasts is approaching a formidable $900 billion. Collectively, our economic footprint should be able to kick down the doors of the partisan safe havens where politicians go to do bad things.

And there are plenty of bad things brewing. In June, Utah senator Mike Lee the public-lands system that we know today. He described it as existing for an 鈥渦pper-crust elite,鈥� which is surprising given the 331 million visits to national parks last year and the 72 percent of hunters who pursue game on public lands in the West. There are plenty of politicians on both sides of the aisle who respect the sanctity of our protected landscapes, and they need to be rewarded with campaign support and votes as we head to the polls this November.

Likewise, we need to be forceful in our insistence that the Land and Water Conservation Fund be permanently reauthorized with dedicated funding. This piece of legislation from 1964 diverts money from oil and gas leases on offshore federal property into a fund that鈥檚 used for recreational access to public lands and waters across the nation. It鈥檚 also one of our most important tools for conserving fish and wildlife. The fund was thrown a temporary three-year lifeline in 2015, but that expired on September 30, 2018. While some long-awaited movement for its reauthorization has recently been passed in committee, Congressional leaders have yet to move a package forward for consideration by the full House and Senate.

The list goes on. With issues ranging from the ill-advised Pebble Mine near Alaska鈥檚 Bristol Bay to sage grouse recovery in the American West to Everglades restoration on the Florida peninsula, there鈥檚 plenty of room for sportsmen and women and outdoor recreationists to sing as a chorus rather than as lone voices crying out from the wilderness.听

Contributing editor Steven Rinella is the host of , available on Netflix.

*The paragraph about the Land and Water Conservation Fund has been updated to reflect the most recent news.

The post Hikers: Stop Hating on Hunters appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

Playing the Field: Be On the Lookout

Sparks fly in the strangest places

Whenever I tell the story of how Sara and I fell for each other, it sounds like a lie. Sometimes I rein in the details鈥攏ot because they鈥檙e false, but -because I know they appear to be. Like the part with the volcano. The part with the volcano always tips it from crazy to unbelievable.

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We鈥檇 been in the Amazon for a week, in northern Ecuador, dodging bullet ants, swimming with pink dolphins, fishing for piranhas. Friends, platonic, since childhood. On what was supposed to be the final day of our trip, we emerged from the jungle on the outskirts of Lago Agrio, a little oil town just south of the Colombian border, where we planned to drag our grimy backpacks onto a turboprop and fly to Quito. We already had two seats booked on a flight.

Walking the road toward town, we smel-led the burning tires before we saw them. There were several smoking piles and hundreds of protestors. As we got closer, a few of them started chanting that they should throw the gringos into the fire. Sara鈥檚 Spanish was rusty, and she asked me what they were saying. I told her I鈥檇 tell her later.

The airport was shut down, as were all major roads. Foreign oil companies had bled the area for decades, giving little in return, and the locals were fed up. Most of the nearby wells and pipelines had just been sabotaged, cutting into Ecuador鈥檚 oil output. We found a cheap hotel with a nervous desk clerk and an empty room and waited for the inevitable crackdown.

The military arrived. We watched the clashes from our window, saw Molotoved banks burn, inhaled lungfuls of tear gas. At some point we discovered what I imagine has always been true: when things fall apart, people fall together.

As chaos subsided, we tried to get out of town. We hitched a ride with a cop, then thought better of it when we saw a police car in flames. We called our embassies鈥攕he has Canadian citizenship鈥攂ut they couldn鈥檛 do anything. Eventually we found a television news crew that was determined to get its footage back to Quito, and we asked if we could tag along. They said we could. The protestors let them through. They wanted their message out.

The last hurdle was a partially dismantled bridge. We stopped and hauled just enough of its scattered pieces of steel back into place. As our vehicle inched across, I looked up the riverbed and saw that we were on the flanks of a volcano鈥擡l Reventador鈥攁nd that it was in the process of reven-tando, belching smoke and ash.

That was 11 years ago. The short-lived Lago Agrio uprising had only a modest effect on world oil prices, but it changed our worlds completely.

Our daughter just turned ten.

Luke Dittrich is the author of .

Getting Serious: Stay the Course

Relationships demand compromise. But always hold on to your dangerous habits.

When I started dating my wife, Katie, I ached for her from my knees to my throat. My desire to keep her close tempted me to cancel trips, tell my buddies to buzz off, and turn down jobs that I鈥檇 normally be thrilled to get.

A specific recollection has me climbing into the nosebleed section of a giant Sitka spruce that was leaning over my friend鈥檚 home in order to knock out the top with a chainsaw. I鈥檇 done this a bunch of times while working as an arborist during graduate school. I always loved the thrill of riding that bucking tree amid the rush of air created by the severed trunk racing toward a collision with the earth. But this time, as I inched my way up, I suffered a collection of worries about a climbing rope that suddenly seemed vulnerable and insufficient. One wrong move with my chainsaw or an errant placement of my climbing spurs and I might not live to touch Katie鈥檚 thigh again. The only sensible thing to do was rappel down and leave the tree to some sucker who was less in love.

But I kept climbing. I was driven by thoughts of many friends who had given up some vital part of themselves in the early stages of a relationship鈥攕olo climbs, annual fishing trips, plans to cross the continent on a bike鈥攁nd their girlfriends grew to love them in the absence of such things. Later, when my friends tried to resume their old behaviors, they realized that they had inadvertently placed them out of reach. A buddy of mine describes this phenomenon as 鈥渢he screwing you get for the screwing you got.鈥�

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That鈥檚 not good for anyone鈥攏ot for you, your girlfriend, or your relationship. When Katie and I were going through that love-drunk phase, I kept right on doing extended hunts in the mountains of Alaska and traveling to some of the remotest corners of the world for work. Instead of feeling threatened by these activities, she learned to take pride in my ability to navigate danger. 鈥淚 want my guy to be capable,鈥� she鈥檇 say, 鈥渁nd to remain dedicated to what he鈥檚 doing even in the face of big risks.鈥�

Just don鈥檛 push it to the point of selfishness. Katie knows that I鈥檓 not carousing in bars at night. She knows that she can count on me in tough times. She knows that our family is my top priority. Because of all that, she鈥檚 OK with me turning up in the top of a big tree, attached to life only by a thin rope. When I come down, it鈥檚 like our first date all over again.

Contributing editor Steven Rinella is the author of .

Making the Commitment: No Risk, No Reward

The best way to show your willingness to go the distance? Follow them anywhere.

It鈥檚 only three miles, I told him. You can swim three miles. I鈥檝e got some fins in your size, and the group stops every 500 yards. The water鈥檚 warm! Usually there isn鈥檛 much current. Right now the Southern Hemisphere is quiet, and the Northern Hemisphere hasn鈥檛 kicked in yet, so there won鈥檛 be any swell. We鈥檒l see turtles! Fish. Manta rays. Across the coral reefs it鈥檚 a kaleidoscopic trip, and in the deep water鈥� well, you can still see the bottom. You鈥檒l love it! You鈥檒l be fine.

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He was game. He was from Manhattan by way of northern Italy, in Hawaii for the first time, and he had flown to the middle of the Pacific Ocean to visit me. We were a new couple, feeling our way through early turbulence and geographic complications, and more than anything, I wanted him to stay for a while. In matters of the heart, I鈥檝e learned that it pays to address the heart directly, so I set out to share what I love most: Maui鈥檚 offshore waters.

Here鈥檚 what I didn鈥檛 share: that a thriving population of tiger and oceanic whitetip sharks love these waters as much as I do.

Two years earlier, in fact, while swimming the same course, three friends and I ran into a feeding 13-foot tiger. I鈥檝e seen my share of large marine life, and this was for sure the crankiest. A tattered sea turtle with a chunk out of its shell lay below us as we treaded helplessly, watching the shark roll its eyes back, tuck in its pectoral fins, and prepare to attack. But something gave the animal pause, and after a few long, menacing minutes, it snatched up the sea turtle, gave the carcass a warning shake, and swam slowly away.

Since then there have been other shark encounters around here, several bites and two fatalities. I didn鈥檛 see the upside in mentioning this. We waded out from the beach, adjusted our goggles. I was nervous. This was a moment of reckoning.

Until now we鈥檇 gotten along easily in our fledgling relationship, but reality would eventually descend鈥攁nd here was a dose of it. Could I love someone who didn鈥檛 handle himself well in the ocean? The short answer was no. But I also realized that it鈥檚 a pretty tall order to ask someone from New York City to plunge into 70-foot-deep salt water and stay there for two hours comfortably.

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My worries were wasted. He swam well; if anything, he鈥檇 understated his skill. The ocean was crystalline that day, everything glowing and luminous. But when we arrived at the turnaround point, a rocky cliff studded with sea caves, the water abruptly turned oily and murky. Looking down, I saw a severed ahi head lying on the seafloor and realized, with a jolt, that the fishermen on the rocks above had been chumming. A lot.

Before I could suggest that we get out of there, another swimmer yelled: 鈥淪hark!鈥� We ducked our heads in time to see a ten-foot oceanic whitetip, sleek as a fighter jet, swim past us right below the surface. The shark鈥檚 mouth was open, teeth clearly visible, and it was heading out to sea as if spooked. 鈥淚 think we鈥檇 better go,鈥� I said. He agreed, and in that moment I saw that he hadn鈥檛 panicked, hadn鈥檛 freaked out, and that, if anything, he was awed by the whitetip鈥攚hich, by the way, is one of the more aggressive models. We got engaged six months later. Now when he tells the story of his first open-water swim in Hawaii, there鈥檚 pride in his voice, and happiness. A man who loves the wildest fish in the sea? That鈥檚 what I call a keeper.

Susan Casey is the author of .

Going Long: Lean On Me

Whatever the trail throws at you, you can handle it step by step

The first date that my wife, Lisa, and I went on was a bug safari in Central Park in the summer of 1992. Dressed in khakis and penny loafers, we wandered the woods and hillsides with magnifying glasses and entomology books in hand. Two weeks later, we pitched a tent for three nights in Adirondack Park. Soon afterward, we camped in New York鈥檚 High Peaks Wilderness Area and hiked 5,344-foot Mount Marcy.

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As our relationship grew, our outings got more ambitious. Later that year, we strapped a canoe on top of Lisa鈥檚 Saturn and drove from Boston to Everglades National Park to paddle the 99-mile Wilderness Waterway. We conceived our first children鈥攖win girls鈥攚hile backpacking in Great Smoky Mountains National Park and eloped in the summer of 鈥�95, with Lisa gathering a bouquet of wildflowers and vegetables on the way to the courthouse in Lewisburg, West Virginia.

Some couples hike hand in hand. Not us. Lisa kicked my ass. She walked faster. She was never out of breath. And she always鈥攁nd I mean always鈥攑repared and packed better than I did. She was the quintessential adventure partner.

And then her body started falling apart. First to go was her shoulder. So we stopped doing triathlons together. A few years later, around 1998, she broke her right big toe. For some reason it never healed, and so while she could still hike glaciers in Greenland faster than me, each of us carrying a twin on our back, she was hurting every other step. Yet she soldiered on because it was our thing. We were the outdoors couple.

And then it got worse. By 2007, she started to experience excruciating pain in her hips on simple walks on our neighborhood nature trail. We didn鈥檛 know it, but she had a hered颅itary condition, shared with her brother and two sisters, in which the tissues that held her joints together were simply no longer strong enough for the job. Between the four siblings, they鈥檝e now had four hips, five shoulders, and three knees replaced.

Watching Lisa hobble around our house, first on a cane and then on a walker, I assumed our outdoor life together was over. But about two years back鈥攁nd I remember the exact look, words, and location鈥攕he turned to me and said, 鈥淚 miss being in the outdoors with you and the kids too much. I want to go on hikes with you until the day we die.鈥�

We learned that her 鈥済ood鈥� hip had end-stage osteoarthritis, and her bad hip was far worse. Her doctor couldn鈥檛 believe the destruction鈥攂one had been grinding on bone for quite a while. Last winter she got dual hip-replacement surgery. Then, in the spring, a reconstructed big toe. Her right second toe was so disfigured by arthritis that she chose to have it amputated.

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A few months into her recovery, it鈥檚 a relief just to be able to walk with her to the end of the driveway to get the paper. Or to arrive hand in hand, out of breath, at an outdoor wedding. We have a tough climb ahead, but as long as there鈥檚 a trail before us, we鈥檙e 颅going to follow it, together.

Correspondent W. Hodding Carter is the author of and .

听

My husband, Steve, and I have been living and skiing in northern New Mexico for 16 years. We鈥檝e had epic powder season, when we skied Taos nearly every weekend and drought seasons when we had to settle for skinning up our local ski area and carving wide wale. Steve scored some great backcountry seasons, with hut trips to British Columbia. Then I had pregnant seasons (hiking Kachina Peak at 5 months along鈥攎aybe not the wisest idea?) and newborn seasons, when my ski days were curtailed by ravenous infants and, when I did venture farther afield, my pump was part of the package. I鈥檝e expressed milk in ski area parking lots, cafeteria bathrooms, and SnoCats, but never鈥攖hank God鈥攐n a chairlift.

Now that our two daughters are emerging from babyhood and are learning to ski, we鈥檙e having kid seasons. We鈥檙e enormously lucky to have a decent resort just 25 minutes up the road, but it鈥檚 still a schlep to get girls and gear to the lifts, and on the best days, we only manage to sneak in few runs ourselves. So all winter we鈥檝e been fantasizing about getting out of the area and into the backcountry, where鈥攁way from the vacationing crowds, the lure of hot chocolate in the lodge, the occasional parking lot tantrum鈥攕kiing as a family would be simpler, more relaxing. Or so we thought.

听

Choosing the right spot was key. There are plenty of backcountry huts and yurts throughout the Rockies, but with a one-year-old and three-year-old, we had very specific criteria: We needed something within a few miles of a road, as our range would be limited by how far we could carry them and all our gear. The terrain had to be low-angle, with low or no risk of avalanche. Ideally, the hut would be big enough to accommodate another family. And we didn鈥檛 want to have to spend a ridiculous amount of time driving to get there. All told, our requirements were a little daunting, and I was starting to think we鈥檇 be better off waiting until the kids were older.

Then by chance I found it: a lone yurt at , deep in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, about an hour northeast of Taos. The yurt鈥攁 circular, wood-and-canvas shelter, in only its second season鈥攊s only a mile from the base area, accessible by groomed and rolling cross-country ski trails. EFXC鈥檚 website describes it as having woodstove for heat, a propane stove for cooking, all the necessary cooking gear, an outhouse, and bunks for six (BYO sleeping bags). It sounded ideal for us and another family, who also have two girls under four. I figured we鈥檇 put the babies in portable, backcountry cribs, and the rest of us would crash on the bunks. Best of all, EFXC rents ski pulks specifically designed for carrying kids, and we could pay an extra $25 to have our gear transported via snowmobile to the yurt and back. I checked the calendar: Not surprisingly, only a couple weekend nights were still available, so I booked one on the spot.

It had all the makings of a perfect starter yurt trip.

Last Saturday morning, we left Santa Fe at the tail end of a storm, with fog obscuring the mountains and three inches of wet snow on the ground, but by the time we reached the Rio Grande Gorge, the roads were dry and the skies were clearing. It was turning out to be a classic March day in New Mexico: snow one moment, sun the next, all the more beautiful for how moody and unpredictable it was. After a two-and-a-half hour drive, we arrived at Enchanted Forest around lunchtime and spent the better part of an hour unloading and repacking our sizeable pile of gear and food. As we鈥檝e learned from summer river trips, it鈥檚 almost impossible to travel light in the backcountry with toddlers and babies鈥攅ven more so in the winter, when they need lots of warm layers, bulky boots, and for our three year old Pippa, a last-minute pair of borrowed XC skis.

Mush! photo: Blair Beakley

We debated using the snowmobile鈥攖he purists (e.g., fathers) among us argued it would be just as easy to haul the kids and then come back for the gear鈥攂ut eventually, practical minds prevailed, and Mike, the head ski patroller, backed the sled behind our car and we started piling it full of stuff. Good thing, because putting four wiggly toddlers into two small ski pulks鈥攑icture a bike trailer, only smaller and with two plastic grooves instead of wheels鈥攖urned out to be trickier than we thought. One-year-old Maisy was delighted to play in the pulk, but when we stuck her sister in beside her and zipped up the clear plastic cover, it turned into an instant mosh pit. Ditto for our friends Stewart and Blair, whose 11-month-old baby Grace began wailing loudly beside three-year-old Franny. Time for Plan B: our .

We鈥檇 strapped the little girls on our backs and the bigger girls in the pulks and were finally ready to shove off, when Geoff, EFXC鈥檚 owner, ambled out of the homey base lodge to assess our rigs. 鈥淥h we don鈥檛 usually allow people to ski with kids on their backs,鈥� he told us. The casual way he said this belied the bomb he dropped next. 鈥淚t鈥檚 too dangerous. There have been eight fatalities in the last decade.鈥� He paused meaningfully to let the horror set in. 鈥淚 was a first responder on one of them.鈥� I looked at Blair, who has been my partner on numerous ski outings with babies in tow, and I could tell she was thinking what I was thinking: All those times I鈥檝e skied pregnant or with a baby strapped to my back鈥攈ow could I be such terrible, careless mother?!

But Geoff wasn鈥檛 done yet. 鈥淭hink about it: a baby鈥檚 head is like a watermelon,鈥� he went on, 鈥渁nd if your skis slide out from under you, bam.鈥� He made a slapping motion with one hand, and in one frenzied contortion, Blair shrugged the baby pack off her pack and put Grace into the safety of the pulk. Maisy was still protesting, so I decided to keep her on my back, at least for the long gradual climb to the yurt. After all, Mike had just told me my backcountry skis鈥攚ider than typical XC skis, with metal edges鈥攚ere 鈥渁 little overkill鈥� for the groomed trails. 鈥淚f you get nervous,鈥� Steve said pragmatically, 鈥測ou can put her in the sled.鈥�

Setting off, Powderpuff Trail climbs gently from the lodge, and pretty soon Geoff鈥檚 message of doom was drowned out by Gracie鈥檚 desperate screeching. Behind me, I could feel Maisy鈥檚 head slump on my shoulder and all 23 pounds of her turn to dead weight. She was asleep. I could just make out Pippa鈥檚 bright eyes and huge grin through the fogged-up plastic cover of her pulk. With the help of the trail map, we navigated half a dozen junctions along EFXC鈥檚 more than 30k of trails. The website was reporting a 30-inch base, but in some sunny places, it skied more like five, with rocks and patches of grass peeking through along the edges. Still, it was undeniably gorgeous, and liberating, to be out there in the fresh air and stillness of the afternoon, pulling the girls under our own power, free from our mountain of stuff and life鈥檚 constant yammering distractions, at least for a little while.

The yurt, when we arrived after half an hour, sat in a picturesque clearing beside the trail; to the south, you could make out the high snowy ridge of Wheeler Peak, the highest in New Mexico. Even from some distance, I could tell it was going to be the smallest yurt I鈥檇 ever seen (never mind that it was the only yurt I鈥檇 ever seen, up close). Inside, our neatly stacked gear took up half the place; the rest consisted of two bunk beds, a tiny folding table, four chairs piled in the corner, a small wooden counter with a two-burner camping stove, a lantern dangling from the ceiling, a miniature wood stove, and a narrow shelf stacked with Sorry! and Yahtzee. It wasn鈥檛 immediately clear to me how we鈥檇 all fit inside, or where we would sleep, but we crammed in anyway, nervously admiring the view through the skylight and trying not to step on each other, especially baby Grace, who would more or less live on the floor all weekend.

We laid out lunch of hummus and wraps on the table and shooed the girls outside to take advantage of the daylight hours and build a snow cave. Then Blair and I ducked out to ski a lap around the south end of the trail system to an overlook called Piece de Resistance, with views south towards Wheeler Peak and Gold Hill, above Taos Ski Valley. Afterwards, we all went out for a walk, strapping Pippa into a pair of kiddy XC skis for the first time. I was expecting a spastic, wobbly-ankle debacle, but Pippa was surprisingly surefooted, herringboning up the steeper slopes and evening getting some glide.

Back at the yurt, Steve lit a fire, gave me explicit instructions to not let it go out, and skied off with Stewart into the late afternoon. Soon it would be dark, and suddenly the yurt felt very cold. It was hard to decide which was more urgent: get the kids into warm clothes or put dinner鈥攙egetarian chili Blair made ahead鈥攐n the stove. We scrambled to do both at once, layering the girls up in wool leggings and fleece while trying to light the burners, cajoling them to eat chili and cornbread cross-legged on the floor, jamming too-long logs into the woodstove, and taming the crazy mess of gear spilling onto every inch of yurt. Yeah, we were backcountry nesting. By the time the guys came back, the yurt had a vague air of order about it, the kids were fed, and hot chili for the rest of us was simmering on the stove鈥攁 fleeting moment of calm before the storm. Literally.

Trying to put four kids to bed in a space roughly the size of a bathroom isn鈥檛 something I鈥檇 wish upon my worst enemy, and even though the adults among us were far too preoccupied trying to settle squalling girls to say anything aloud, I know we were all thinking the same thing, and not for the first time that day: How could this possibly be worth it? Nearly two hours of musical kids and bunks and countless false alarm trips to the malodorous outhouse later, the kids were more or less asleep. And since there was nothing much for us to do but sit and whisper in the dark鈥擨 was most certainly not going to catch up on my New Yorker reading as I鈥檇 imagined鈥攚e all retreated to our bunks in various stages of emotional and physical disrepair.

Trust me when I say that the most essential piece of gear on a family yurt trip is a pair of earplugs. They鈥檒l take the edge off when your husband gets up repeatedly to shove wood in the stove and when the kid (yours) in the top bunk wails with a night terror (thankfully, Franny and Grace, model yurt citizens, slept through the hysteria). The only thing stranger than my inconsolable, half-asleep daughter thrashing on the top bunk was the flash of snow lightning that lit up the skylight and the clap of thunder that followed. Oh great, I thought, imagining our tiny canvas shelter being vaporized by the next strike, this is just what we need.

Next thing I knew, though, the faint light of dawn was streaking through the plastic windows and the children were beginning to chirp softly, like tree frogs in a Costa Rican dawn. All I could think was, thank God, we鈥檇 survived. 国产吃瓜黑料, the rogue midnight storm had dropped at half a foot of fresh snow, and the ponderosas glittered in white. There was the answer to our question: Yes, in the blinding light of a backcountry powder day, this was most certainly all worth it.

After breakfast, we went out for a family ski and got first tracks on fluffy, just-groomed trails. The older girls stood in the back of the pulks, musher-style, and Pippa broke out the XC skis for a bit, their peals of laughter breaking the powdery quiet. No one was out yet, and as we glided along through the silent, shining forest, I was struck by how, despite the obvious hassles, sleeping out in the backcountry is the only true way I know to slow time. Away from the over-stimulation of everyday routines, life really is so much simpler. In a 16-foot yurt, your only job of consequence is to keep the kids from killing each other or freezing to death. That, and fly through the trees on fast skis with fresh air in your lungs and sun on your face and people you love all around. Really, is there anything more important?

Top Ten Tips for Surviving Your First Yurt Trip with Kids

1. If you can, stay at least two nights, preferably three. It takes the same amount of prep as one, and the first night you鈥檒l be too busy working out the kinks to really relax. By the second, you鈥檒l have your system down and can focus on checking out.

2. Don鈥檛 forget earplugs.

3. Suck up your pride and take snow mobile assist if there is one. Definitely.

4. Bring more warm layers than you think you need, especially socks. Even with woodstoves, yurts can be chilly.

5. Pack slippers for all.

6. Borrow, rent, or BYO ski pulk. Chariot makes ski kits that will turn your bike trailer into a kiddy pulk. Otherwise, check out ($475), the classic, made-in-Utah sled that we used at EFXC.

7. Snowshoes are a great alternative to XC skiing if you鈥檙e worried about carrying kids on your back.

8. Bring or rent equipment for the kids, even if they鈥檝e never tried Nordic skiing. A backcountry base camp is the perfect low-pressure place to explore the feeling of gliding on edgeless skis. If they鈥檙e not into it, they can always play musher in the pulk or build snow caves.

9. Double check the size of the shelter before you book. Your gear will take up more floor space than you think, and a 16-foot diameter hut isn鈥檛 big enough for eight. A hut with a separate sleeping space will make for a more restful night for all.

10. Homemade banana bread from Alice Water鈥檚 Art of Simple Food is an instant tantrum tamer and easy no-cook breakfast when you want to feed the kids fast and get out for a ski.

Enchanted Forest Cross Country Ski Area, ; yurt rental, from $75 per night.

鈥擪atie Arnold

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If the doomsayers are right and we are headed toward a zombie apocalypse, I鈥檒l have a laugh from the grave about whoever eats me. Unless they cook my flesh to an internal temperature of 160 degrees Fahrenheit, they鈥檙e going to experience the same torture that I recently endured after enjoying a meal of undercooked black bear meat in central Alaska that was contaminated with the roundworm Trichinella spiralis. The parasites bred inside me and sent forth untold thousands of progeny to burrow through the walls of my vascular system and into my muscular tissue. The gastrointestinal issues were horrific, but not nearly so nasty as the muscle pain. It felt like a bad weight-lifting accident spread across my entire body. The Pepsi-colored urine that I was passing served as a visual aid to help me understand just how much hard-won muscle I was literally flushing down the toilet.听

The worms were just the latest invaders in a series of microscopic parasites and bacteria that have infiltrated my body in recent years. In terms of severity, the highlight of the run was a bout of Lyme disease, caused by bacteria transmitted through a tick bite that manifested with amnesia and concluded a few agonizing months later with a four-week round of intravenous antibiotics administered through a tube that ran from a hole in my arm to my heart. Preceding the Lyme was a complex case of giardia, an intestinal infection from parasites, that landed me in the emergency room twice in one day and then in a hospital bed for four nights. Following the Lyme was the trichinosis. The larvae of those worms now survive in my muscles, protected by calcified cysts. They have no way of harming me again, though they will make life hell for any creature that digests my uncooked flesh and thereby liberates the legions of pests.

Much of this trouble has come as an occupational hazard. I host a television series called on the Sportsman Channel that explores the world of hunting, wild foods, and adventure. I鈥檝e also had a lifelong interest in spending as much time outside as I can, and I鈥檓 never happier than when I鈥檓 off the grid at my tiny cabin in southeast Alaska, filleting halibut and salmon I caught with my brothers. This lifestyle has brought me up against all manner of threats, including a moose attack, a grizzly charge, and a couple of tussles with wild boars. But it鈥檚 the microscopic critters that have proven most effective at putting me on the ground. Trust me: anyone who ascribes to that old adage about not sweating the small stuff hasn鈥檛 spent much time outdoors.

Years ago, I went to a lecture by a mountaineer who had recently returned from Mount Everest. During his talk, he discussed a famous study from the late nineties in which researchers instructed subjects to watch a video of six people playing catch with two balls. The subjects were tasked with counting how many times the balls traded hands between the individuals, who were identified by black and white shirts. Meanwhile, in the video, a woman dressed in a gorilla suit walked through the middle of the game. Half of the subjects failed to see the gorilla, thanks to something that researchers describe as inattentional blindness, or a failure to perceive unexpected stimuli that are in plain sight. But the mountaineer offered his own interpretation: those who see the gorilla survive the mountain; those who don鈥檛, do not.听

I鈥檇 take that argument further and say that those of us who turn a blind eye to the little things we come across are also courting disaster. Granted, a giardia cyst is only about one-fiftieth the size of the period at the end of this sentence. The larvae of Trichinella spiralis are plenty small, too鈥攜ou can鈥檛 detect them with the naked eye. Trichinosis diagnoses must be reported to the local Department of Public Health, which asked me to provide a piece of the bear meat I鈥檇 eaten for testing, in order to verify the cause of my infection. It turns out that the meat contained about 360,000 larvae per pound. That it still looked delicious is a testament to the invisibility of the worms.听

Microthreats are hardly confined to the wilderness. From the common cold to the Ebola virus, various nasties could be waiting to pounce on you every time you shake someone鈥檚 hand. But in the outdoors, there鈥檚 this whole other league of bizarre and miniature predators desperately wanting to make the jump from the animal to the human world. You could go on for hours trying to name them all: Rocky Mountain spotted fever, leishmaniasis, rabies, malaria, cryptosporidium, hantavirus, tularemia, leptospirosis.听

I鈥檝e been around enough to have accumulated a basic understanding of most of these ailments, a fact that my wife, Katie, used against me when I contracted trichinosis. 鈥淵ou should be embarrassed,鈥� she said. 鈥淚 mean, you know about this kind of stuff!鈥� She raised a valid point, which is perhaps the funniest鈥攐r maybe the saddest鈥攑art of all this: I鈥檇 learned about every one of the diseases that I recently caught well in advance of catching them. In the case of trichinosis, I not only knew about the disease, but I had warned others about it through a book, published articles, and several MeatEater episodes.听

With giardia, I had gone so far as to read academic papers about the protozoa. What鈥檚 more, I鈥檇 already struggled with minor giardia infections on two separate occasions prior to the day that I contracted my most recent case, while filming in Arizona. On that morning, I was standing at the bottom of a canyon in the Galiuro Mountains after spending a waterless night camped on top of a high butte. I dipped a Nalgene bottle into a creek, filled it with some of the most beautiful water on the planet, and dropped in two iodine tablets. You鈥檙e supposed to wait about 15 minutes, but I gave it an impatient five and then chugged away.听

About a week later, I was filming a wild pig hunt in Northern California when things started to go seriously wrong in my gut. I carried on despite the rising discomfort and ended up getting a nice boar. But the pig must have been rolling in poison oak鈥攚ithin two days, I was covered in rashes from the waist up and running a fever, in addition to suffering from a case of giardia-induced diarrhea. A doctor put me on steroids for the rash, which wreaked havoc on my immune system and undoubtedly heightened the giardia鈥檚 effect on my intestines. Soon I was passing copious amounts of blood in a hospital bed. When I was released four days later, a doctor inquired about any 鈥減revention plans鈥� that I could use on upcoming outdoor adventures. I thought about the gorilla in the study. It wasn鈥檛 that I didn鈥檛 see this one coming, however small it was. But rather than move out of the way, I opted to let it walk up and beat me half to death.听

One thing I admire about the small stuff is how insidious it is. The delay that separates the infection date from the onset of symptoms can be weeks or months. If you look at things from the perspective of the disease, the time lapse is a shrewd strategy. For one thing, it makes diagnosis extremely tricky. When I got trichinosis, I was shooting an episode of MeatEater that involved taking a Navy SEAL officer on his first hunt. He wanted an intense experience, and I figured that hunting and eating bears in the western Alaska Range would suffice. In total, three crew members and I got sick. There are typically fewer than a dozen reported cases of trichinosis in the U.S. every year; I鈥檓 proud to know a significant percentage of this year鈥檚 victims. We ate the bear meat on June 6, but the symptoms didn鈥檛 hit until the Fourth of July. If we hadn鈥檛 been in touch through work e-mails, I don鈥檛 think we ever would have put it together. But knowing that we were all having the same experiences helped us narrow down the list of potential causes. Still, just try walking into a doctor鈥檚 office and explaining that you鈥檝e self-diagnosed a condition that鈥檚 about as relevant today as scurvy. Persuading someone to take you seriously is almost as annoying as the worms.听

Another result of delayed symptoms is that it makes the condition seem slightly more palatable. When you鈥檙e faced with a scenario that might cause you to get sick at some point in the future, it鈥檚 easier to take risks than if you could get sick right away. The day that I contracted Lyme disease, I was with a buddy in New York鈥檚 Westchester County, about a 45-minute drive from where I was living at the time. It鈥檚 one of the nation鈥檚 worst counties for the disease: the majority of the area鈥檚 black-legged ticks, which transmit the bacterium, are infected. It was June, which is the high season for humans to contract Lyme. I was walking through tall grass on trails made by white-tailed deer, which host the black-legged ticks. Yet I spent the day traipsing around on those trails without taking any meaningful precautions鈥攏o deet, no pant legs tucked into socks, no long sleeves鈥攂ecause I was intent on catching some bluegills from a local reservoir to make fish tacos for my family. Would I have behaved any differently if you had told me that 50 percent of the ticks in those woods were capable of rising up and smacking me on the head with a baseball bat? Absolutely.

A month later, I was sitting in my office, and suddenly I had no idea how I鈥檇 gotten there. I couldn鈥檛 remember waking up or leaving my house that day. I couldn鈥檛 account for the words written on my computer screen. When I tried to get home, I couldn鈥檛 remember the route. I called my wife, with difficulty, and she took me to the emergency room. Initially, I was diagnosed with something called transient global amnesia; however, a continuation of strange defects in my nervous system鈥攎ost notably a numbness in my legs that made it difficult to walk鈥攅ventually led to an accurate diagnosis of Lyme. The five-month recovery process included a $20,000 course of antibiotics. It鈥檚 worth mentioning that I didn鈥檛 catch a single bluegill that day in Westchester County.听

Not long ago, while filming in the jungles of Bolivia, I was stung on the ankle by a bullet ant鈥攁 gargantuan creature compared with the sorts of things I鈥檝e been talking about. On the Schmidt Pain Index, which rates insect stings, the bullet ant is the only one awarded a four-plus rating, the highest possible score. The entomologist , who created the index, aptly describes it as 鈥減ure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch nail grinding into your heel.鈥� To me it felt like being stung by a chicken-size wasp, with a deep and throbbing ache that ran from my toes to my knee. I squashed the guilty ant within seconds of it stinging me, not out of malice but to ensure it couldn鈥檛 hit me again. For the rest of the trip, I went out of my way to enjoy the sight of any bullet ant that I happened to encounter in the jungle. The species had earned my admiration.听

On the occasions that I鈥檝e been sick from microscopic tormentors, I鈥檝e tried to regard them in the same way that I regard dangerous animals and treacherous landscapes. But hard as I try, I can鈥檛 quite bring myself to love the little guys. I respect them, sure, but it鈥檚 like how a general respects an opposing force. It鈥檚 a respect that is tainted by a desire to see them cleansed from the face of the earth.听

But at what cost would the annihilation come, however unlikely it is? How differently would we perceive the outdoors if it weren鈥檛 for that great biodiversity of little bastards hiding in the water we drink, the food we eat, and the bugs that bite us? In the absence of risk, would we find contentment, or would everything taste and feel a little less exciting? In the words of the great conservationist Aldo Leopold, 鈥淚t must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.鈥澨�

I think back to that meal of black bear meat in Alaska. I can picture it perfectly: a collection of purplish red hunks of flesh suspended above the coals on willow skewers as smoke wafted from below and rain fell from above. Distracting me from the task of cooking was a large grizzly that had been hanging around south of camp. We鈥檇 been reveling in the presence of the big bear, but if he was going to show up for dinner I wanted to know well in advance. As soon as the outer surfaces of the meat achieved a nice mahogany color with charred accents, we all popped a few pieces in our mouths and then started the long hike back to the lake where we鈥檇 landed a week before on a float plane. Flying out of there, I was quick to miss the palpable sense of danger that makes me feel so gloriously alive when in the wilderness. But now I realize that such longings are completely unnecessary. There鈥檚 a good chance that some part of the wild is tagging along, hiding right inside of me. 听听 听

Contributing editor Steven Rinella () is the author of the forthcoming series .

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During my high-school and community-college years in western Michigan, I sold firewood to supplement my meager income from on-again, off-again construction work. I鈥檇 follow in the wake of commercial logging operations, sawing and splitting the unwanted hardwood “tops” that littered the forest after the saleable logs had been hauled away. I鈥檇 earn $95 a cord, delivered. It was hard work, which is why I had zero regrets when I left to attend graduate school. In a seemingly symbolic gesture, I traded my Husqvarna chainsaw for an 鈥�89 Ford Econoline that I used to flee my hometown for Montana.

Now I occasionally get nostalgic when I handle the gritty tools of my woodsman days. The sentiment came in mixed form when I picked up the , an outfit based in, of all places, Manhattan. With nearly two dozen options for decoratively painted handles and a head forged by fourth-generation ax makers in North Carolina, Best Made鈥檚 axes are intended as much for display as for use. On the one hand, I was insulted by the notion that such a tool would be built
for lookin鈥� instead of choppin鈥�.

But I soon discovered that this was the best-handling and most beautifully balanced ax that I had ever swung. And while I did consider hanging it over the fireplace, I opted instead for what any deskbound American would do: I walked outside and walloped a stump. And damn did it feel good to watch the chips fly.

Price: from $158

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We're living in the era of artisanal food. Everything that鈥檚 good is supposed to be organic and small-batch and preferably produced by a Manhattan refugee who left a high-stress job to make cheese on a Vermont farm where the cows sleep on hypoallergenic mattresses and are raised on a diet of Tibetan poetry and free-range alfalfa. In my own carnivorous way, I鈥檓 guilty of this same gastronomic high-mindedness. I once spent 10 days wandering the Patagonian countryside in search of the perfect grass-fed steak, and I鈥檝e engaged in the questionable practice of breeding pigeons in my basement in order to replicate the early-20th-century squab recipes of French master chef Auguste Escoffier. I also host a TV show on the in which I travel to remote locations to hunt for, cook, and eat wild game, often within feet of where it fell. But despite all my food-based travels, which have resulted in many sublime dining experiences, I have something to admit: many of my most memorable meals have been slurped from seven-ply laminated sacks of factory-produced freeze-dried food resurrected from its mummified state with an application of boiled pond water and usually a few dribbles from the end of my runny nose.

Freeze-dried mach and cheese ready for the trays.

Food is funnelled down onto trays in the Oregon Freeze Dry factory.

A vacuum chamber being defrosted.

The final product.

I like to brag that I鈥檝e eaten more freeze-dried food than any man living, which is probably a lie. What isn鈥檛 a lie is that I鈥檝e enjoyed every nibble, thanks to the mind-blowing ambience of the rugged places where I eat it. Take a recent day hunting mule deer in Montana, when I came stumbling down from a snowbound butte after 12 hours of nothing but energy-gel shots so hungry that I was sucking on the palm of my glove to extract the leathery flavor. Back at camp, I dug through my gear and found a bag of Mountain House spaghetti with meat sauce that I鈥檇 bought at a Walmart six months earlier and 2,000 miles away. The packet had been living alternately in my gear closet, my car, my duffel, the floor of a canoe, the inside of a tent, and, for the last 20 miles, the bottom of my backpack. It was all my frozen fingers could do to fire a Jetboil to melt some snow. I added the boiling water and voil脿. It certainly beat the campfire omelet my buddy would have made if his Nalgene full of cracked eggs hadn鈥檛 come open while he was trying to thaw them out in the foot of his sleeping bag. In that moment, I was feeling downright thankful that research scientists had found out how to make a surprisingly delicious food item that had spent some 20 hours inside an industrial sublimation chamber at temperatures and pressures equivalent to what you鈥檇 find in the mesosphere 40 miles above the Earth鈥檚 surface.

MENTION FREEZE-DRIED FOOD to your average American鈥攐ne whose meals are prepared exclusively in restaurants or home kitchens鈥攁nd their frame of reference is likely limited to astronaut feed. To their credit, it is as common to space flights as popcorn is to movie theaters. The first meal ever eaten on the surface of the moon, by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, included freeze-dried bacon squares and peaches. In fact, every manned mission ever launched by has carried freeze-dried food. NASA鈥檚 systems engineers appreciate the same qualities鈥攎inimal weight, resistance to spoilage, high nutritional value, and negligible preparation鈥攖hat have so endeared it to hardcore backcountry enthusiasts.

Despite its space-age connotations, freeze-dried food is one of many developments in man鈥檚 ancient quest for the perfect shelf-stable traveling grub. Jerky was probably the earliest manifestation of this desire; you can imagine its discovery happening many times, as early hominids stripped the preserved, air-dried remnants of meat from carcasses left behind by saber-toothed cats. The first Europeans to arrive in the New World were dining on meat and fish preserved in kegs of salt, and they encountered Native Americans who鈥檇 made long-lasting trail food by mixing shredded jerky with melted animal fat.

At some point along humanity鈥檚 road to modernity, freeze-dried food was likely developed by accident. Ancient Peruvians stored meat and potatoes on the mountaintops above the Incan city of Machu Picchu, where the cold, high-altitude climate was similar to the conditions created inside a modern freeze-drying chamber. While various tinkerers conducted laboratory experiments throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, the preservation technique didn鈥檛 achieve widespread use until World War II. Then, during what was essentially the greatest medical crisis ever experienced by humankind, health professionals began freeze-drying blood plasma and volatile serums such as penicillin that could be shipped overseas without the need for mobile refrigeration.

It wasn鈥檛 long before food engineers took note of the emerging technology. By 1963, began using freeze-dried fruit in its breakfast cereals. The next year, today鈥檚 largest diversified manufacturer of freeze-dried goods, , which makes 鈥攖he brand most aficionados of freeze-dried meals consider the best鈥攐pened its first plant in western Oregon. One of the company鈥檚 initial contracts was with the U.S. military. Special-operations units in Vietnam were suffering hindered mobility in the jungles due to the cumbersome, wet-packed C rations developed for World War II.

The answer to this dilemma was the Long Range Patrol ration, dubbed the LRP ration by troops. It was an 11-ounce pack containing accessories such as shrink-wrapped gum, instant coffee, and cigarettes, plus a 1,000-calorie entr茅e of standard American table fare鈥攃hicken and rice, spaghetti with meat sauce, chili con carne鈥攑acked inside a waterproof, olive drab envelope. Soldiers liked the LRPs because they could carry a meal in the hip pocket of their fatigues. By 1967, Oregon Freeze Dry had delivered more than nine million such meals to the military.

After reading a November 13, 1967, Newsweek article about LRP rations, REI founder Lloyd Anderson sent a personal letter to Oregon Freeze Dry congratulating it on the success of its new products and asking for a price list. By the time Oregon Freeze Dry launched its first retail product line in 1969, called Tea Kettle, American outdoor enthusiasts had already discovered the company鈥檚 military offerings through stateside Army-surplus outlets.

Today, Mountain House is the most widely available brand produced by any of the four major freeze-drying manufacturers operating in the U.S. And while Oregon Freeze Dry still maintains lucrative government contracts with NASA suppliers as well as U.S. military forces, the consumer market has steadily increased. Mountain House now accounts for 40 percent of the company鈥檚 total business. Annually, it sells 20 million servings, 10 million of which are purchased by outdoor recreationalists.

Oregon Freeze Dry鈥檚 head of marketing anticipates consumer purchasing to keep rising, thanks to the growing population of preppers. From families in Florida bracing for hurricanes to survivalists in Idaho gearing up for the apocalypse, preppers now account for roughly 50 percent of Mountain House sales鈥攗p from just 7 percent a decade ago. Faced with economic and climatic uncertainties, more and more people are discovering something that outdoor adventurers have known for a long time: when times get tough, it鈥檚 nice to know you鈥檝e got a stash of indestructible food within easy reach.

WHEN MY BUDDIES AND I are hunkered under a tent vestibule eating freeze-dried food, the conversation often turns to our favorite brands. My friend Remi is fond of , a Boulder, Colorado, company that uses aggressive seasoning blends in its formulas. Mountain House is my go-to label. I鈥檓 a huge fan of its chili mac and sweet and sour pork, and I actually fell into a brief depression recently when it canceled another favorite, chicken Polynesian.

In the interest of becoming a more erudite camping partner, I paid a visit one day to the headquarters of Oregon Freeze Dry in Albany, Oregon. Today, the company employs almost 400 people, and its corporate offices are on a parklike campus with manicured groves of birch trees. The main office building is shaped like the letter M that adorns the packaging of Mountain House products. The production facility is a short distance away across a set of railroad tracks.

On the day I toured the facility with John Damon, the senior vice president of manufacturing, it was running a batch of spaghetti with meat sauce. The company prides itself on the fact that its food is first prepared as a ready-to-eat dish before it is freeze-dried, which leads to what it calls the 鈥渉omemade taste鈥� of its offerings. The magic begins in the cook room, where ingredients ranging from shrimp and vine-ripened tomatoes to parsley and precooked ground beef are combined to make the approximately 27 products that Mountain House offers at any given time.

In the case of spaghetti with meat sauce, the dried noodles are boiled and added to a pasta sauce made on-site from spices, tomato paste, and ground beef. The food is cooked in hog-size kettles that can hold 1,200 pounds, then poured through a funnel into a hopper located on the floor below the cook room. There, still-warm spaghetti is spread into inch-deep layers on shallow, rectangular trays resembling cafeteria pizza pans. The dishes go into a subzero freezer as big as a school gymnasium. The exact temperature of the room is proprietary, determining the size and shape of the ice crystals that form as the food freezes.

The actual freeze-drying comes next. The doors of the 18 freeze-drying chambers are round and fortified, like portholes. Each chamber is big enough that you could park a couple of four-wheeler trucks inside of it and can accommodate 4,800 pounds of the spaghetti, still frozen in trays and loaded onto rolling racks. Once the doors are sealed, overhead pumps are engaged and, as Damon says, 鈥渨e pull a vacuum on it.鈥� As the air pressure inside the chamber decreases to about 1/10,000th of what you experience at sea level, the temperature drops to minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Then, slowly, the racks holding the trays began to radiate warmth. As the temperature of the frozen water inside the food increases, the molecules sublimate鈥攖hat is, they skip the liquid state and go directly from frozen to gaseous form. The free-floating vapor, liberated from the spaghetti, collects again as ice on supercooled coils arrayed on the walls of the chamber.

By the end of the process, about 20 hours later, the coils have collected more than 400 gallons of water. The spaghetti will come out weighing about 1,400 pounds. The outward appearance of the food is essentially unaltered, and its nutritional content is identical to what it was before going into the chamber. (The difference is that you can lift a tray鈥檚 worth of spaghetti like a Frisbee and fling it at a wall.) It is then crushed into gravel-size chunks and put in laminated bags made of polyester, aluminum, and nylon. The most common bag size holds 4.5 ounces of freeze-dried spaghetti, equivalent to 2.5 servings. Each serving has 220 calories, 5 grams of fat, 11 grams of protein, and a bit more salt than you鈥檇 find in a Quarter Pounder but half of what you鈥檇 get from eating the same thing at Olive Garden. (The company has launched several low-sodium entr茅es and will be releasing more.) The filled laminated bags are purged of oxygen using a small amount of iron. As long as the package isn鈥檛 punctured鈥攁nd it is very hard to pierce鈥攖he spaghetti has a shelf life of at least 30 years.

FREEZE-DRIED FOOD HAS its critics, and they go beyond your typical culinary pantywaist who refuses to suck it up and eat what鈥檚 put in front of him. Some of my most trusted travel companions have lodged complaints against the stuff, few of which have to do with the taste. A producer of my TV show named Dan Doty, whom I鈥檝e traveled extensively with in the outdoors, has observed that the serving pouches are generally deeper than your average spoon is long. You can鈥檛 get the food out of the bottom without getting slop all over the handle, a particularly vexing problem when it comes to the epoxy-like cheese in freeze-dried lasagna. Other complaints are more biological. My director, Morgan Fallon, protests that freeze-dried food contains so much salt that his fingers swell up like boiled hot dogs when he鈥檚 been eating it for a few days. Another friend, Bryan Callen, an actor, says that a few days鈥� worth causes his bowel movements to veer wildly from voluminous diarrhea to teaspoons of plasticine.

These complaints actually serve as testaments to the overall quality of freeze-dried food. Each was groaned by a person who was actively cramming his face with a bag of the stuff while traveling by foot or canoe in places like New Zealand鈥檚 South Island, northern Alaska, and backcountry Montana. The complainers are similar to people who bitch about commercial airlines; sure, there鈥檚 hardly room for your legs, but the flights don鈥檛 suck nearly as bad as staying home does.

My friends鈥� observations are more or less particular to the long-term consumption of freeze-dried food, something that only a small and peculiar segment of the population engages in. For a more general perspective, I had a bunch of non-camping food enthusiasts over to my house one night for a freeze-dried dinner party. Among several others, I invited Chris Collins, the long-time executive producer of Anthony Bourdain鈥檚 ; Alberto Gonzalez, the owner of , the first certified-organic restaurant in New York City; Benjamin Wallace, a bestselling food and wine writer; Savannah Ashour, a food writer and book editor who has worked on many cooking titles; and Manhattan chef Matthew Weingarten.

It was the easiest dinner party I ever put together. I pedaled my bike to REI and bought 9,860 calories worth of food weighing a total of nine pounds for just under $100. All of this fit into a laptop backpack described by its manufacturer as 鈥渟velte.鈥� Then I rode home and filled a teakettle with water and laid out some spoons. I was ready to roll. My wife, Katie, still felt that something was missing. She set out a tablecloth and plates, creating a weird incongruity: freeze-dried food on wedding china.

I started with two ethnic dishes produced by Backpacker鈥檚 Pantry, which uses both freeze-dried and dehydrated ingredients. The CEO of Backpacker鈥檚 Pantry, Rodney Smith, explained to me that his company鈥檚 motto is 鈥渉aving fun with your food.鈥� The style might best be understood as an experimental and highfalutin鈥� answer to Mountain House鈥檚 admittedly conservative approach. Sadly, while Backpacker鈥檚 Pantry has many fans, especially of its Hawaiian chicken and Louisiana red beans and rice, the ethnic dishes didn鈥檛 fare so well. On the subject of the pad Thai, Ashour, the book editor, had this to say: 鈥淭hat has nothing to do with pad Thai.鈥� I noted that the curry tasted like a two-year-old had gone wild with the contents of a spice cabinet. Another participant noted that the odor of the curry resembled a cleaning product. Weingarten observed that his wife makes worse curry. 鈥淒on鈥檛 print that,鈥� he quickly added.

With the ethnic dishes, my friends had hit upon an opinion that I鈥檝e long held about freeze-dried food. Enjoying it comes down to one鈥檚 ability to manage expectations. In our minds, at least here in the U.S., pad Thai is represented by the superb preparations that we鈥檝e come to expect from Thai restaurants. Compared with such an ideal, any just-add-water dish is going to disappoint. As Gonzalez, the restaurant owner, put it, 鈥淚 was looking for something I didn鈥檛 find.鈥� This helps support what I consider to be the genius of Mountain House. In a way, the typical Red State table fare it offers is a way of saving you from yourself. The menu is openly honest about the limits of the technology. It鈥檚 the company鈥檚 way of saying, 鈥淭rust us, dude, just go with the beef stew. Let鈥檚 not get carried away.鈥�

This theory was given further support when I switched gears again and served up a few sacks of Mountain House beef stew followed by spaghetti with meat sauce. Peering into the bag, the chef observed the similarity between its contents and 鈥渟omething I ate as a kid, like at a mean babysitter鈥檚 house.鈥� After tasting it, he remarked that it was actually way better than he thought it would be. The spaghetti, dumped onto plates, resembled a $2 offering from Chef Boyardee. Collins, the producer, said that he鈥檇 eaten a lot of SpaghettiOs as a kid鈥斺�渂ut this is way better. The noodles don鈥檛 taste like they鈥檝e been wasting away in the sauce for months on end.鈥� 鈥淭his is as good as anything from a can,鈥� replied Weingarten. 鈥淲hich I mean as a compliment.鈥�

Going into that dinner party, I was aware that it wasn鈥檛 necessarily a fair playing field for freeze-dried food. After all, these were people who routinely eat the finest food the world has to offer. And they weren鈥檛 suffering from cold or hunger or exhaustion or any of the other things that help freeze-dried food taste as good as it does when you鈥檙e out in the middle of nowhere. But still, Collins offered a more eloquent perspective than I鈥檇 ever heard from a backpacker or mountaineer. 鈥淚鈥檝e had so much bad food around the world, in so many places, that my baseline is different,鈥� he said. 鈥淔or me, fermented shark in Iceland is bad; it鈥檚 like cotton balls soaked in formaldehyde. After eating that, freeze-dried anything is going to be a treat.鈥�

Collins鈥� perspective was similar to something I鈥檝e always believed. When you鈥檙e out in the wild, you should live so fully and recklessly that you鈥檙e happy to be alive and healthy by the end of the day. You should push yourself to the point where you can rejoice in the fact that you鈥檝e got a warm sack of bland food in one hand, a spoon in the other, plus a mouth full of teeth. After all, things could be way worse.

Contributing editor is the author of .

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My two brothers and I, along with a buddy of ours named Dan Bogan, own a shack at a place called Saltery Cove on Southeast Alaska鈥檚 Prince of Wales Island. The shack is about 36 feet long and 12 feet wide, with the warped shape and discoloration of a cardboard shoe box that鈥檚 been soaked in the rain. A partially uprooted old-growth hemlock leans menacingly over the back corner, and the front deck sits about seven feet above the shoreline on wooden pilings that are in various stages of decay. The tidal fluctuations in this area are so wild that the shack might be 200 yards away from the water鈥檚 edge in the morning and then be at risk of becoming oceanic debris by lunchtime. When friends come to visit, they often scrutinize the engineering as though reluctant to commit their full weight to the structure, let alone sleep inside it. While doing so, they鈥檙e prone to asking questions like 鈥淲hat made you guys buy this place?鈥� with a weird inflection that seems to betray a hint of pity.

My usual, flippant reply is that real estate clich茅 about location, location, location. The appeal of our shack isn鈥檛 so much the structure itself, but rather the bare-bones nature of its locality. Surrounded largely by the Tongass National Forest, it鈥檚 a place where black bears gnaw mussels from the rocks in what might be described as our yard and killer whales pass by so close that you can hear them even with the door closed. But in truth that鈥檚 only half the answer. The other half is more difficult to explain and also a bit masochistic: Saltery Cove is a place where everything鈥攖he weather, the ocean, the mountains, the people, the trees, the animals, even the buildings鈥攕eems capable of kicking your ass in a very physical way. And in today鈥檚 increasingly tame and virtual world, where our primary sensations tend to be delivered by our Wi-Fi connections, a good old-fashioned ass kicking is something worth paying for.

Another way in which the cabin kicks my ass is through my wife, Katie. She often regards my purchase of the shack with that eye-rolling sense of dismissal that people will use when confronted with the subject of their spouse鈥檚 past girlfriends or boyfriends. Not that Katie, a publicity director for a high-profile publishing house in Manhattan, entirely disapproves. Rather, she just feels that the expense of maintaining our 鈥渟econd home鈥� is grossly incommensurate with how much time we spend there. When I try to justify the costs to her, I point out that it鈥檚 not so much a second home as a first shack, and also that it could someday prove to be a good investment. When those justifications fail, I hit below the belt and tell her that I鈥檇 intended for it to be my primary place of residence but had willfully sacrificed that dream in order to stay close to her鈥攎y true love. That usually does the trick.

The purchase occurred during my late twenties, well before I鈥檇 met Katie. It was a time when I was more or less aimlessly bouncing around the country with little or no responsibility. In 2003, this landed me on Prince of Wales Island. I went there with my brother Danny to fish salmon and halibut with one of Saltery Cove鈥檚 eight full-time residents, Ron Leighton, a man of mixed Native Alaskan and Irish descent who鈥檒l tear your head off for tangling an anchor line and then send your kid a birthday present even though the nearest mailbox is an hour鈥檚 boat ride from his house. Ron鈥檚 r茅sum茅 includes a tour of duty as a door gunner in Vietnam, a career as a detective with the police force in Ketchikan, Alaska, and a parallel career as a halibut long-liner. He and Danny originally met when Danny traveled to Saltery Cove to do some environmental survey work through his job as an ecologist at the . Ron offered to put him up and show him around during his stay, and they struck up an unlikely friendship. Then, about a year after my own initial visit (a trip that included meal upon meal of self-caught shrimp, crab, and halibut), Ron called Danny to tell him that the shack across the creek from his house had been put up for sale by its owner.

The price was $80,000, non-negotiable. Danny recognized that this was a lot of money for one guy to pay, especially for a place that might get knocked into the water by a hemlock and float away. Twenty grand, on the other hand, seemed reasonable. All he had to do was find three other guys who felt the same way. He called me in Rhode Island, where I was living in a short-term rental that sat so close to the water, I could watch movies in my living room at night while holding a fishing rod baited for eels and cast into the bay. I鈥檇 just sold my first book for what seemed like a staggering sum of money, and since I was still a few years away from adult responsibility, I knew I鈥檇 end up blowing my windfall on outdoor gear and alcoholic beverages. That I could take permanent possession of a setup similar to the one I was now enjoying鈥攁lbeit 3,000 miles away鈥攚as an irresistible notion. Our brother Matt and our buddy Dan were equally intrigued. The four of us mailed in our checks.

Danny and I were the first ones to plan a visit. To get there from his house in Anchorage, where I鈥檇 been staying for a couple of months, we ended up flying into Seattle and then transferring planes to Ketchikan, a town with an airport that happens to be on a different island than the town itself. We collected our bags and then dragged them down a long ramp toward a ferry dock. After crossing to Ketchikan, we dragged the bags up another ramp and waited in the rain for a cab. Since this was our only chance to stock up on provisions, we made the rounds to the grocery, hardware, and sporting-goods stores. By then it was too late to get a float plane, so we booked a hotel and caught a shuttle to the docks at dawn. There we loaded our supplies into the plane and flew over Clarence Strait toward the jagged and serpentine coastline of Prince of Wales Island, a landmass half the size of Hawaii鈥檚 Big Island but with three times as much coastline.

Danny and I will forever remember the month that followed as the summer of trash. When we climbed off the float plane to behold our new treasure, we were greeted by a two-acre parcel of garbage to which we now held the deed. There were steel barrels of chemicals such as kerosene, water sealer, and gear oil made useless by the intrusion of rainwater that had dripped through rust-perforated lids. Dozens of empty barrels, concealed beneath layers of moss, gave the landscape a bumpy look that reminded me of a rash. Elsewhere we found styrofoam blocks as big as bathtubs, a mound of fiberglass insulation the size of a car, enough rotted lumber to build a rotted house, and what would eventually turn out to be 150 gallons of crushed beer cans. Two sheds made of plastic sheeting had simply collapsed over time, burying piles of junked fishing gear, inoperable chainsaws, rusted hardware, busted-up shrimp and crab traps, and coils of cracked plastic hose. When we opened an outhouse toward the back of the property, near the national-forest border, we found that both the hole and the structure had been filled with household garbage.

The only thing more staggering than the volume and variety of the trash was the fact that it had all come in on boats and planes, presumably over the course of many decades. There was no economically feasible way for us to get it out of there and into a landfill, so we did the only thing that made sense. In a weird moment of clairvoyance, I had packed along my flame-retardant military flight suit, and this became my uniform for the next month as Danny and I built infernos of burning trash with smoke plumes rivaling those seen on news broadcasts dispatched from Kabul.

In the evenings, we worked on the much more pleasurable task of learning to navigate the labyrinthine networks of straits and fjords and islands that stretched for watery miles away from our place. Initially, we stayed inside an area known as Skowl Arm; we were afraid to cross into the treacherous waters beyond, known as Clarence Strait, because of a nautical chart that someone had nailed to the wall of the shack with the words DO NOT GO written across the entrance to the strait in red marker. But of course our curiosity overrode our caution, and one night we found ourselves out there in a 16-foot open-bowed skiff with a stalled engine and no radio. We were drifting so fast on the outgoing tide that it felt like we could pull a skier. Just as I began calculating how long the 10-pound halibut in the bottom of the boat would stave off starvation as we drifted toward death on the open sea, the engine popped to life with a puff of black smoke and we beelined for the safety of sheltered water. At the end of that month, when the float plane finally picked us up for the trip back to Ketchikan, we circled around and passed over the shack. I looked down at it like a rodeo rider might view a bull that had just bruised him up. He knows it鈥檚 a lot of trouble and that it doesn鈥檛 make a lick of sense, but he鈥檚 already planning another ride.

When I started dating Katie, I would try to impress her with stories of the cabin. I promised to take her up there and get her hooked into a halibut that was so big we鈥檇 have to sink it with a harpoon in order to drag it into the boat. She now admits that the bravado kind of turned her on, though she has a hard time explaining how my stories resulted in her mistaken impression of the shack as some kind of classy Aspen-style retreat where you stroll out to the hot tub in a white robe with a wine glass dangling between your fingers.

In reality, the hot tub that we rigged up prior to Katie鈥檚 first visit was a livestock watering tank that we had shipped up on a barge from Seattle and then set out on some rocks by the stream. It was powered by an ingenious woodstove that circulated water through a heating box by means of its own convection currents.

Other improvements over the years included an adjoining workshop to store boat engines and tools. This freed up space in the shack鈥檚 sleeping area so that it could actually be used for sleeping. Also, we鈥檇 worked out the problems in our plumbing system, which meant you could more reliably take warm showers using water that was diverted from the creek and heated with a propane burner.

In fact, the place had gotten so comfortable that my two brothers figured it would be a perfect time to introduce their significant others to the shack as well鈥攁long with Danny鈥檚 three-year-old daughter. And in case things weren鈥檛 quite cozy enough with seven people sharing three bunk beds and well under 500 square feet of space, we extended an invitation to our friend Brandt and his new girlfriend.

I was a tad worried about the crowding issue, but in hindsight I should have been much more concerned that it was midwinter. The area gets an average of 160 inches of precipitation per year, about four times as much as Seattle, and the bulk of that seemed to fall during Katie鈥檚 stay. On her trip out to the cabin, she got stuck in a Ketchikan hotel because of the weather. When it finally cleared enough for her to get to the shack, it promptly turned shitty again once she landed. For days, the wind howled and snow dumped. We got out in the boat only a few times. Once, when we took a ride to set crab traps and ran out of daylight about two miles from home, the engine hit a submerged log with such ferocity that the bow of the boat dipped below the surface and scooped out a wave鈥檚 worth of water, which flooded through the vessel like a tsunami. We bailed it out with a solemnness that came from knowing that we were maybe just a few gallons away from a capsized boat and possible death by hypothermia.

Another outing in the boat occurred during a storm surge that pushed the high tide up over the porch, and we had to chase down all the gear and food that had been swept into the ocean. The surge also caused a temporary shutdown of what so far had been the trip鈥檚 one salvation, the hot tub. Its creekside location offered scenic views plus a handy source for changing the water. But when the high tide backed up the creek, all you could see of the tub was the top of the chimney. When the tide fell we moved the tub to higher ground and filled it with water siphoned from the creek with a long hose. Then the improperly drained hose froze and ruptured, so we were unable to change the water when it became soiled with dirt and spruce needles and the general funk caused by nine human inhabitants and a spilled White Russian that gave the water a milky tint. The tub鈥檚 popularity waned significantly after that, though not as badly as my own after announcing that I鈥檇 miscalculated the kerosene usage and we鈥檇 soon have no way to heat the shack.

One of the best things about life is that now and then, when we鈥檙e lucky, the reality of a situation rises up to meet our hopeful expectations. I thought of this a couple of summers ago, when Danny and his significant other, Corrina, got married on a grassy beach across the cove from our shack under sunny summer skies. Well over a dozen friends and family were gathered for the celebration. Salmon rolled in the stream mouth and flashed spectacularly during the ceremony. A bear sow and her two young cubs appeared down the shore and seemed to pose, as though Steve Irwin had been resurrected as a wedding planner. In the evening we gathered on the deck, drinking beer and boiling crabs and expecting at any minute the deck to finally collapse beneath the weight of all our friends.

It held firm and was still standing strong in the morning as the guests packed up their sleeping bags and tents and boarded planes headed to Ketchikan. Later that day, I took Katie out on the water and fulfilled at least part of my seductive promise. Although the halibut she caught wasn鈥檛 big enough to require a harpoon, it was her first nonetheless. That night, she glowed with pride as we grilled a fillet of the fish. I served it with leftover boxed wine poured from the liner bag that someone had thoughtfully pinned under a rock beneath the creek鈥檚 surface. After dinner, we went down to the shoreline and watched the light fade. We鈥檇 been married a year at that point. Something about the experience鈥攎aybe the air, maybe the wine, maybe the residue of hopefulness left over from a day of fishing鈥攃aused her to say that she was ready to have a baby so long as I was up for it. We were leaning against the gunwale of a beached skiff, and we just stood there for a while in silence. There was a mountain empty of people behind us, an ocean full of fish in front of us, and at our side a cabin in the slow and steady process of accumulating memories. And in that moment I could see clearly why I鈥檇 bought a place that was so hard to get to: even if I had to leave right then, I couldn鈥檛.听听听听听听听听听听

Correspondent is the author of .

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The bush pilot dropped my brothers and me on a gravel bar where a stream that I鈥檒l call Nowhere Creek flows into the much larger and glacially fed Forgotten River. This was in the Alaska Range, about 120 miles west of Mount McKinley and 30 miles from the nearest road. It was hot, with daytime highs in the 80s and nighttime lows only down into the 50s. Such weather is rare at that latitude and elevation in mid-August; usually you can expect snow squalls and freezing rain by then. But the surrounding skies were cloud-free, except for the haze of smoke created by wild fires burning in the taiga forest that stretched away beyond the glaciated mountains to the north鈥攆ires that wouldn鈥檛 be put out until the snow started to fly.

We walked off the gravel bar toward a line of spruce trees that began where the floor of the valley tipped upward and climbed toward the mountains. Danny tied a length of parachute cord to a rock and tossed the rock over a high limb. We then used it to hoist up some emergency food and dry clothes and an extra tent where they would be safe from bears. If we got back to the landing strip and the pilot never showed, or if some other kind of disaster struck, then at least we had some supplies to keep us comfortable and fed. We then lifted our packs and started walking uphill. Somewhere up there, we hoped to find Dall sheep.

Our plan was to leave the main valley and follow Nowhere Creek all the way up into the treeless alpine zone. In order to pick up the creek鈥檚 course we had to navigate a maze of beaver ponds that were bisected by low, grass-covered beaver dams. Along the edge of a pond we kicked up a sharp-tail grouse. It flew a short ways and landed in a spruce tree. Matt shot it for dinner with a load of bird shot fired from a .44 Magnum revolver. He gutted the grouse and stuffed it into the water bottle pocket on the side of his backpack.

As soon as we started following Nowhere Creek we realized that it cut up through a tight canyon full of waterfalls. We then had to leave its course and veer to the right. This move landed us in an alder-choked hellhole with nasty under- and over-layers of downed trees. The alders made it feel like an army of little kids was pulling on our clothes and backpacks, and the downed timber made it feel like we were running an obstacle course of limbo bars and split-rail fences. Eventually we lucked into a moose trail that was beaten into the ground as heavily as a maintained path in a state park. The trail climbed upward and upward, until we finally reached the end of the timber and passed into the alpine zone at a point that was three miles from Forgotten River and two thousand feet higher. The transition was sudden and dramatic, like walking out of a crowded midday matinee into an empty sunlit street.

Here, above the maximum elevation of the spruce trees, the only vegetation that even reached our knees was the band of willows and alders that lined the floor of the valley below. The lower portions of the surrounding hills were covered in mixed swaths of gray and brown and green鈥攖he gray from exposed outcrops and scree slides, the green from blueberry bushes and crowberry, the brown from dried lichen and sedges and grasses. Up higher, the vegetation gave way to exposed rock that rose up to sharp ridgelines and cliff faces. To the north, toward the head of the valley, the land climbed to a series of glacier-capped mountains that reminded me of the top of lemon meringue pie.

We slowed our pace and covered just a mile or so of ground before reaching a flat patch of land that was big enough to sleep three people. It was so hot that I鈥檇 already cut away the sleeves of my T-shirt, so I dipped the scraps of cotton into a rivulet of spring water that was seeping from beneath a rock and used them to wipe away the layer of sweat and pollen that had collected on my face and arms. There was no need for a sleeping bag in this heat, but I laid mine out anyway for a little extra padding between me and the ground. We put some water over an alcohol stove and boiled the sliced-up meat of the grouse. Then we strained out the cooked meat and used the water to reconstitute a few freeze-dried backpacking meals that we made slightly more palatable by adding the bird鈥檚 meat. Afterward, we shared a big glob of cheddar cheese that had melted into a sweaty and bulbous mass inside my pack.

Between eating and falling asleep, we discussed the fact that we really shouldn鈥檛 have been hunting in this kind of heat. People always ask if I lose game meat to bears and wolves, but warmth is a far greater threat. It will silently ruin meat without a lick of romance while you are sitting around fantasizing about the threat of predators. But while it might have made sense to wait for the heat wave to pass, a Dall sheep hunt is not something that you can simply postpone until another day. We had secured our dates with the bush pilot 10 months earlier by putting down a nonrefundable $1,200 deposit on round-trip flights that would take us into the mountains. And since reliable Alaskan bush pilots are insanely busy during the months of August and September, it鈥檚 quite possible that you鈥檒l miss your entire trip if you miss your dates.

On top of the fee for the bush pilot, Matt and I had each forked over about $600 for plane tickets from Montana to Anchorage. Upon landing in Anchorage, I had dropped another $600 for a nonresident hunting license and a sheep tag. When you factor in myriad other incidentals鈥攆reeze-dried backpacking food, gas for Danny鈥檚 pickup, miscellaneous bits of gear鈥擨 had well over $2,000 invested in the hunt. And that sum of money hardly guarantees success. Ninety percent of the sheep hunters who head into the mountains of Alaska without a paid professional guide meet with failure. In other words, only 10 percent of nonguided sheep hunters like my brothers and me get a sheep. Considering that mature Dall sheep rams weigh around 200 pounds and yield maybe about 35 percent of their body weight in boneless meat, you see that we were faced with a best-case scenario of securing 75 pounds of game meat at a price of around 30 dollars a pound. And also considering that there was an outside chance of losing the meat due to factors including but not limited to the heat, you鈥檒l see that this venture of ours could hardly be justified as an exercise in subsistence-based hunting and gathering. Instead it was an exercise in something much more controversial and difficult to explain鈥攕omething that makes me cringe just to say it: trophy hunting.

The next morning we couldn鈥檛 have killed a Dall sheep even if we鈥檇 found one, because the season opener was still a day away. Our plan was to continue up the valley while scouting out the land and keeping a constant eye on the surrounding mountains for sheep. The best and most discreet route seemed to be right up the center of the valley, following moose trails or walking on the raised gravel eskers that had been laid down by a river that once flowed beneath some bygone glacier.

We used our binoculars to dissect the jagged rims of the valley and also the many side canyons and cirques that opened up to our view as we traveled along. Dall sheep are white, so they do stand out pretty easily against the muted colors of a snow-free mountainside. But their whiteness is obviously not a disadvantage. In fact, the animals spend far more days in the snow than they do on bare ground, and even in the absence of snow they often hang around near the ice-strewn peripheries of glaciers and sometimes even on the glaciers themselves鈥攁 type of background that can make them nearly invisible. What鈥檚 more, they have an affinity for lying beneath rocky overhangs or near crevices in cliff faces, where shadows diminish your ability to see them. Meanwhile, it鈥檚 possible for them to spot you from extraordinary distances. Dall sheep have eyes that are about eight times more powerful than a human鈥檚 are, and it鈥檚 possible to scare them away without ever knowing they were there in the first place. It鈥檚 essential to see the sheep before they see you, which means you need to be looking for sheep at distances that can be measured in miles rather than yards.

And you鈥檙e not just looking for any old Dall sheep. In most of Alaska you鈥檙e only allowed to kill a ram, or male, that meets at least one of the following three criteria: 1) at least one of his two horns must be full-curl, which means it must describe a 360-degree circle when viewed from the side; 2) both of his horns must be broomed, or broken on the ends; or 3) the animal must be at least eight years old, as demonstrated by the presence of at least eight growth rings, or annuli, on the animal鈥檚 horns Basically, what all of this means is that only about five or 10 percent of all the Dall sheep in Alaska are legal quarry.

We pushed along through the morning and into midday, walking and glassing. We spotted plenty of critters, except for the ones we were looking for. A pair of beavers worked in a pond on the valley floor. A young bull moose browsed willows on the lower slopes of a distant mountain. A band of caribou cows and calves were bedded on a snowbank that was sheltered from the sun by a high peak. A young grizzly fed on blueberries at the head of a side valley. But no sheep.

By early evening we were about nine miles in from where we鈥檇 landed. Here Nowhere Creek forked into two branches that were separated by a nose-shaped wedge of land that rose into a high, triangle-shaped mountain. The left branch dropped toward the confluence through a series of waterfalls coming off a high plateau. Above the falls, our map showed that the plateau went only a couple of miles before entering a steep-walled canyon and then terminating at a cirque that would probably be impossible to climb out of. The right branch looked as though it went for about six miles before petering out at the foot of a pass.

We dropped our packs at the junction in order to make a quick scout up the left branch. After climbing past the waterfalls we could see a collection of white spots in the shade of an outcropping that interrupted an otherwise smooth ridgeline. They were miles off, but there was only one thing they could be. I started to form the word听sheep听in my mouth but I was cut off by Matt and Danny saying the same thing.

I sat down and studied the band of sheep with my binoculars. There were eight of them. I noticed that three of them were only about half as big as the other five, and each of the little ones was close to a larger one.

鈥淟ooks like ewes,鈥� I said.

鈥淭hat鈥檚 what I鈥檓 thinking,鈥� said Danny. 鈥淓wes and lambs.鈥�

鈥淵ou sure there aren鈥檛 any rams mixed in there?鈥� I asked.

鈥淣ot at this time of year. They won鈥檛 start breeding for another few months, so they鈥檒l be separate now.鈥�

We kept going. For a while we followed the course of the creek, sometimes walking from rock to rock over the water鈥檚 surface. But then the land rose up on either side of the creek, threatening to block our view of the surrounding country. We climbed the right bank and angled upward until the creek was just a fine line of white below us. Away from the water the temperature was at least 15 degrees hotter, and I wiped the sweat from my eyes with the belly of my shirt. We climbed higher and soon hit a trail that was loaded with moose tracks. It continued upstream without gaining or losing elevation, and soon the creek had risen to a point where we were once again level with it. We veered back left to the water and refilled our water bottles, then followed the creek into the mouth of the canyon. It was cool and shaded inside. We went around a couple of bends and now the trail was littered with the bleached bones of a caribou; except for the teeth, the animal鈥檚 skull had been crushed by time and decay into fingernail-sized fragments that were pressed into the ground.

I was checking the skull out when Matt hissed the words听holy shit听and听ram,听put his hand on my shoulder, and pulled me down. My eyes went toward where he was looking. High above us was a white face surrounded by a mass of horn. The ram was peeking out over a ledge and looking down; it must have heard something just seconds earlier and stood up. It watched as we backed away, seeming unsure of what we were. When we were out of view, we turned and slipped out of the canyon without saying another word. None of us had gotten a good enough glimpse to tell whether the ram was legal, but we figured that we should try to find it again in the morning and have another look鈥攖his time without it seeing us. We walked to where we鈥檇 left our gear, and then laid out our sleeping bags on a soft mat of crowberry.

My brothers and I were first introduced to Alaska in 2000, when Danny took a permanent job as a biologist at the University of Alaska at Anchorage. At the time, Matt and I were both living in Montana and killing enough meat to keep us fed all year. Right away, though, we started coming up to Alaska on a regular basis to tap into the hunting and fishing opportunities. Our initial jaunts were tame by Dall sheep standards, but still exciting as hell. We launched canoes into rivers we鈥檇 never heard of to fish salmon. We walked into mountains that we鈥檇 never seen to hunt moose. We made unguided trips into the Arctic to hunt caribou, an animal that I鈥檇 never before laid eyes on. Each year, at the end of whatever trip we made, we鈥檇 sit around and fantasize about whatever new thing we were going to try next year.

These discussions usually turned to the subject of Dall sheep. Most people who have hunted them agree that they are North America鈥檚 most difficult game animal. The terrain that Dall sheep inhabit is remote, rugged, and intimidating. People who dream of hunting them put off doing so for decades, waiting for when they have the time and money, only to find that time and money never come or they鈥檙e too old when they finally do. What鈥檚 more, we were in a prime position with regard to legal issues. A nonresident of Alaska cannot hunt Dall sheep (or grizzlies or mountain goats) without a paid outfitter unless he or she is accompanied by a second-of-kin relative who is a legal resident of the state. Second of kin includes brothers, sisters, spouses, sisters-in-law, sons-in-law, grandmothers, etc. With Danny living there, we were able to launch a do-it-yourself sheep trip that would have cost us 10 or 12 thousand dollars apiece if we had to hire an outfitter. So, in the early 2000s, we made our first attempt on Dall sheep.

We picked a drainage in the northern Chugach Range, about 130 miles south of where we were now camped but which we could easily drive to. We parked along the Parks Highway and used an old rubber raft to cross the Matanuska River. We then deflated the raft and hoisted it into a tree (grizzlies have a strange tendency to eat rubber) and headed up a large drainage that came in from the south. We hiked about 10 miles to where the valley ended at a big blue-colored glacier and then followed a tributary stream deeper into the mountains. For seven rainy and miserable days we scoured the land without seeing a single Dall sheep. We鈥檇 grossly miscalculated our food rations, and by then we were running so low on food that we were cutting pieces of hard candy in half with the serrated blade of a Leatherman in order to share them. On the eighth day we climbed after a sow black bear while feeling so weak from hunger that I could barely move my feet. We shot it from a stone鈥檚 throw away, tagged it, and then feasted on cubes of meat deep-fried in rendered bear oil.

We packed up the rest of the bear鈥檚 meat and the hide and started hiking out with thoughts about dry clothes and a good night鈥檚 sleep. A few miles from the road, we passed an incoming stream where you could look up its valley and see a distant collection of peaks that seemed a world away. We took a break from walking and set up the spotting scope for kicks, just to have a look around. Sure enough, there was the first Dall sheep we鈥檇 laid eyes on. The animal was standing up near the crest of a far-off peak, like something that had been put there in order to play a joke on us. I zoomed the lens and stared at the sheep until my eye hurt. We鈥檇 heard a trick about how to tell a ram from a ewe at long distances: A ram鈥檚 horn will curl around and block out the white of its neck, so that from far away it looks like the head has been severed from the body. That鈥檚 what we were looking at here, though from this distance there was no way in hell to determine if he was legal. We had to get closer鈥攎uch closer.

We hoisted the remaining bear meat into a tree so that the bears wouldn鈥檛 get it and then started climbing. By the time we reached the vicinity of the ram, enough hours had passed that he was gone and we couldn鈥檛 find him anywhere on the mountain. Completely discouraged, we headed back down toward where the bear meat was hanging in the tree. Along the way we had an argument about our routes. Matt split off in order to descend a particularly dicey cliff, while Danny and I went to look for an alternate route. We made it back to the bear meat late that night, but Matt didn鈥檛 return until early the next morning. We then ate some more meat and hiked our way out toward the rubber raft, the river, and just beyond that, the highway. All the while, I thought about how that ram鈥檚 horn had blocked out the whiteness of the sheep鈥檚 neck from miles away. Though I could see none of the details of that horn, I became fixated on the idea of it. Better than any piece of man-made art, the horn seemed to encompass all the danger and beauty of a place that would just as happily kill you as let you walk on it. Over the next two years, I watched as Matt and Danny each brought into their homes beautiful heads of Dall sheep they killed on grueling trips that work obligations prevented me from joining. After seeing those horns, I knew I had to have a set for my own home. I remembered reading that Eskimo hunters used to bring home the heads of certain animals and then set them in their lodges in order to treat them as honored guests. I could see where they were coming from.

Now, three years later, we had a rough idea about the location of a ram that might, just might, be legal. We left camp before daylight and found him right at sunup, grazing high on a round-topped mountain that towered above the canyon where we鈥檇 found him the day before. The grass and lichens were so sparse up here it looked like he must be feeding on gravel. Whatever he was eating, he鈥檇 picked a good spot for himself. There was no obvious way to close the distance on him without spooking him. He could see in every direction, and there was no cover within hundreds of yards. It seemed that the best bet was to get a little closer and then wait for the ram to move into a more approachable position. Since Matt and Danny had already killed sheep on previous trips, we agreed that I鈥檇 be the one to make the stalk. Matt would come along with me, while Danny stayed put in order to keep an eye on the sheep in case it moved while we were out of sight.

Two hours later, Matt and I were lying on our bellies within 600 yards of the ram. All we could see of the animal was its head and neck and the top of its back. We鈥檇 gotten this close when it had grazed out of view beyond the crest of the hill, but then it had wandered back and now we were pinned down. If we budged, it would see us for sure. We held tight and whispered back and forth about whether the sheep was legal. Just then I heard a strange and rhythmic clicking noise behind us and turned my head. It was a cow caribou. The noise comes from the way their tendons move over the bones of their feet. She got within spitting distance before she realized we weren鈥檛 rocks, and then she bucked almost like a wild horse, spun around, and ran off. The movement caught the ram鈥檚 attention. When I looked back he was staring right at us, stiff-bodied and alarmed. In a blink he turned and ran. I stood up. 鈥淪on of a bitch,鈥� I said.

All Danny saw from his vantage point was that the ram was headed down toward the canyon. Once it started running, he said, it dropped from his view. 鈥淵ou think it was a legal ram?鈥� he asked.

鈥淧retty sure,鈥� said Matt. 鈥淚 think his right horn comes full. But we weren鈥檛 totally sure enough to shoot.鈥�

鈥淚 can鈥檛 believe you didn鈥檛 see him,鈥� I said to Danny. 鈥淚 thought he鈥檇 come down right through here.鈥�

鈥淗e must have been around that bend,鈥� said Danny.

We walked up around the bend and the story was clear. A set of downward-running tracks was dug into a hillside of crushed shale so clear and fresh they looked minutes old. The bottom of the canyon was mostly bare rock and wouldn鈥檛 hold tracks, but we could see the prints where he鈥檇 stormed up the other side and disappeared into the cliffs.

It was an impossible-looking slope, and it would be a nasty climb, but we had in our heads a piece of advice that Danny and Matt had gotten from a bush pilot they once hired: 鈥淔ind the one you want,鈥� he said, 鈥渁nd stay with it.鈥� For a lot of animals that advice just wouldn鈥檛 work, as they can vanish into deep timber and brush. But the open country that allows a sheep to see you from miles away also allows you to see him from miles away. If you spook one and then climb through the same terrain that he does, the pilot explained, there鈥檚 a good chance that you鈥檒l run into him over the next couple of days. We kept this advice in mind as we discussed what we ought to do, though in the back of our heads was the reality that we weren鈥檛 even sure the ram was legal. Eventually it came down to a vote. Matt and I voted to follow the ram; Danny voted to go look for another one.

The three of us followed. It was a hot and miserable climb, often so steep that we had to dig our fingertips into cracks in the rock to pull ourselves up. There were a few springs trickling out of the rocks, and the mountain was steep enough that you could stand beneath them like a shower.

It took a few hours to gain the summit, a square-shaped butte almost as flat as a football field and about that size. The entire surface was scattered in sheep droppings. Some were fresh and some were old. On every side, the land dropped away into sharp descending ridges and jumbles of collapsing rock. We began stalking around the edges, slow and easy, often crawling to the edges on our bellies in order to peek over the side and survey the confused terrain below. By moving along, we could steal angled glimpses backward and ahead and see into shadows and crevices that we hadn鈥檛 been able to see into when we were directly above them. At one point I took off my sunglasses and set them at my side in order to rub my eyes and wipe the sweat from my face. Just then some kind of pipit, a small passerine bird, landed right next to me and started to attack his own reflection in the lenses. I was wondering if he could actually damage the glass when I heard a whisper and saw that Matt was on his belly just a ways down the ledge. He was motioning me forward. I started to get up and he gave me the 鈥渟tay low鈥� gesture with his hand. I crawled over and he said, 鈥淭hree rams.鈥�

They were bedded in an indentation of the cliff face about 300 yards below. The one we鈥檇 been following was there, along with two other young and nonlegal rams that he鈥檇 joined up with. They were straight down enough that I could have thrown a rock and landed it among them. All were staring downhill. While Dall sheep predators鈥攕uch as wolves, grizzlies, and lynx鈥攁re some of the most badass critters in North America, sheep usually trust that they鈥檒l be coming from downhill. In fact the sheep seem almost incredulous that some other animal would outclimb them in tough terrain. While this assumption has served the species well over the millennia, right now it was a major oversight. We were able to nestle into the rock and take our time while we again tried to ascertain the legality of the ram.

If the right horn was full-curl, as Matt suspected, it was only barely full-curl. At this angle it was tough to tell for sure. But the position of the sheep, and the fact that it was holding still, made Danny fairly confident that he could count the horn鈥檚 annuli with the spotting scope. We set the scope on a tripod, moving slowly and quietly, and trained it on the ram鈥檚 head. For 30 minutes we took turns counting, trying to sort out the annual growth rings from the horn鈥檚 lesser rings and grooves. To make a mistake is a major deal. If you screw up and kill an illegal ram, you can face heavy fines and even jail time. Of course you could also walk away and no one would ever know, but you鈥檇 have to live with the knowledge and that鈥檚 as ugly as any fine or penalty.

I was reluctant to make the call, but eventually Danny鈥檚 hesitation faded. 鈥淚鈥檓 telling you,鈥� he whispered, 鈥渢hat ram has at least eight annuli. It鈥檚 legal. If I were you, I鈥檇 take the shot.鈥�

To know Danny is to know that he doesn鈥檛 screw up. I placed the crosshairs of my rifle behind the sheep鈥檚 shoulder, then considered the steep angle of the shot and adjusted my point of aim. I took a breath, let half of it out, and squeezed the trigger. The ram stood up, but then he got woozy looking and toppled over and dropped from view.

In spite of the fact that a slip and fall could have been fatal, the three of us half-scrambled and half-slid down the cliff face without even thinking of the danger. Far and away, the most exhilarating moments when you鈥檙e hunting big game in rough country come as you鈥檙e climbing up or down toward a fallen animal. It felt as if I might explode with tension and stress and anticipation. And then I finally got down to where I thought the animal would be, but it wasn鈥檛 there. I was hit by a horrible feeling that the wounded ram had escaped. Matt rushed past me and climbed down to the next ledge and then let out a whoop. There it was, dead.

The horns of a Dall sheep are so bizarrely curled and beautiful, and the first thing I did was lift the ram鈥檚 head by its horns in order to feel their mass and power. Through the horns, a sheep can deliver and receive blows with about 40 times the energy required to fracture a human skull. But the initial thrill of holding the horns was quickly replaced by a panicked feeling. Neither of the horns seemed to come quite full circle. Instead of curling tightly, they spiraled outward in long, lazy arcs. Only one side was broomed, and that one only slightly. I frantically began counting the annuli, as did Matt and Danny. We counted together from the base outward, and then recounted the rings from the tip back toward the base. Without a doubt, the ram was nine years old. It was legal.

From the book Meat Eater by Steven Rinella. Copyright 2012 by Steven Rinella. Reprinted by arrangement with Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.听 All rights reserved.

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Tough Love

I became a father in May 2010 with the birth of my son, Jim. Like many fathers before me, holding my boy in my arms brought back memories of my own dad. When my father decided to instill in my two brothers and me his love for the outdoors鈥攁 love that he developed during a two-year camping trip in Europe known as World War II鈥攈e did so with an intract颅ability that you might get from cross-breeding a drill sergeant with Timothy Treadwell.

Steven Rinella and family

Rinella (with salmon), his brother Matt, and their father on Lake Michigan

He made me prove I could swim by throwing me off a dock. If we went camping and used a tarp to get out of the rain, the next morning would bring an hours-long seminar on drying and folding tarps in the precise fashion normally associated with flag ceremonies. One time, we built an ice-fishing shanty on the lake in front of our house. When it got stuck in the snow and ice, my brothers and I weren’t allowed to come inside until we freed it up. By then I had frostnipped fingers. I was six years old.

My father died in 2002, and since then my brothers and I have hashed out over dozens of campfires how he affected us. My feelings have ranged from anger that he could never just let us enjoy the outdoors to incomprehension about why he did what he did. Now that I’ve brought my own son into the world, I’m beginning to at least understand his motivations. He didn’t want to raise a thin-skinned softy who couldn’t handle hardship and who didn’t respect the value of his equipment.

In the end, my father’s approach worked. My brothers and I can survive in Alaska’s backcountry for extended periods; we know how to fix things; we can handle the cold. But I’m hoping to find a way to impart that knowledge to Jim with more patience and less danger, and to create a future that we can remember with fondness. Plus, a little hot chocolate never hurt anyone when frostbite is about to set in.

Correspondent Steven Rinella is an author and the host of the Travel Channel series .

The Rambling Gene

I THINK IT has to do with being from Ohio. My great-grandfather, born in Norwalk in 1866, used to tell a story about his younger brother Wint, a lad so restless and prone to wander that his mother had to tie him to a dog run in the backyard. Despite her efforts, Wint often disappeared, and my great-grandfather would be sent to find him. One morning he discovered Wint at the Norwalk railroad station, perched expectantly on the cowcatcher of a waiting westbound train.

Family contagion, or something, transferred the wandering fever to my father and through him to me. I never thought of my dad as an outdoor kind of guy. Fishing and hunting, which I loved, appalled him; I realized only later that he spent more time outdoors than almost anybody. His particular restlessness sent him sailing out of sight on Lake Erie, walking into the desert beyond Tucson, where my mother’s parents lived, and driving all over North America鈥攁s far as possible until the road ran out. He often took his wife and kids along on his jaunts, but he went whether accompanied or not. As he got older, his fingers curled permanently from gripping a steering wheel.

In the pre-seatbelt days, my four siblings and I racketed around the back of our station wagon on mattresses laid over the folded-down seats. As my father drove, I leaned over the front seat and helped him observe the highway: Route 66 in New Mexico and Arizona, for example, still my favorite of all roads. Dad would lecture to me quietly on some long, complicated subject鈥攔ocketry, the court system鈥攄uring the dawn hours as the others slept. Jack颅rabbits ran from the headlights, mesas and saguaro cactuses lifted their intoxicating silhouettes against a slowly brightening sky. My happiness then was inconceivable, even shaming, compared with my average grown-up frame of mind.

We stayed mostly in campgrounds鈥攄ozens and dozens of them, from the Florida Keys to Alaska. Every trip, we rented the same fold-up camper trailer from Buckeye Sports Center near where we lived. During the rest of the year, when we weren’t using it, the trailer sat in Buckeye Sports’ parking lot. The trailer’s top consisted of two doorlike panels on hinges that folded out to provide sleeping platforms, above which a camper tent with aluminum struts could be assembled. A crucial moment in the assembly process required someone to stand inside the tent and clip things together while a partner on the outside held it up. It was my job to be on the outside while Dad did the inside part. Once, I got distracted and let go of the tent, allowing the whole business to fall on him. When he emerged from the wreckage, he told me I didn’t have the brains God gave a screwdriver.

He was a chemical engineer, a man of practical wisdom who could take apart and repair anything, and I think he regretted that I wasn’t like him. He reproached himself for failing to pass his mechanical aptitude along. But though I couldn’t fix things, I could ramble as far as he could, even when I was young; and if his unstoppable momentum鈥攚hich never let up, even on vacation鈥攄rove him up a mountain next to the campground as soon as the tent top was in place, I went with him. He’s been dead for many years, but I still have a muscle memory to match the brisk, easy rhythm of his stride.

My son, Thomas, has the same skills my father had. They skipped a generation, as often occurs. But at 18, Thomas is like most kids his age in that he spends most of his time indoors, viewing artificial landscapes on a small screen. Last summer I took him on a road trip from our house in suburban New Jersey to my new favorite destination, Ohio, the state from which I was centrifugally flung long ago. Two old friends, Bill and Don, came along. And I do mean old: cumulatively, the three of us are almost 180. Thomas chilled in the backseat, texting, with his headphones on, and our old-guy awfulness affected him not at all. To get him even to look out the window I had to point and shout. Later, though, he said he’d had a good time. And these days, when we return from doing some local errand, he often asks if we can keep driving for a while. He has inherited the rambling gene, although he doesn’t know it now.

Contributing editor Ian Frazier is the author of .

Son, Keep Your Skis On

Despite his mustache, I SKI sunglasses, and wind shirt, and even though he owned one of the first Subarus in a town full of Camaros, my dad was never much of a skier. A second-generation Italian American from Quincy, Massachusetts, Pete Peruzzi (“Peatah” to the micks) played high school sports as a youth and helped out around the lot where my grandfather cut gravestones. An outdoorsman he was not. He took up skiing because my Irish mother was a skier. Somehow he kept the ruse alive for 20 years.

We skied Black Mountain, New Hampshire, a mom-and-pop hill with a spider’s web of whoop-de-do trails in the trees to keep the kids busy. It was here that my dad gave me the only piece of outdoor survival advice he would ever proffer. “If you get lost,”鈥坔e said, “never take your skis off鈥攜ou’ll sink in the snow and freeze to death.”

At seven years old, I was the youngest boy in a group that today would be mainlined with Ritalin. We held mock machine-gun battles at full speed in the woods. On this day, though, I was skiing with my father. When I saw the older kids cut into the forest ahead, I pleaded with him to let me go. He acquiesced, wanting nothing to do with the luge track through the low branches. I promised I would reconnect with him down the trail.

Except I didn’t. The kids had gapped me. Moving fast, I took a hard left, dropped over a gentle ridgeline, and entered another world. Within a few minutes, I was a mile or more away from the ski area. Then I stopped gliding.

For the first time in my life, I went for a backcountry tour. Across the fields, into the woods, following a contour line in the direction of the ski area. Onward I plodded until I came across a brook, water bubbling under and over the jumbled ice. I almost made it across, but the opposite bank threw me back. My skis broke through into the stream. I thought about releasing them, but if I took my skis off I’d be a goner. My father had said so. I began to scream. The story ends with a patroller hearing my cries and rescuing me. My mother, needless to say, was wicked pissed.

Now I find myself teaching my kids to be safe in the mountains. At ages seven and nine, Ada and Jake know they can sideslip any steeps. They execute workable ski-pole self-arrests on ice. They partner up in the trees and stay clear of tree wells. I’ve even given them the “keep your skis on” talk. “But if you get stuck,” I tell them, “don’t just sit there and freeze to death. Click out of your bindings and get moving.” That, and I’ve clipped rescue whistles to their coats.

Funny thing is, although my dad’s survival advice may have been half- baked, maybe he was speaking in metaphor. As it turns out, I’ve kept my skis on my entire life. Thanks, Peatah.

Marc Peruzzi is the editorial director of magazine.

Mulligan Boy

First, the math: my sons are now 29, 25, 25, and 12, which adds up to 91 child years. Or is that dad years? More important, have I learned anything?

On paper and otherwise, the three older boys (Jeb, Reid, Tim) collectively have done just fine鈥攁cquired manners and humility, earned diplomas with distinction, run swift marathons, finished triathlons, been awarded the game ball, trekked to Everest Base Camp, brought home a keeper of a daughter-in-law, moved to another continent (Africa), memorized every line of Goodfellas. No complaints from this corner. But if I were them, I’d have registered at least one: Dad, please, less is more.

If I could have one do-over, it would be to have spent less time telling them what I’d done in my life, what arcane knowledge I’d accumulated. If only I had just listened and absorbed what the world looked like through their unadulterated, as it were, eyes. And now, of course, they are adults themselves, residing under other roofs. Which is how the youngest, Paul, became my mulligan boy.

We live in the busiest of places鈥擬anhattan鈥攚here guilelessness and silence are rare commodities. Paul is bright, competitive, and no fool, yet willfully innocent, having arrived at a simple but profound understanding: for as long as possible, he wants to remain a boy/child. This is where I come in. The key, I think, has been to mute my reflexive irony and hum along with the music of his monologues, the euphony from his brain.

We drive: “I just like looking out the window, Papa. It’s a time to reflect. My ideal trip would be one around America. That would be a fun trip. Maybe I’ll decide to learn to drive.”

We camp, we canoe, we fish: “Fishing and camping are really fun. It makes you realize that some parts of the world aren’t yet built up and super civilized. You forget that computers exist or how they could even be invented. And I like the fishing part just because it’s fun, even though we release them. It’s like going to the grocery store but really having fun at the grocery store.”

His plausible fantasy: “Go into the woods and, like, have a survival kind of experience. Just live off of not much. Just have the basics: a tent, sleeping bag, and flashlight, a minimum amount of clothes. For fire I’d need matches and wood. No ax鈥攚ell, OK, an ax, but I’d only cut stuff off of dead trees. The weather might get nasty in other months鈥攕o summer. So I won’t get sick in the middle of the woods.” Bugs? “I’d deal with them.” Bug repellent? “No, thanks.” Getting to the woods: “I might have somebody drop me off, and from there I’d just walk around. I don’t know that anyone would want to come with me, but if you wanted to, you could.”

That’s it? “That’s it. I’d fish for my food. I’d have a tiny bit of money. Just in case. Because I’d be traveling inside the woods, I probably wouldn’t need it. Unless maybe I came to a city. If I came to a city, I’d buy some fresh vegetables. And sushi.”

Mark Singer is the author of .

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Easy Does It

What a tough guy can learn from an island off Belize

EXACTLY 12 HOURS after walking out the front door of our Brooklyn apartment into a snowstorm, my wife and I stood on the dock at St. George's Caye Resort, in Belize. I was holding my fly rod while she sipped a fruity cocktail and teased me about my bombastic claim that commercial flights do not count as real travel. Any self-respecting adventure traveler, I often say, needs to follow his flight with a couple of days on a train or the top of a bus in order to feel as though he's actually gotten somewhere.

My perspective on the issue was not well supported by St. George's Caye. It's only a 20-minute boat ride from Belize City, yet it feels like a place that should take a couple of days to reach by outrigger canoe. The two-mile-long island is sandwiched between the Belize Barrier Reef and hundreds of square miles of mangrove swamps and bonefish flats that support raucous colonies of seafaring birds and a few local manatees. You could count the permanent human population on your fingers and toes. But my wife didn't need to mention any of this or cite the relevant statistics. Instead, she simply pointed to the school of tarpon lolling in the shallows 30 feet away.

For the rest of the trip I continued to eat my words鈥攁long with immense amounts of spectacular food, such as spiny lobster delivered directly to the kitchen by local fishermen. Between meals鈥攕erved communal style, on the beach, by a smiling crew in flip-flops鈥攚e joined a few planned expeditions. There was snorkeling and diving on the reef; a night cruise in search of crocodiles; and fishing for bonefish and permit with a private guide. But, mostly, we took off on our own makeshift adventures. The resort provides plenty of kayaks and sailboats without the fees, rules, and boundaries that too often turn island getaways into chaperoned walks on the beach. We discovered secluded sand, secret swimming holes, hungry schools of fish, and a curious manatee. At night, we kicked back in one of a dozen thatch-roofed cabanas. We could hear the Caribbean roll in just beyond our front porch. Beyond that, nothing. This self-respecting adventure traveler slept well.

GET THERE: St. George's Caye Resort (om) provides guest transport from Philip S.W. Goldson International Airport. Cabanas for two from $218, including meals and local rum punch. One-tank dives, $60; half-day fishing trips, $325.

Fire on the Mountain

Playing in the shadow of a volcano in Papua New Guinea.

Papua New Guinea

New Britain's Tavurvur volcano gets feisty

IN 1994, a 2,257-foot volcano erupted on the island of New Britain, Papua New Guinea, burying the city of Rabaul under seven feet of ash and prompting 30,000 people to evacuate. Only 3,000 returned, leaving the town essentially like Kauai pre鈥揅aptain Cook, only with more pyrotechnics: The island is populated mostly by members of some 50 indigenous tribes, and the resident volcanoes, Tavurvur and Vulcan, are still very much active. Go now and you can lounge on a black-sand beach and watch Tavurvur burp up lava and small columns of ash as many as four times an hour.

I arrived two years ago to find an ashy town鈥攖he swimming pools were gray鈥攕et on an active caldera with countless adventure options just beyond the city limits. One can scuba-dive at a reef wall that served as a berth for Japanese submarines in World War II; sample grilled crocodile at a sustainable farm in New Britain's jungle; or take a helicopter flight over inland waterfalls so remote, nobody has bothered to name them. But the highlight of New Britain is the paddling. On my third day in Rabaul, I drove five minutes south to Matupit Island and rented a dugout canoe with a guide from the Tolai tribe. We paddled across Simpson Harbor while a hot ash cloud boiled overhead. Afterwards, my guide brought me back to the Tolai village and served me bananas poached in coconut milk, which he said was a traditional feast commemorating the arrival of Fijian missionaries鈥攚hom the Tolai ate.

GET THERE: Air Niugini flies here at least twice daily from Port Moresby, on the south side of PNG's mainland (from $300; ). Lodging in Rabaul is limited to the Hamamas Hotel (doubles from $59; ). Ask the staff about tours of the OISCA farm ($18 with crocodile lunch; ) and rides to Matupit. The Tolai guides will find you; a day trip is $9.

Vieques Rising

Puerto Rico's Vieques has come a long way from when the Navy played war games on its beaches.

Back in 2001, the Navy was still using Puerto Rico's Vieques for war games on the beaches. There was just a handful of restaurants and hotels on the 21-mile-long, four-mile-wide Caribbean island, and it was the kind of place where guests didn't wear shoes. Today, the Navy is gone and the old bombing ranges have been designated a national wildlife refuge. Now, Vieques is exploding in a different way: New roads are being built; old ones are getting paved. One of the military's old bunkers is now a sports bar by day and a disco by night. Swanky hotels, like the W, which opened in March (doubles from $379; ), and restaurants, like El Quenepo (787-741-1215), are popping up.

But don't worry. While it's now possible to have the resort experience, Vieques is still funkier and more laid-back than most Caribbean islands. Book a 肠补产补帽颈迟补鈥攐ne-room cottage鈥攁t La Finca (doubles from $125; ), a clean but rustic joint with outdoor showers and mismatched towels. Then head for the sand. There are more than 50 beaches鈥攑erfect for everything from kayaking (Green Beach) to snorkeling (the islet of Blue Beach) to paddling at night in one of the biggest bioluminescent bays in the world (Puerto Mosquito, a.k.a. “Bio Bay”). The best way to see the latter is in a clear canoe from the Vieques 国产吃瓜黑料 Company (two-hour rentals, $45; ), which, should you start getting antsy for more action, can also set you up with decent mountain bikes to explore all the old military roads ($25 per day) or take you kayak fly-fishing for tarpon ($150).

Twilight Zone

Happily lost on a Croatian island haunted by vampires.

Lustava

Northern Lustava

Dalmatian dinner, Croatia

Dalmatian dinner.

BY THE TIME we reached Lastovo, we were made of salt water and octopus. For a week, my family鈥�14 of us, from age 78 down to 16鈥攈ad sailed along Croatia's Dalmatian coast in a 100-foot Turkish gulet, gorging on grilled fish and pickling ourselves with local wine. We'd come far from the cruise ships of Dubrovnik and left the nightlife of Korcula behind. Lastovo (pop. 800) was the last and most remote island, one big national park with, from the look of the charts, great sheltered kayaking. But even our guide, adventure writer Maria Coffey, had never been.

We'd heard there were vampires on Lastovo鈥攊n the 1700s, the island had a little problem with vukodlaci, undead corpses that rose, as our guidebook said, “to visit the beds of bored wives and pleasure them in the night.” This sounded fine to some of our clan, but the island still emitted a creepy vibe. Even today, one of Lastovo's biggest celebrations involves the ritual humiliation of a straw puppet led through town on a donkey.

Sure enough, the crags showed little sign of life鈥攋ust crying gulls and the colorful towels of naked Germans, the predominant pink-skinned species here, found sprawled along Dalmatia's rocky coast. But the little harbor of Skrivena Luka was a miracle, a still blue bay ringed with stone cottages. At the lone restaurant, Porto Russo, the proprietor brought out homemade verbena-infused Croatian grappa, then white wine (from his own grapes), home-cured olives, and local squid cooked for hours pod pekom鈥攗nder a metal bell in a wood-fired outdoor oven. Later, in Lastovo Town, a 15th-century wonderland of vineyards and minaret-topped churches teetering on the island's summit, the local street sweeper鈥攚ho still uses a broom鈥攄ragged us into his courtyard for thick, sweet coffee.

Did we come here by plane? Was the World Cup still going on? What was my name again? The Dalmatian islands aren't exactly off the beaten path, but in Lastovo you can feel like you sailed in and discovered them yourself.

GET THERE: Hidden Places owners Maria Coffey and Dag Goering guide ten-day kayaking-and-sailing trips along the Dalmatian coast for $4,550 per person ().

Sweet Bondage

There's no vacation quite like a Colombian-prison-island vacation.

BETWEEN 1960 AND 1984, visitors to Colombia's Isla Gorgona arrived shackled and blindfolded and slept behind barbed-wire fences, on wooden bunks without mattresses. The 2,500 inmates of Gorgona Prison were warned that, if they escaped, the venomous snakes on the tropical island would kill them and, if they braved the ocean, the sharks would get them instead.

Today, the lush, 6.5-square-mile island, 30 miles off Colombia's Pacific coast, is a national park; the lodging here has been managed since 2006 by the winner of the Colombian version of the TV show The Apprentice. Which is to say, this is one strange escape. I arrived last September via speedboat from the coastal town of Guap铆. Upon touchdown, military police searched my bags for alcohol (it interferes with the requisite antivenin) and weapons. The other guests鈥攖he island hosts 130 at a time鈥攚ere mostly schoolchildren and besotted couples, enjoying king-size beds in the updated guard quarters by the beach.

I spent my days exploring: first, the grisly ruins of the mammoth stone penitentiary, said to be modeled after a Nazi concentration camp and now overrun with capuchin monkeys and foot-long basilisk lizards, then the dense tropical jungle that covers 85 percent of Gorgona, for which the island provides obligatory boots. There really are pit vipers and coral snakes here, as well as easier-to-spot (and mostly harmless) boa constrictors.

The trekking's good and the kayaking better鈥擨 spent a few afternoons dipping into the equatorial water as blue-footed boobies and frigates flew overhead鈥攂ut the main activity on Gorgona is diving. The island has a fully equipped dive center, and I'd regularly see 20 to 30 moray eels at any site, many as thick as my thighs. Gorgona's nature preserve extends to a six-mile radius around the island, so fish and turtles are plentiful, intrepid, and big. But size is relative. From July to September, humpbacks come to Gorgona's banks to mate and calve, and to see them breach and slap the surface with their gargantuan tails is to forget that once this was a place no one ever, ever wanted to go.

GET THERE: Three-night packages, including three meals daily, island transfers, and flights from Cali to the coastal town of Guap铆, in the Cauca department, from $463 (). Two-dive day trips from Gorgona's dive center, $90. Kayak rentals, $5 per hour.

King Kauai

Lush greenery, volcanoes and an endless supply of hidden beaches.

The Big Island has size on its side, not to mention fun volcanoes. Oahu has the storied North Shore. And Maui鈥攚ell, let's just say that the honeymooners storming its beaches year after year don't come for nothing.

But little Kauai has it all: lush greenery, volcanoes, small towns not yet overrun, and a seemingly endless supply of hidden beaches for surfing, snorkeling, and sunbathing.

This year, all those options are more accessible than ever. On the island's north shore, the St. Regis Princeville opened its doors last October (doubles from $385; ); after taking over the historic Princeville Resort, St. Regis revamped the whole place with a classy retro look. (Think coconut palm floors and a new spa and restaurant by 眉ber-chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten.)

But you don't go to Kauai to lounge. Join the locals for stand-up paddleboarding in Hanalei Bay鈥攖here's a great SUP surf break by the Hanalei Pier鈥攐r along the flat calm of the Hanalei River. Kayak Kauai offers lessons and boards (rentals from $42 per day; ). In the nearby Hanalei National Wildlife Refuge, a coastal wetlands teeming with endemic bird species, you'll find the Okolehao trail鈥攁 windy, two-mile path offering views of Hanalei Bay and the mind-blowing Na Pali coastline. If it's surf you're after, head 45 minutes south to Poipu, rent a board at Nukumoi Surf Co. ($6 per hour; ), and try the Poipu Beach surf break, one of the island's best. Afterwards, crash just 50 yards away at the year-old Koa Kea, the first and only boutique property here (doubles from $299; ).

Trippin' on Indo

Short-term memory loss in the South Pacific.

Indonesia

Shrines decorated for the Hindu Odalan festival.

Indonesia

Lembongan traffic

LEMBONGAN ISN'T EXACTLY out of the way鈥攋ust seven miles southeast of tourist-clogged Bali鈥攂ut it stays perfectly out of your way. Nothing about the place gets between you and your vacation. A three-square-mile speck of coral reefs, empty beaches, and hillside bungalows, the Indonesian island is what Henry Miller meant when he said of Big Sur, California, “There being nothing to improve on in the surroundings, the tendency is to set about improving oneself.”

The easy access from Bali鈥攑lus the presence of several consistent surf breaks and dive spots鈥攈as given Lembongan a small but steady tourism economy to supplement the traditional kelp farms. My wife and I thought it might be a nice change of pace during our 16-day honeymoon on Bali. It ended up being the highlight of our trip.

It's hard for either of us to say exactly why. I know we surfed and took a beginner scuba excursion. But mostly what we have are hazy recollections of long naps, afternoon strolls, and laughing over dinner about how we'd managed to fill another day doing … er, well, we were never quite sure. And still aren't. We barely even have any photos from our stay. That's Lembongan's gift: letting you let go.

I imagine this empty-mindedness is the sort of self-improvement people seek from meditation retreats. But this retreat has cold beer and a really hollow reef break鈥攆rom what I can remember.

GET THERE: Island Explorer Cruises offers day trips to Lembongan for $85 per person, including food and activities, and beachside bungalows for two from $90 per night ().

Have Lots, Want Not

The curious challenge of living it up on a private island in Fiji.

Fiji

Three acres of paradise: Wadigi

Indonesia

Wadigi's open air suites

I HAD TWO WHITE-SAND beaches and an infinity pool that overlooked an endless sea. I had a boatman ready at a moment's notice to take me snorkeling, water-skiing, windsurfing, fishing, or paddling in a glass-bottom kayak. I had two chefs waiting to prepare any whim; an open-air villa; an on-call masseuse; and a statuesque hostess who greeted me with a fruity cocktail in a fresh-cut coconut. In other words, I had Wadigi, a tiny islet in Fiji's Mamanucas, at my command.

I'd been sent there by a dive magazine to experience the singular indulgence of a private island. And, as a chronically underpaid writer, I planned to soak up every last perk. But after a couple of days of diving among spiky lionfish at half a dozen world-class sites, dinners with too many courses to count, and enough gin-and-tonics to get me kicked out of any self-respecting American bar, a funny thing happened: I found myself doing absolutely nothing.

As it turns out, when you have everything you might want, your wants start to subside. OK, so I never did get bored with that glass-bottom kayak, but I spent most of my free hours simply lolling around and contemplating the preposterous views. On my last evening, instead of ordering extravagant cocktails and back-to-back massages, I ate all the home-baked cookies in the jar and then simply sat in the pool watching the sun dip below the horizon and the clouds sweep across the mirror-still sea.

GET THERE: From $2,327 per day for two, including meals, most activities, and lodging; two-tank dives, $100;

New Outposts

Seven island getaways to fit every fantasy.

Anguilla

The Viceroy, Anguilla

FISH
Islas Secas, Panama
A group of 16 private islands, Islas Secas sits 25 miles off the Pacific coast, close to the wahoo, marlin, and grouper crowding Hannibal Bank. On land, the place is Gilligan's wildest dream, its seven solar oceanfront yurts holding only 14 guests. Go for the surfing or diving, but mainly go fish: Last winter, fishing director Carter Andrews helped a guest set seven world records here. In a week. Six nights, $6,600 per person;

SAIL
Scrub Island, British Virgin Islands
This 230-acre private island, which opened in February, is the first new resort in the BVIs in 15 years. At the heart is a 53-slip marina, the perfect base to launch a sailing excursion of the BVIs. Or stick around in one of the island's 52 rooms to enjoy day sailing, diving, hiking, and three restaurants. Doubles from $359;

DIVE
Shearwater Resort, Saba
Set some 2,000 feet atop Saba, a five-square-mile volcanic island in the Neth颅erlands Antilles, Shearwater offers panoramic ocean views but is only a ten-minute drive from the docks. There, dive boats will take you out to some of the Caribbean's best snorkeling and scuba. (Ask Shearwater about custom packages.) The newly renovated rooms offer flatscreens, iPod docks, and wi-fi. Doubles from $175;

WATERSPORT
Viceroy Hotel and Resort, Anguilla
With three restaurants and three pools, you might be inclined never to leave the grounds of this year-old, 35-acre resort on the shores of both Barnes and Meads bays. But do: The 3,200 feet of coastline on the two bays offers spectacular sailing, snorkeling, and swimming. Doubles from $595;

SURF
The Atlantis Hotel, Barbados
Following a complete refurbishment in 2009, this swank, eight-room lodge on Barbados's east coast offers fast access to Sand Bank, a beginner-friendly beach break, and Soup Bowl, a tenacious reef break that Kelly Slater has called one of the best in the world. Doubles from $255;

MULTISPORT
The Landings, St. Lucia
A 19-acre waterfront resort on the northern tip of lush St. Lucia, the Landings offers complimentary 78-foot sailboats, snorkel gear, and sea kayaks . Pick up one of the latter and paddle 400 yards to little Pigeon Island for a hike to an 18th-century British fort. And don't forget to look inland: St. Lucia's Piton mountains offer some of the Caribbean's best hiking and vistas (you can see neighboring St. Vincent). Six nights, $1,755 per person, double occupancy;

INDULGE
Terre di Corleone and Portella della Ginestra, Sicily
Until recently, these properties were owned by mafia bosses Bernardo Brusca and Salvatore Riina. Thanks to a 1996 Italian law that uses government-seized mafia assets for social purposes, they've been converted into inns and cooperative farms producing fresh pasta, honey, legumes, and, of course, plentiful red and white wines. Doubles from $45;

Fresh Trips

Seven island getaways with the perfect balance of adventure and indulgence.

Belize

Off Ambergris Caye, Belize

PADDLE
Palau
Boundless Journeys' Oceania Odyssey starts with infinity-pool luxury at the Palau Pacific Resort, on Koror, before going rustic: For the next week, no more than ten guests camp on two smaller islands; snorkel over sunken World War II planes; sea-kayak the saltwater Black Tip Lake, accessed by marine tunnel; and dine on fresh-caught parrotfish. January鈥揙ctober; from $4,695 per person;

SAIL
Isle of Skye, Scotland
On the new seven-day Sailing & Walking Around Skye trip from Wilderness Scotland, local skipper Angus MacDonald Smith will ferry eight guests around Skye on his 67-foot yacht, Elinca, seeking out the old pirate anchorages, hailing passing fishermen to buy prawns, and cruising up inlets to launch guided hikes in the steep Cuillin Hills. Go in May or June for 20-hour days and peak seabird nesting. $1,400 per person;

MULTISPORT
Madagascar
Gap 国产吃瓜黑料s' Madagascar Experience focuses on inland beauty. From the capital of Antananarivo, your crew will head south by minibus, stopping to hike in lush rainforests, bike around (and swim in) Lake Andraikiba, and explore the eroded sandstone Isalo Mountains. March鈥揇ecember; $1,449 per person;

FISH
Seychelles
On Frontiers Travel's new six-day Desroches Island Flyfishing 国产吃瓜黑料, guests cast for hard-fighting bluefin trevally at offshore atolls by day and crash in private villas by night. Casting arm need a break? Explore the 3.5-mile-long island with kayaks, bikes, or snorkels and fins. $7,600 per person, double occupancy;

MULTISPORT
San Juan Islands
REI 国产吃瓜黑料s' San Juan Islands trip is a six-day mash-up through Washington's Puget Sound, including a 50-mile road-biking spin around Orcas Island, sea kayaking with killer whales near Sentinel Island, and one night at a remote campsite. (The other four are spent at the Lakedale Resort's tent-cabins, which have real beds.) From $1,899 per person;

DIVE
Half Moon Caye, Belize
On the seven-day Lighthouse Reef trip from Island Expeditions, you'll kick back in safari-style tents and napping hammocks strung in coconut groves on 44-acre Half Moon Caye, some 50 miles off the mainland. Of course, you'll probably spend most of your time in or on the water, diving the Blue Hole鈥攁 famous, 400-foot-deep well鈥攕norkeling in shallows, and exploring the reef by kayak. From $1,789 per person;

RIDE
Crete
Backroads' new six-day Crete cycling trip starts from Ir谩klion, on the northern coast, and ends, after 268 miles of pedaling, at Akrotiri Cape, in the west. In between, you'll spin past lush vineyards and olive groves and Venetian harbor towns, where fresh seafood and plush inns await. $3,598 per person, double occupancy;

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