Ever come across an incredible hotel that stops you mid-scroll and makes you think, Wow, wouldn’t it be something to stay there? We do, too—all the time. Welcome to Friday Fantasy, where we highlight amazing hotels, lodges, cabins, tents, campsites, and other places perched in perfect outdoor settings. Read on for the intel you need to book an upcoming adventure here. Or at least dream about it.

Ten feet overhead in a desert canyon in Utah, a jammed log spanned the gully, left by a recent flash flood. In the next passage in Harris Wash inĚýGrand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, southern Utah, our group gazed up at a tangled brown stripe of debris from the same flood, adorning a green cottonwood tree like Spanish moss.

All our lives we marvel at nature’s power. Here we also appreciated the immovability of geology—rock walls—as our group of nine, all staying in the region atĚýthe complex, at first walked and then arduously wormed through a narrowing slot canyon. When the sides pinched down to only a foot wide, my friend DeMarco Williams, athletic and deep-chested, said from two feet ahead, “I don’t know if I can do this.” He was pinned.

Ofland Escalante, two miles from the town of Escalante, is situated amid the landscape of the national monument and between two national parks. (Video: Eric Vega)

I had it easier, being smaller. As a climber, I’ve been in squeeze chimneys before; they can be awful and claustrophobic, and you just want out, but have to make it happen.

DeMarco pressed on, and something gave, and he scraped through the constriction. I followed, ducking, and emerged into the light, where he waited smiling. At each obstacle, following canyoneering practices shown us by Rick Green, owner of the guiding outfit , one of us waited to help the next person.

This trip last August was to the treasure that is Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, where friends and I all stayed two nights at Ofland Escalante, an ideal, central base located within the national monument and two miles west of the pioneer town of the same name. (Harris Wash was some 25 miles from town, with much of the drive on a washboard road.)

Not everyone in our group loved our several-hour canyoneering experience. Some cried, and some half-laughed, half-cried. But no one will forget it.

Toward the end, having split into two groups (one with Amie Fortin of the same outfit), we all convened for lunch in a bowl among blunt buttresses that were once ancient sand dunes, the slickrock around us inscribed with fine criss-cross lines. Sage and grasses waved in the wind, with hardy piñon-juniper trees in clumps nearby. Paiute, Ute, and Navajo tribes once dwelled in this region. So did dinosaurs. We saw no one else all day.

As we all looped back out of the canyon, we scrambled a little, but much of the return was just a quiet, reverent walk through washes and passages. Tracing the undulating wind- and water-sculpted walls, I peered into natural niches like little altars, holding swirls of sediment.

The Lodge

Closed each winter but slated to reopen March 12, Ofland Escalante is located just off Highway 12. Opened in 2021 on the site of an old RV park and drive-in movie theater, the place was in recent years, per the website, a “luxury RV park” known as Yonder Escalante. In May 2023 the new owners added “deluxe” cabins, and last year renamed the place (“Ofland” is for “of the land”). Ofland has varying services and prices, and brings people together in communal spaces.Ěý

The place offers four types of accommodations. I bunked in a Deluxe Cabin, simple and boxy with floor-to-ceiling windows, able to sleep up to four people. Also available are vintage Airstreams, tiny cabins, and campsites.

The central common area draws visitors with a fire pit, picnic tables, complimentary hot drinks, and shelves of books, board games, and cards. Our crew brought over s’mores supplies from our rooms and gathered at the tables for spirited rounds of Uno.

On Ofland Escalante’s 22-acre grounds, you can still enjoy the vintage outdoor “drive-in” theater, where you watch from inside one of nine in-situ classic cars. Other property diversions include a hot tub and swimming pool.

But the big deal is the place’s location amid the wonders of the Utah desert. The nearby town of Escalante is on the northern border of the 1.87-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, and just off the 123-mile-long U of scenic highway 12, which runs between Panguich, 67 miles west of the town, and Torrey, 65 miles north of it. Escalante sits between two national parks, about 50 miles east of Bryce Canyon and 67 southwest of Capitol Reef. Highway 12 links them all.

şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Intel

Escalante (and Ofland Escalante) are in road-trip reach of five national parks, four state parks, another national monument, and the vast Dixie National Forest, all boasting a myriad of .

You’re also in the high-elevation desert here. The town of Escalante is set at 5,800 feet, and the surrounding area rises to about 8,600 feet, while reaches 9,000 feet. So ascend gradually and, while you are outside and exerting, pay attention to your water intake.

Escalante is famous for its slot canyons, and Excursions of Escalante can take you out, set up rappels, and use their guides’ situational experience to avoid dangerous floods. The outfitters gave us packs, helmets, and water bottles, but you should arrive wearing good trail shoes and clothes that take being abraded.

A little on-site commentary from a canyon in Harris Wash, the Utah desert (Video: Neil Tandy)

A Utah friend tells me that , a 6.7-mile out-and-back starting 19 miles northeast of Escalante, is her favorite hike ever. It has birdwatching—for hawks and ravens, and she once saw a condor—and “a little of everything” else, from steep sections to sandy patches and a 125-foot waterfall.

For me, a dark-horse favorite was also . We hiked the Rainbow section (and added a few other loops), where we saw petrified wood in scattered chunks, from wastebasket- to coffee-table size, with hues of sulphur yellow and iron red but also deep blues and violet. The starts on an uphill past a tram-size balanced rock overlooking Wide Hollow Reservoir, where you can camp, swim, or .

Please do not pocket any pieces of petrified wood. Things in the desert are supposed to stay there. Besides, I’ve , and taking one only brings you ill luck.

Choice Rooms

My Deluxe Cabin’s outside shower was heaven. The water was plenty hot, and I could gaze out at the sky and the surrounding scrub-covered dun bluffs.

The Deluxe Cabins (from $259 per night) are the most cushy places, the only ones with private bathrooms and their own driveways. Each has a kitchenette and Wi-Fi, a deck with picnic table, and a queen bed and pull-out sofa such that it can sleep up to four. From the cabins it’s a five-minute walk to the main lodge. ADA cabins are available as well, and the lodge has golf carts for transport around the property.

Other options include vintage Airstreams ($175 per night), which sleep up to three people, and tiny cabins ($169), located just paces from the common area. The cabins have front decks and the Airstreams step out to picnic tables and fire pits. Both use shared bathrooms with amenities and open-air showers.

Ofland also has five campsites (from $99, per night). Each comes with a picnic table, grill, fire pit, filtered-water hookup, power, and bathroom access.

Eat and Drink

Pop over to the on-site food truck, prepare your own meals in your kitchenette, or go out for dinner at in the delightfully small and funky town of Escalante. 4th West offers 30 types of beers; burgers, paninis, and nice spicy tacos; a pool table, where my friends played half the night; and a nice local vibe. The evening was cool, so we skipped the outdoor seating, but in warm temps it would be wonderful to enjoy the view from there over dinner.

, 14 miles east of town and located within the national monument, is a magical-looking complex overlooking the startlingly green forest lining the Escalante River. It offers vegetarian-friendly Southwest fare, indoor and outdoor seating, and lodging.

Thirteen miles farther north is in the town of Boulder. The place, which has a devoted following, features ethically sourced ingredients and its own organic garden. The owners practice Buddhist principles and are committed to social responsibility.

At the end of Highway 12, in the town of Torrey, is the family-owned Wild Rabbit Cafe, with an on-site coffee roaster, and vegan and vegetarian options.

When to Go

Ofland Escalante is open mid-March through October. Spring and fall will have you cozying up around the fire pits, and maybe hitting the hot tub. Summer is bound to put you in the swimming pool. All indoor accommodations have heat and A/C.

How to Get There

The small Bryce Canyon Airport is just four miles north of Bryce Canyon National Park, 48 miles from Escalante. Most visitors and rent a car for the amazing 294-mile drive south and back with its section on Highway 12.

Don’t Miss

Hike to the 100 Hands Pictograph Panel, actually site of three major rock-art panels, via a family-friendly 1.2-mile round-trip off Highway 12, starting from the Escalante River Trailhead 14 miles east of Escalante. Ancient petroglyphs—sheep, deer, a snake—are visible just five minutes along the trail. The trail contours up to an alcove where you see the 100 Hands (more like 160 Hands) panel, and beyond that is the Shaman and Hunter panel, with a bowhunting scene and collection of shaman figures wearing headpieces.

Forty miles beyond Escalante, stop and get out at the Homestead Overlook, at 9,600 feet elevation, to see the tableau of the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument, the Kaiparowits Plateau, and the Waterpocket Fold of Capitol Reef National Park, with their oceanic deposits and sedimentary layers, red and gold desert against the bumpy skyline of the Henry Mountains. Descending, you pass the Fishaven Reservoir and may see some sandhill cranes, before winding through the treed hamlet of Boulder, volcanic rocks and basalt scattered along the roadway.

Details

Price: From $99

Address: 2020 UT-12
Escalante, UT 84726

Alison Osius is a senior editor in travel at şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř magazine and şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online. She is a longtime climber and a former editor at Climbing and Rock and Ice magazines. She’s recently written about seeing the Utah desert from a lodge made of glass sky domes; hiking the memorial Storm King Trail, scene of one of our country’s greatest firefighting tragedies; and how to approach traveling to altitude (which starts with: paying attention). Oh, and if you were wondering, here are 8 simple rules for visiting your friends in mountain and waterfront towns.

The post Want to Wake Up in Utah Canyon Country? We Do, Too. appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

We’re minimalist travelers here at şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř—we don’t want any extra weight slowing us down as we explore the world. What we do like are practical gifts that make traveling easier, more convenient, and more fun. So our travel editors are revealing the items on their wish list this season—and the gifts they’ll be giving to their favorite travelers.

I’m definitely adding that water bottle and the Hipcamp gift card to my wish list. —Alison Osius

1. Best Gadget

AirFly Pro ($55)

At first, I was skeptical of this tiny gadget. As a lightweight packer, I refuse to schlep more chargers or adapters than absolutely necessary to survive a long-haul flight. Yet this year, my husband, tech-savvy guy that he is, insisted we try the AirFly Pro Wireless Audio Transmitter/ Receiver on our trans-Atlantic trip to England. Usually, I just use the freebie headphones flight attendants hand out. But our vacation happened to fall during the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament, which we watch obsessively, and I instantly became a convert to this gizmo: a pocket-sized, 15-gram transmitter that plugs into your seat-back audio jack and Bluetooths to any wireless headphones on the market.

We watched game after game on the plane’s live TV app, and time flew by. Since we had no cords to mess with, bathroom breaks were easy, and we streamed from two screens in tandem, each able to listen with both buds. The AirFly Pro has a nice 25-hour battery life as well, and now we never fly without it. This is the perfect stocking stuffer for any frequent flyer. —Patty Hodapp, senior contributing travel editor

2. Best Fanny Pack

Yeti Sidekick Dry 1L Gear Case ($40; strap is an additional $10)

Fanny packs, in theory, should make hands-free travel easier, right? Not always. My entire life I’ve searched for the perfect pouch, only to be disappointed in the wild by their size, or lack of pockets, or uncomfy straps, or performance in poor weather. Enter the Yeti Sidekick Dry 1L Gear Case—officially everything I need and more, available to use alone or with a strap.

The waterproof technology of the exterior has kept my stuff dry on brutally rainy trips in Iceland and Ireland, and is made from similar material to that of whitewater rafts, so it can take a beating. The case also floats if I accidentally drop it in water (been there, done that on a recent fly-fishing trip). And its internal mesh pockets ensure my passport, wallet, keys, phone, lip balm, and other gear stay organized.

I’m partial to the one-liter option because it’s the ideal size for me. But if you’ve got a camera or bulky layers to protect, you may want the three or six liter. Don’t forget the Sideclick Strap (sold separately), which attaches to the bag so it doubles as a belt or sling. Now, you can carry your gear in comfort, worry free.—P.H.

3. Best Personal Item

Longchamp Le Pliage Original M Travel Bag ($205)

I always try to carry on when I’m flying. This means that my personal item has to be incredibly efficient at holding a lot but must still fit under the seat. I have spent hours searching for the perfect backpack, but nothing has ever held as much as my nylon Longchamp tote bag does, or held up to wear and tear the same way. I jam this thing with shoes, my laptop, chargers, food, my dopp kit, you name it. The wide-top shape of the bag allows it to hold more than any other while I can still cram it under the seat. It easily attaches to my Away Carry On Suitcase, too.

The Longchamp has been on a lot of plane trips with me over the last 15 years and still looks great. It folds down to nothing when you aren’t using it and also makes a great beach, gym, or day bag once you get where you’re going. Be sure to order the shoulder strap with it, or you can to get the extract size, color, and straps you want, which is what I did. —Mary Turner, Senior Brand Director

4. Best Extra Layer

Patagonia’s Torrentshell 3L Rain Jacket ($179)

I have had a version of this Patagonia rain jacket for years, and I take it on every trip. The jacket is super lightweight and packs down to nothing. It’s great for rain protection or when you need an extra layer for warmth in cold or wind. I bought mine a size up so that I could easily layer underneath it. The Torrentshell comes in men’s and women’s versions. It lasts almost forever, too.â€Äâ.°Ő.

5. Best Gift for Long-Haul Travelers

Resort Pass (from $25)

ResortPass, which allows you to pay a fee to use hotels for the day, is the perfect gift for travelers. Maybe there’s a hotel that you can’t afford, but you’d really love to spend a day there, or you have a long wait for your red-eye flight home from Hawaii after checking out of your Airbnb. This is where ResortPass becomes wonderfully handy. You can chill by a hotel pool instead of hanging out at the airport.

I searched for day passes in my hometown of Santa Fe and found some great deals, starting at $25, at beautiful properties. ResortPass partners with more than 1,700 hotels around the world and that list is constantly growing. It’s easy to purchase . How much I would have loved this in my backpacking days, when sometimes I just needed a little TLC and a hot shower . —M.T.

6. Best Day Spa for Travelers

Olympic Spa (gift cards from $100)

If you’re ever in Los Angeles—for a few days, overnight, or during a long layover—there’s an amazing women-only spa in Koreatown, and I’ve been telling everyone about it, because it is that good. doesn’t look like much from the outside, and the website isn’t going to convince you. But let me testify: this is a spotless oasis that will leave you blissed out after a couple of hours. There are three pools (saltwater, mineral water, and cold plunge), three saunas (herbal steam, red clay, and ice, the last of which was novel but not that cold), an oxygen-therapy room with a charcoal ceiling, and—my favorite—a salt halotherapy room where the warmth thoroughly seeped into my bones.

All that would be enough, but a friend recommended the Goddess treatment ($220), and that put me over the edge: a masseuse scrubbed nearly every inch of my body, from my ears to between my toes; plied my muscles down to overcooked-noodle consistency; and moisturized me to a seal-like slickness. After I spent 105 minutes on the table, the masseuse had to guide my limbs into the bathrobe and slippers. I am returning the next chance I get. Somebody get me a . —Tasha Zemke, managing editor, şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř

7. Best Phone-Camera Accessory

Joby GorillaPod Mobile Mini Tripod ($17)

I work with şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online’s astrotourism writer Stephanie Vermillion, and this past fall she recommended a tiny tripod that pairs well with smartphones. She uses her mini-tripod when shooting the northern lights and other dark-sky scenes that require long shutter-speed times with no vibrations. But honestly, I’m just tired of long-arming photos of myself and friends in beautiful places. I can tuck this accessory into my daypack—it’s about the size of a large iPhone, and weighs the same as two Hershey chocolate bars—and then set it up, adjust its flexible legs, pop my phone into its rubber jaws, set the timer, and take a snap that’s not a blatant selfie. Just what I’m looking for. —T.Z.

8. Best Gift for Nervous Flyers

Bose Noise Canceling Headphones 700 ($349)

Listening to music while flying helps lessen the anxiety I often feel, especially during takeoff, landing, and periods of turbulence. I was gifted these excellent noise-canceling headphones a few years ago, and they were comfortable over my ears and even looked cool, but, sad to say, I left them in the seat-back pocket on a leg to Paris. I’m going to have to replace them, but I have a plan to avoid paying full price: by going to Bose’s amazing , which sells returned products at a significant discount. The brand’s tech team fixes the defects, and you’d never know the items weren’t brand-new. You also still get a year warranty. The only catch is that the item you’re seeking may not be available immediately. I just checked the shop for headphones, and they’re sold out, but upon the click of a button, I’ll be notified when the next pair comes up—and you can believe I’ll wait.Ěý—T.Z.

9. Must-Have for Star Parties

BioLite HeadLamp 425 ($60)

I always travel with a headlamp, and not just for camping and being outdoors. Headlamps are tiny and easy to pack, and I’ve stayed in cabins at the Red River Gorge or in Tahoe where the rooms were so dark I needed a light to find my socks. I still have the original Biolite 330 headlamp from when it was introduced five years ago at an affordable $50: it is super light (2.4 ounces), bright, and functional; is USB rechargeable; and has an integrated design that puts the lamp flush into the headband for simplicity and comfort. It also has a strobe light for rescues and red lights for night missions.

Compared to white lights, low-intensity red ones minimizes pupil dilation, allowing better night vision; red light is also less disruptive to wildlife. Red lights are essential for star gazing, and these days everyone is going to dark-sky parks and peering at the stars, meteors, and northern lights. Recently, looking for a headlamp for my stepsister as she went off to an astrophotography class in the Tucson desert, I picked the 425. —Alison Osius, senior editor, travel

10. Best Travel Pants

The prAna Koen Pant ($95)

When I went to Abu Dhabi to see my nephew graduate from high school, my luggage was delayed for three days out of a five-day trip. So I wore the same mahogany-colored Title IX capris nearly every day as well as on all my flights, and came back loving them more than ever, which is some testament. Sadly, I later lost those red pants. Yet I hit on a match: the Koen. I bought the Koen capris (two pairs), then the Koen shorts (also two pairs), and then the pants: my new fave travel pants and apparently fave anything pants, since I just wore them to the hospital for a finger surgery.

They are lightweight, silky, stretchy, and wrinkle free, and work for anything from hiking to around town. The front pockets are flat and unobtrusive, with hidden zippers, yet deep enough to hold a phone securely if you need a quick stow, like when juggling items in the airport. The pull-on waist is ideal for comfort and upright cat naps, since it lacks zips, snaps, or external ties. The Koen is overall sleek in its lines. I am psyched that it comes in regular, short and tall versions, and am getting the long ones for my older sister, who is taller than I am and travels 70 percent of the time for her work. Don’t tell her, because it’s a surprise.—A.O.

11. Best Gift for Campers

HipCamp gift certificates (starting at $75)

Wasn’t it Clint Eastwood, he of The Eiger Sanction lore, who said, “I would rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth”? No, wait, Steve McQueen. Point is, with digital for booking a campsite on Hipcamp, you can give that experience. A card ushers someone into an expanding community with sites across the country and in Canada, the United Kingdom, France, and Australia. And these sites are not just for a tent in a grassy lot. They are for a yurt in the middle of a flowering meadow; they are for camping, glamping, RV spots, cabins, and canvas. The gift card never expires, nor will you ever run out of places.—A.O.

12. Best Soak With a View

Mount Princeton Hot SpringsĚý (gift cards from $50)

The old mining town of Leadville, Colorado, sits way up there at 10,000 feet, and it’s cold. Luckily within an hour you can reach any of half a dozen hot-springs resorts, some of the nicest in the state or anywhere, to warm your bones. My sister used to live in Leadville, and when I visited we often took our young sons and let them play and soak..and maybe even slow down a little. The mountain-ringed Mount Princeton Hot Springs, in Nathrop, has geothermal springs, an infinity pool, natural creekside pools, and a view of the Chalk Cliffs on the 14,197-foot peak the property is named for. It that work for day passes, lodging, and dining.—A.O.

13. Best Water Bottle for Travel

Katadyn BeFree 0.6 L Water Filter Bottle ($40)

I sure could’ve used this lightweight collapsible filtered bottle last summer for mountain hiking. On one trip with an eight-mile approach followed by a day on a peak and then the dread march out, I filled my bottles time and time again from a stream near camp, thirsty and getting careless when my filtration system took time. (Luckily I got away with it, or rather without giardia, this time.) Filtering at a rate of up to two liters of water per minute, the Katadyn is a fast and light (two ounces) system that would also be perfect for the trail runners and bow hunters in my household who don’t want to carry heavy water bottles. I would like to take the Katadyn hiking and traveling, since it’s light, packable, and makes for safe drinking.—A.O.

14. Best Reading App

Everand Subscription (from $12 per month)

Whether traveling by car or air, I always download a series of audiobooks from my Everand (formerly named Scribd) app before going. With a library of more than 1.5 million ebooks and audiobooks—plus a collection of magazines and podcasts—to choose from, I never run low on options. Often, I’ll base my pick on the destination: Desert Solitaire for a trip to Moab or A Walk in the Woods for a hiking adventure in Maine. Every time I board a flight, I pop in my earbuds and am fully entertained until we land. Or, since I like to sleep on planes, I might set Everand’s sleep timer to 30 minutes, and drift off by the time we finish takeoff. I love the app so much that I’m getting a subscription for my 14-year-old stepdaughter this year, too. —Abigail Wise, Digital Director

The post 14 Best Gift Ideas for the Traveler in Your Life appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

Ever come across an incredible hotel that stops you mid-scroll and makes you think, Wow, wouldn’t it be something to stay there? We do, too—all the time. Welcome to Friday Fantasy, where we highlight amazing hotels, lodges, cabins, tents, campsites, and other places perched in perfect outdoor settings. Read on for the intel you need to book an upcoming adventure here. Or at least dream about it.

Waking up in the middle of the night can be maddening. Unless you’re able to gaze directly up at the firmament.

The skies are the star attraction at Clear Sky Resorts Bryce Canyon, a new property set in a quiet gulch just 16 miles southeast of Bryce Canyon National Park. Far from light pollution and adjacent to this certified International Dark Sky Park, it offers superb stargazing by night and an otherworldly landscape by day.

Most nights, that is. I could consider it unfortunate that rain fell during my visit, but precipitation is good for the high desert. And while I lacked lucid starry skies, I enjoyed a daytime rainbow and an evening lightning show, both plenty compensatory. Upon waking at first light—usually discomfiting to this night owl—I watched raindrops run peaceful rivulets down the glass wall of my geodesic dome.

The resort is a collection of these futuristic structures, their surfaces half-glass and half-paneled. The window sides of each dome face up and also away from other units, though as darkness fell, I couldn’t help wondering (hey, a little) about anyone looking in. But all I had to do was close the lower tier of curtains, leaving the top ones open for viewing.

Hal Feinberg, resort founder and co-owner, said in the dining hall that evening that he came up with the sky-dome idea after seeing a teepee hotel in Livingston, Montana, that felt close to nature yet offered decks and nice indoor furniture.

In 2021, he opened Clear Sky Resorts Grand Canyon, 30 miles from the South Rim, with 45 sky domes that, like the ones in Utah, are connected by paths to shared activity spaces. With the Bryce iteration, Feinberg upgraded from using clear PVC canvas windows to ones made of glass. The result, he said, “is like going from a Chevy to a Corvette.”

Clear Sky Resorts Bryce Canyon opened August 9. It currently offers 25 domes, out of an intended final total of 62. Also underway is an employee-housing structure for up to 40 people.

This is luxury glamping with a jazzy, celestial theme. In the lobby, I passed a robot whose concierge duties include greeting guests by name and pulling up hiking maps. The nearby dining-hall dome, also known as the café, featured a gleaming central boomerang-shaped bar. That evening as friends and I stared out of the café’s 28-foot-tall window, the amber lights lining the surrounding gravel paths and access road glowed like airport jetways.

A singer-guitarist played during dinner, and afterward, between showers, we hung out around the decorative fire pit on the deck. Daytime, people lounged there at the outdoor tables, and a grandfather smiled as his two grandsons went at it with cornhole.

şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Intel

You can sign up for stargazing tours and outdoor yoga, or walk a pleasant mile or two around the property on the gravel paths and roadway. A nearby option is to drive ten miles to the northernmost hike in the national park, the moderate (0.8 mile one-way, with just 150 feet of elevation gain). This waterfall hike, a rarity for the area, winds along the park boundary.

But most visitors are here to explore the heart of . Friends and I intended to hike with April LeFevre, a fourth-generation area resident who drove shuttle groups in Bryce for 18 years before opening her own outfit, . Rain, however, nixed the morning’s hike, and instead we motored along on the main park road, UT-63, which stretches 18 miles north to south. Before doubling back to finish at the famed Bryce Amphitheater overlook near the entrance, we marveled at seeing the arch at Natural Bridge, 12 miles in, and two miles later the Hunter spire at Agua Canyon, come in and out of the mist.

Along the way, LeFevre recounted many local tales, including that of LeRoy Parker, later known as the outlaw Butch Cassidy, who grew up 50 miles away in Circleville. His life changed when he was 13, LeFevre said, after he visited a mercantile to pick up a pair of overalls he’d had repaired, and, finding the place closed, slipped through a window to take them and a pie. He left a note regarding payment, but the owner pressed charges. Though acquitted, the youth henceforth resented authority. LeFevre also said that while Cassidy is thought to have died with his partner, the Sundance Kid, in Bolivia, an area rancher (now long gone) told her that Cassidy had returned to Circleville. The rancher claimed to have given the former robber a ride in his wagon. Some say Cassidy is buried in a secret location in Circleville.

Anyone visiting the park will want to see the spindly hoodoos, striated in red, gold, and white. Bryce Canyon has the greatest concentration of hoodoos in the world: 12 amphitheaters of them. According to an ancient Piaute , the hoodoos were once people who’d committed evil acts. A coyote spirit invited them all to a party, to trap them, and turned them to stone.

In geological terms, the hoodoos and holes in the walls are remnants from 50 million years ago when the area was a lake surrounded by rock walls. The spires formed from erosion, weather, and ice expansion during freeze-thaw cycles.

Later, when the clouds cleared, our crew hiked the , a 1.8-mile round-trip, to reach a formation that supposedly looks like Queen Victoria. I didn’t think too much of the resemblance, but marveled at the views of endless golden towers and labyrinths. This hike is commonly for a stellar three-miler. I’d have loved to do the 4.2-mile hike to see the top-heavy hoodoos of the .

Ěý

Bryce is known as an otherworldly place to see the sunrise (head to Sunrise Point) as it lights up the hoodoos. Rangers offer in the park as well, and doing that would be amazing.

The landscape is also a bird-watchers’ dream, drawing hawks, eagles, peregrine falcons, and swifts. I delighted in seeing both ponderosa pine, which smells of vanilla, and, at the highest point of the canyon, ancient twisted bristlecone pines. The mellow one-mile cuts through a forest, with side views of hoodoos. (This trail is considered largely wheelchair accessible, with assistance.)

Much of the hiking at Bryce begins at about 8,000 feet, and the Bristlecone Loop reaches 9,100 feet, so in coming from lower elevation, be prepared to deal with altitude. Always bring water and pay attention to intake.

Choice Rooms

The Standard Sky Domes sleep two. I stayed in a Deluxe, called Milky Way, with more controls for lights and temperature and vents than I possibly knew what to do with. The place had a patio (some have decks) and kitchenette, a king bed and two twin beds in a loft, and a rad shower with six adjustable side jets. The Milky Way ($730) was dubbed an XL in that it slept four, and I thought about how much fun (aside from the snoring) it would be to have my husband and two sons here.

The designs varied. One friend stayed in a two-occupant Deluxe called the Big Dipper ($630) with no loft but a cool swinging chair. Another was in Nova ($680), also double occupancy, that had, I kid you not, a dance floor, disco ball, and flashing lights. There’s a two-suite dome that sleeps eight ($1,125) if you want to go big.

Eat and Drink

The resort’s Sky Nova Café Bar and Grill, open to the public, affords wall-to-ceiling views of the canyon and sky and has a lot of fun themed touches, like little inverted domes within the water glasses and crazily multicolored silverware.

EntrĂ©es are generously sized and range from $20 and to $35, though the 20-ounce Atlas Ribeye is $49—and that thing is a brick. I ordered the heavenly pan-seared °Őľ±łŮ˛ą˛Ô’s Trout with lemon-dill sauce.

I didn’t know I liked barbecue that much until I had lunch at i.d.k. Barbecue, six miles from the resort in the town of Tropic. While I had the sweet chicken and baked beans, also on offer were pulled pork, beef brisket, slaw, potato salad, and cornbread.

Ebenezer’s Barn and Grill, 15 miles away in Bryce Canyon City, is a popular “gourmet cowboy” music hall, with a fixed-price meal served to hundreds in turn. The night we visited, Due West, a country band founded in Nashville, Tennessee, played original tunes.

When to Go

Clear Sky is open year-round, as is Bryce Canyon. Most visitors to the park come from June through September to take advantage of the warmer weather and clearest skies. The months of October through May are cooler but the upsides are fewer crowds, autumn foliage, and spring wildflowers. Some say the park is at its most beautiful with white snow atop the red rock.

How to Get There

The small Bryce Canyon Airport is just four miles north of the park. Most visitors fly into Salt Lake City and rent a car for the spectacular 294-mile drive south.

Don’t Miss

Stick your head into the lobby of the Bryce Canyon Lodge, built in 1924 in the Rustic style of national-park architecture and one of some half dozen lodges designed by Gilbert Stanley Underwood. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it meshes development, landscape architecture, and the environment. The lodge is located in the forest only 700 feet from the canyon rim, and a beautiful half-mile walk from Sunrise Point.

Details

Price: From $525
Address: 855 UT-12, Cannonville, UT 84718

888 704 4445

To Book

Alison Osius is a senior editor at şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř and part of the travel team. She lives in Western Colorado. Previously, she had only flown over Bryce Canyon, though in a small plane with a sunset view. This was a prized chance to explore the park from the ground.

Looking for more great travel intel?

For more by this author, see a personal tale of years of hiking the Storm King Memorial Trail, just off Interstate 70, in Western Colorado, site of a famous firefighting tragedy.

See also this tribute to the most beautiful mountain town in Colorado.

And a lifetime’s accumulated camping tips.

The post What It’s Like to Stay in a Glass Dome Under Utah’s Darkest Skies appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

They don’t call it lifestyle property for nothing. Anyone who is fortunate enough to live in a beautiful place can expect visitors and a lot of houseguests. I know because I live in a mountain town.

When I was younger and living in a shared house in Aspen, I rashly, widely urged friends to visit, to crash in sleeping bags. But then there were more and more. Someone who supposedly knew my brother from college called and asked if she and her brother could stay a few days. (It’s always “a few.”) One of my housemates had a romance with a visiting British guy, who came back the next winter with two of his friends. By then she’d met someone new, and so she left the three Brits sleeping in our living room for days, until I was elected to tell them to decamp.

In those days of land lines, one time when I came back from work, a visiting friend said, “I called Russia.”

“You … what?”

“I had to call Russia. You can tell me when you get the bill.”

Of course, I’ve stayed in many a friend’s house, and I love having people for dinner and to visit. But early on in Aspen, my housemates and I realized we had to manage the situation. I started warning people ahead to say I would be working and couldn’t ski with them every day, nor go out every night. Guests who are on vacation and locals who are not are fundamentally at cross purposes.

Eventually I got married, moved 30 miles down valley to Carbondale, entered many years of kids and schools, and had visitors, but not the same sort of volume. Lately, though, they are surging anew.

Friends are taking early retirement. Some are self-employed or have reduced their hours, and some are working “very part time.” And there are always teachers with summers off, or just people on breaks: lighthearted, blithe.

Recently a friend said he was coming to town and asked to stay. My husband and I said sure. “I’ll get there Monday or Tuesday,” the next text said. He arrived Sunday morning: “Oh, I thought it was Monday.”

Friends pass through on long road trips, with loaded roof racks and bike racks. People I haven’t seen in years write, “How are you?” and I know what that means. People ask all the time if I can take time off or do things on weekdays. But I work full-time, and in the last month we’ve had six sets of visitors. I wanted to see every one of them (and insisted on hosting some for certain events), but PTO is finite.

The other change is this: now I work at home. The pandemic. A friend who also works at home recently told her nephew sorry, no, he and his wife couldn’t come stay on a Tuesday through Thursday. Her old guest room is now her office, which she must use to work. It’s always easier to have friends on a weekend, but visitors forget, because they’re on vacation.

So, a few suggested tenets for visiting friends in mountain towns and other beautiful places.

1. Ask your hosts well ahead of time if a date works, and offer an easy option to decline. I.e.: “We can also camp, so no worries if you have too much going on.” A dear friend came through last week, knew we had our son and his girlfriend here in addition to two people in a van in the driveway, and mercifully said, “Can you come meet us for dinner one night?”

2. It helps to keep your stay to three nights, per the old saying about fish. (An exception is family, especially our now grown kids … er, and all their friends.)

3. No one was ever anything but pleased with a thoughtful house gift. Anything’ll do. And/or bring food! A cooler is good, too, so you can bring more!

4. Offer to contribute to meals and cover at least one dinner, whether it’s cooked in your host’s house—that’s fine! that’s heaven!—or at a restaurant.

5. Please put your dishes in the dishwasher. They can’t make it there from the counter on their own.

6. On leaving, put sheets and towels in the laundry room, and clean up the bathroom a little.

7. Aim to visit on weekends. At the end of “Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen,” Baz Luhrmann says, “Trust me about the sunscreen.” Trust me about the weekends. Midweek is tricky when people work.

8. Help me out. I work a lot. I prefer people not bang on my office door shouting, “Time to stop!” Or chide, “You’re not working again, are you?” or ask, “When are you going to retire?” I like my job, and I’d like to keep it.

Last, I practice what my brother and his husband—who hosted me and everybody else under the sun while they were in the State Department in embassy housing overseas—always called benign neglect. Make your own plans, come and go as you like. I’m glad to see you and will join in if I can, but mostly give you a hug and a house key.

Alison Osius, a senior editor at şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř, lives in Carbondale, in Western Colorado. Having stayed with her brother and his family in Indonesia and Vietnam, she hopes they will take her up on visiting her to ski in Colorado next spring break. She’d hit the slopes with them on the weekend.

Colorado’s Storm King Mountain Memorial Trail Takes You to Sacred Grounds

Don’t Let Altitude Sickness Ruin Your Mountain Vacation. Heed This Doctor’s Tips to Avoid It.

In 2022 A Stranger Saved Us in a Storm at Green River. Trying to Find Him, I Just Got a Surprise.

The post If You Live in a Mountain Town, Get Ready for Lots of Houseguests appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

The young woman was coming from sea level, but was fit and had never had trouble with altitude before. She would say that many times over the next few days. She seemed OK at the welcome dinner in Redstone, Colorado, at 7,185 feet, opening the annual photo camp then held by Rock and Ice magazine, where I was working.

But the next day as we all headed up to a campground above the town of Basalt at 8,000-plus feet, she threw up out my car window.

I offered to take her back down to our offices in Carbondale, which is at 6,200 feet, but she shook her head vigorously no. Our group all hiked up to a cliff, and later, on the way down the steep trail, the student collapsed into my arms. It took two of us to guide her to the road. Still she refused my entreaties to go to the hospital or come to Carbondale overnight. She had a dismal time of it before feeling better a day or two later.

It turned out that, upon arrival in Denver, the young woman had immediately hiked a 14er, I think Mount Elbert, because she was excited to arrive. But she paid the price, oh she paid.

While I now live at altitude, I experienced sleeplessness, tinnitus, and breathlessness when first moving to the area. Those were mild annoyances, but I’ve seen some things go pretty south. Once my elderly stepfather, who had a heart condition, spent Christmas in the ER and came back to the family’s rental house toting oxygen. Another time I was at a wedding in Boulder where a bridesmaid keeled over right in the middle of the ceremony, having come from sea level…and being dehydrated…and hungover. The young-adult son of a friend came to Vail, got drunk, sat in a hot tub (yes, they dehydrate you, too), and had to be airlifted out. (The bridesmaid and the guy were both fine.)

After the incident at the photo camp, I wrote up a list of altitude-sickness prevention tips for students and other visitors to our area.

As summer kicks in, with visitors coming to my house and tourists traveling to mountain towns all over, I decided to update the list, and contacted Peter Hackett, M.D., an E.R. doctor and . Hackett has treated patients and gathered research at the clinic known as “14” (for 14,000 feet) on Denali, in Alaska, and in the mountains of Nepal, also at 14,000 feet. (He climbed Everest in 1981, going solo from the South Col to the summit.) In 2009, he founded the Institute for Altitude Medicine at the Telluride Medical Center, in Telluride, Colorado, heading it up until 2015.

He also has another gig, as it were. In 2006, when the Rolling Stones played in Mexico City, at 7,350 feet, they felt the altitude. Hackett, as an expert, was flown in for a consultation; he and Mick Jagger hit it off. Since then, he says, “I’ve toured with them for 18 years” as the band’s physician, in his capacity as an ER doctor. Tours are intermittent, lasting perhaps two months, and then he can return home to Ridgway, Colorado, where he .

Word, it seems, gets around among rock stars. I reached Hackett by WhatsApp while he was at a stadium in Madrid, there as touring physician with Bruce Springsteen. He was back stateside the following week in time for the Stones concert in Denver.

As many of you will be traveling from sea level to the mountains this summer to hike, bike, and have fun (and later will travel to them to ski, snowboard, and have fun), here’s our advice on how to fend off altitude sickness.

What Is Altitude Sickness?

In traveling upward from sea level, you encounter thinner air, with effects typically appearing between about 5,000 and 7,000 feet. The lower atmospheric pressure means breathing brings in less oxygen, because less is available. Especially above 8,000 feet, if your body has not had time to adjust, you may experience signs of altitude sickness. The effects are much more significant the higher you go, can be extremely dangerous, and must be heeded, but at moderate altitudes are usually preventable.

Hypoxia is low levels of blood oxygen from going to altitude, and just about everyone experiences some effect, such as shortness of breath, pounding heart, and/or trouble sleeping.

Secondary to hypoxia, and caused by it, is altitude sickness, the result of going high without having time to adjust (given time, the body can adjust to moderate hypoxia). Altitude sickness occurs more gradually, generally taking hours (though you can bring it on almost immediately if you step off a plane and fire up a Colorado 14er). It has three types, known as AMS, HAPE, and HACE. AMS and HACE involve the brain, and HAPE the lungs.

Acute mountain sickness (AMS) is the most common and mildest, and may be characterized by headache, nausea, fatigue, dizziness, and sleeplessness. It feels exactly like a bad hangover, Dr. Hackett says, and “nearly always” resolves in two to four days or less on its own, often within 24 hours if the person ascends no further and exerts little. Go no higher until you are better, and while you can always go lower, it is usually not necessary. Descend or get medical help if you become worse instead of better over one or two days.

In high-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), fluid accumulates in the lungs, inhibiting the transfer of oxygen into the blood. HAPE is separate from AMS, involving the lungs, although Hackett says that 50 percent of those with HAPE had AMS first. AMS can, however, develop into the severe high-altitude cerebral edema (HACE), creating swelling in the brain, with effects as if a person is drunk, such as confusion, disorientation, and loss of consciousness. HAPE and HACE can develop over two or three days.

“HACE can be considered the end-stage of severe AMS,” Hackett says. He also says that AMS “will rarely progress to HACE, especially at the modest altitude of Colorado resorts.” These resort towns, like many in the country, are at about 6,000 to 10,000 feet.

HAPE and HACE are life-threatening medical emergencies necessitating treatment and descent.

“Someone with AMS who stays at the same altitude and gets better will not get HAPE,” he says. “Someone with AMS who goes higher when they shouldn’t will get worse with AMS and could also develop HACE or HAPE.”

Some persons are sensitive to hypoxia and can either feel the effects or get AMS as low as at a sleeping altitude of 5,000 feet, though that is unusual. “At 6,000 to 7,000 feet, it happens more but is still unusual,” Hackett says. “Maybe [to] 10 percent of folks. At 8,000 feet, most everyone feels some effect of hypoxia, like trouble sleeping and shortness of breath with exercise, and about 15 to 20 percent of unacclimatized persons will get AMS.” A sleeping altitude of 9,000 feet is considered a major threshold, he says, and persons going directly to that have an incidence of more than 50 percent of AMS.

Pay attention! Communicate all symptoms to your group, know where a hospital or clinic is, and have a way to get down or a descent route in mind.

At What Altitude Might I Get Altitude Sickness?

Denver, at 5,280 feet (it’s the Mile High City), is a good example of the 5,000-foot mark at which people may exhibit symptoms or should observe how they feel. The city has an international airport and is a launching point for various higher towns that range from, say, nearby fun Boulder at 5,430 up to Leadville, at 10,158 feet the country’s highest incorporated city. Vail, 97 miles up I-70, is at 8,239 feet; Aspen, 160 miles away, at 7,908 feet; and Crested Butte, 8,909.

Other such outdoors towns across the country include Park City, Utah, at 6,936 feet; Big Bear Lake and Mammoth Lakes, California, at 6,752 and 7881; Pinedale, Wyoming, at 7,182; Victor, Idaho, at 6,214; and Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico, at 7,199 and 9,321 feet. And consider surroundings: Salt Lake City is not terribly high at 4,327, but people fly in to ski and might take the tram up Hidden Peak, at Snowbird. It docks at 11,000 feet.

Who Does Altitude Sickness Affect?

A common misperception is that fitness protects you from altitude sickness. It can affect anyone, at any age or stage of fitness and athleticism. Sometimes you might feel fine at altitude, other times not, depending on whether you’ve acclimated or pushed too hard and/or overindulged in alcohol.

Below is my original altitude tips list, updated with Hackett’s comments and clarifications. The conversation and this article use Denver as a model.

How to Avoid Altitude Sickness

1. Hydrate throughout your trip. Take a water bottle everywhere.Ěý

As you go high, your blood oxygen level drops and respiration goes up, and you lose water at an increased rate. Conventional wisdom has long been to drink lots of water when you travel from sea level to anything starting at about 5,000 feet. Many or most visitors need to make a conscious effort. Just don’t take it too far.

Hackett says: “There’s no science to support [that drinking water prevents AMS], but a lot of anecdotal evidence. In mountain environments, you do need to drink extra water, but it depends on what you’re doing”—both effort and temperature. “On Denali it’s cold, and you’re not sweating, so you don’t need as much [as in a hot place].

“The point is not to overdo it. If you’re in Aspen [at approximately 8,000 feet], have an extra liter or liter and a half a day. The danger is that people over hydrate and wash out their sodium. They get hyponatremia, or low sodium, from a lot of water.” Hyponatremia is dangerous and needs to be treated.

Keep an eye on your urine and try to keep it clear or pale yellow as opposed to darker or orange.

Bottom line: “Be moderate,” Hackett says. “Just like at sea level, drink more if you’re hiking hard, but you don’t need too much extra.”

2. Drink little or no alcohol on the trip. Ban that second margarita!

Alcohol increases dehydration and hampers ventilatory adaptation to hypoxia. Ěý

Hackett confirms that, saying, “The science is that ingestions of about 50 grams of alcohol will lower your breathing response to hypoxia. One beer or one margarita is not going to make much difference,” but stick with that “until you get acclimated, which takes two or three to four days.”

The is a little sterner, advising: “Do not drink alcohol or do heavy exercise for at least the first 48 hours after you arrive at an elevation above 8,000 feet.”

3. Give yourself time to acclimate. Try to arrive in a lower site a day early and take it easy, remaining at a constant elevation, overnight if possible, before going higher.

Hackett clarifies that the concept of stopping in an interim place like Denver applies to some but not all people: “As long as they don’t fly into Aspen and go higher, they are probably OK,” he says. “If [someone is] concerned because of pre-existing conditions or has a baby or is pregnant…It’s always better to spend a night in Denver.” Always consider pre-existing conditions.

“It’s super important to take it easy the next day, don’t drink much [alcohol], and hydrate a little more than usual. The single most important thing is not to fly into Aspen and go higher. That’s definitely high risk.”

Another option might be to fly into Aspen at 8,000 feet but spend the first night in a lower spot such as Glenwood Springs, 40 miles away and 2,000 feet lower.

“Coming into Aspen, 85 percent of people will be fine and about 15 percent will get headaches,” Hackett says. “If they fly into Aspen and go to Ashcroft [9,521 feet] to sleep, 60 to 70 percent will get headaches. Go up gradually.”

The CDC similarly advises: “Avoid traveling from a low elevation to an elevation higher than 9,000 feet (2,750 m) above sea level in one day.”Ěý

Some sources advise the tactic of day trips to higher elevations, while sleeping lower. As above, if you begin to feel ill, stay put or descend.

4. Talk to your doctor about bringing a prescription drug such as Diamox in case of need. Also consider bringing aspirin or ibuprofen in case of headache.

“I support all those,” Hackett says. “The problem is your average doctor doesn’t know much about Diamox. Doctors are very reluctant to prescribe a medicine they are unfamiliar with, but it’s good to know there is something that helps. It does not mask the symptoms, it speeds up acclimatization. So instead of three or four days it takes one day.”

Talk to your doctor. Did you expect us to say anything else?

5. Insomnia blues, or what if I can’t sleep at altitude?

The top complaint of those going to altitude, and one I experienced when first in Aspen (I later moved to nearby Carbondale), is sleeplessness, from the effect of hypoxia on the brain.

“There’s no way to prevent it,” Hackett says. “Oxygen is available” to address it, “and they can deliver it to a hotel room. Any doctor can write a prescription for it, and you’ll sleep like a baby.” He later adds in an email: “Sleeping on oxygen will help with sleep, prevent altitude illness, and protect anyone with preexisting problems like high blood pressure, atrial fibrillation, lung disease, etc.”

He says further: “Things that are known to be safe [sleep aids] include Benadryl and Dramamine. You don’t want to take [medications] that might depress your breathing and mix them with alcohol. Diamox can be helpful since it stimulates breathing and raises oxygen levels.

“A lot of people sleeping at altitude will have some irregular breathing at night. It’s not anything to worry about. It improves with acclimatization.”

6. Resources to learn more about altitude sickness.

One of the links I suggested nine years ago, a from the Denver Post, has been updated, as an editor’s note says: “to reflect that people should not drink excessive amounts of water.”

Here are other resources.

The “mythbusters” of Hackett’s website

Wilderness Medical Society:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: andĚý

UptoDate.com:

No longer being updated but still considered expert and useful:

7. Pay attention to red flags

While the woman at the photo workshop was a tricky situation—she was an adult, who had paid and wanted to learn—I always wondered if I should have insisted on taking her lower. I offered repeatedly to drive her to the hospital, or for her at least to stay at my home in Carbondale. She said no. Was I wrong to accede? A worse result would haunt me. I asked Hackett.

Only a few red flags, he said, mandate immediate descent or oxygen. He listed them in an email: “Respiratory distress (�Just can’t get enough air,’ or obvious trouble breathing), and the brain going off (confusion, disorientation, can’t walk a straight line). Vomiting is not a red flag, nor is �collapsing’ unless into unconsciousness.”

Guess I can breathe easier, at least about that time.

Alison Osius is a senior editor at şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř, who formerly worked at Rock and Ice and Climbing magazines. The highest she has been is 14,000 feet, and she doesn’t plan on going any higher.ĚýĚý

For more by this author, see:

Colorado’s Storm King Mountain Memorial Trail Takes You to Sacred Grounds

This Is the Most Beautiful Town in Colorado

Must-Know Camping Tips from a Lifelong Camper

The post Don’t Let Altitude Sickness Ruin Your Mountain Vacation. Heed This Doctor’s Tips to Avoid It. appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

May 2024

This time when I see the first tree hung with the blowing, ragged shirts, the sight is more familiar, less stark than before. I am more prepared.

Hiking the Storm King Mountain Memorial Trail, near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, my son Ted and I approach another tree, this one with firefighter helmets at its base.

In the wildfire of 1994, the ridge we’re on was the dividing line between the firefighters who lived or did not: those who escaped over the other side or those who were caught as they labored uphill, not knowing that the fire behind them would move upward at speeds up to 35 feet per second. There had not been a similar since the loss of 13 in Mann Gulch, Montana, 45 years before.

Ted and I look around, west at the wide valley spreading out from the sinuous Colorado River, the fluted edges of Hogback Ridge to the south catching evening light. At the end of May, the slopes around us have just changed from the light green of spring into fresh early-summer emerald.

It is a hot day, and we stand in the breeze in a saddle beneath the 8,797-foot apex of the ridge; the same saddle the survivors attained in 1994 is the hike’s destination. “This wind is heavenly,” I say.

“It would be bad for firefighters,” Ted responds. “It’s really beautiful here,” he says, turning to me with a faint grimace.

Unspeakable tragedy happened in this spot. The beauty is no justification, but a solace, a benediction.

From here, the trail descends along the fire break the firefighters battled to establish, and then loops back to rejoin the approach. We start down the loose, gravelly trail, toward the first cross.

July 1994

1994 was a drought year. On Saturday, July 2, an intense thunderstorm roared in from the west, and lightning struck a tree on a major ridge of Storm King Mountain, five miles west ofĚýGlenwood Springs. The next morning a tendril of smoke showed, visible from the adjacent I-70, and was reported by many. That day the fire was named the South Canyon Fire, but it was on Storm King Mountain, off the Canyon Creek turnoff; like many, I just call it the Storm King Fire.

Accidents in mountaineering and aviation and hospitals are often caused not by one error or element, but a series, in what is often referred to as the of causation. Various factors, each of which can be represented as a layer of cheese, and each of which could have altered the course of events, line up. Elements that affected or might in some way have prevented the accident are holes that, unfortunately, align.

A day after the fire started, over three dozen lightning-sparked fires were burning in the encompassing Grand Junction District, managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). As days passed with agencies spread thin, major resources were diverted to the largest fire, in Paonia, 70 miles from Glenwood Springs, which burned three houses. I live in Carbondale, 12 miles from Glenwood and 58 from Paonia; we smelled the smoke, and ashes flecked our neighbors’ trampoline.

On July 4, three crew members from the White River National Forest carried chainsaws up Storm King mountain and made assessments. The next day, July 5, seven BLM andĚýForest Service firefighters hiked up to the fire, located on what is known as the Main Ridge (or Hell’s Gate Ridge). Crew members cut a helicopter landing spot (called H1) and an air tanker dropped retardant.

According to the 250-page investigation prepared by the South Canyon Fire lnteragency Investigation Team for the Chief of the Forest Service and the Director of the BLM, at 5:30 p.m. the first crew left for equipment changes, and at 5:45 p.m., eight smoke jumpers parachuted in above the fire. On July 6, more firefighters arrived, putting 49 on the mountain by the afternoon. The report states that 16 smokejumpers, 20 hotshots, a six-person helitack crew (two at the fire and four at the helibase), and 12 BLM/Forest Service firefighters (ll at the fire, one at the helibase) were assigned to the fire.

That afternoon a helicopter dropped water, but after a cold front moved in at 3:00 p.m. and the winds picked up, drops became ineffective.

The same day, July 6, 1994, I was walking 10-month-old Teddy around town in his stroller. I remember the day as bright and hot, and looking up thinking, Where’d that wind come from? It was blowing, and the undersides of nearby tree leaves turned up, glinting.

That was the day the fire on the Main Ridge of Storm King spread, likely by lofted , down into the adjacent West Drainage and then moved rapidly up that narrow canyon and east to the Main Ridge. Ěý

I wheeled Teddy home. That evening our friend and employer Michael Kennedy, then owner of Climbing magazine, called saying that 14 firefighters had been killed on Storm King.

July 2001

The South Canyon Fire and what happened is important history in the area, and I’d heard from a couple of local friends that I should go, in part to see the mementos brought here in tribute. In 2001, my sister Lucy and I took our boys partway up when Teddy (what we called him when he was younger) and his brother, Roy, were seven and four, and her son, Sam, was eight months old. The trailhead is just off I-70, where it runs alongside the Colorado River. We carried the younger kids in backpacks, and Teddy walked.

The memorial trail first began as a path made by family and friends, and over ensuing months was improved by the BLM, Forest Service, Air Force cadets, and 100-plus volunteers as a tribute to the 14 who lost their lives—and firefighters everywhere.

Nine of the lost were from the 20-person Prineville Hotshot Team from Oregon: Kathi Walsleben Beck, 24, Tamera Jean Bickett, 25, Scott Alan Blecha, 27, Levi Brinkley, 22, Douglas Michael Dunbar, 22, Terri Ann Hagan, 28, Bonnie Jean Holtby, 21, Rob Johnson, 26, and Jon R. Kelso, 27. Four of the five women on the Prineville team were killed. Three of the deceased were smokejumpers, who parachuted in: Don Mackey, 34, Roger Roth, 30, and Jim Thrash, 44, and two were helitack crew (meaning they were transported by helicopter): Richard Kent Tyler, 33, and Robert E. Browning, Jr., 27.

The roundtrip hike is only four miles, but steep, rising 1,500 feet. As my sister, the children, and I started out, we stopped and read the excellent interpretive signs—giving the firefighters’ names and faces, different maps, and other information—at the trailhead, then started up the path, deliberately left rough as a reminder of the conditions firefighters face, 700 feet to a minor ridgeline looking over at the Main Ridge.

We peered into the drainage east of us, where the fire had ascended, and then we all dipped slightly down the hillside to an observation platform, with more plaques and a wide view. I had read Fire on the Mountain,Ěýthe meticulously researched account of the tragedy by John N. Maclean (son of Norman Maclean, who wrote Young Men and Fire about the 1949 Mann Gulch disaster), but the visuals and signage here showed me something I’d never understood: where on the rib opposite us one group of firefighters had escaped to previously burned terrain, deployed their fire shelters, and lived.

Other visitors had stopped at the observation point, unwilling or unable to continue the steepening second half of the trail, some leaving messages and flowers. Teddy knelt by a potted African violet, opened his Nalgene bottle, and watered it. That was as far as our young party could go, too, and we turned around and descended.

June 2004

Three years after that first, abbreviated hike, when I thought both Teddy and Roy, now aged ten and seven, could make the full ascent, I brought them again, and two of their friends the same age.

At the trailhead, we all looked at images of each of the men’s and women’s faces, read out their names, and talked about some of them. One, Levi Brinkley, was a triplet. Two others—Roger Roth and Terri Hagen—were from the Iroquois Nation. I knew that one firefighter, Kathi Beck, had a subscription to Climbing, where I was an editor at the time, giving me a small sense of connection to her.

The five of us proceeded, with breaks and snacks, to the observation point, crossed the gully, and hiked up the other side. At the Main Ridge we saw the T-shirts, left by others as remembrances and in solidarity, tied on trees, then reached the vantage point where the photos I’d studied so often in the book had been taken. There, two firefighters, Sarah Doehring and Sunny Archuleta, pulled out a camera and took a few pictures at the top of the ridge. Archuleta saw the fire advancing toward the other firefighters, and realized disaster loomed. He knew that documentation would be crucial to later study.

The west-flank crew on the fireline, 13 of them, approached the ridge in a line on the last rise. The terrain is uneven, rolling, and they could not see what was coming up behind them. I’ve always remembered how they carried packs, chainsaws, and water, not realizing they should drop them to increase their speed; the fire must have still seemed some distance off. Between 4:14 p.m. and 4:18 p.m. the fire spread below the west flank of the ridge. The wind whipped the flames into a “blowup” (a “sudden increase in fireline intensity or rate of spread,” according to the USDA, often involving violent convection) racing up the drainage in two minutes. The fire caught the west-flank crew on the final 300-foot rise, a stone’s throw from safety on the other side.

Two other firefighters, Brad Haugh and Kevin Erickson, who had waited by a tree (subsequently referred to in accounts as The Tree) 200 feet below the ridgeline to encourage the crew on the way up, had to flee, receiving first- and second-degree burns respectively.

Only one of the west-flank crew, Eric Hipke, made it to the ridge, but with his fingers badly burned and burns elsewhere. From there, he escaped down the eastern drainage with help from Erickson and Haugh. Scott Blecha was found only about 100 feet below the ridge. The rest were engulfed closely grouped together 200 to 280 feet below. A few had deployed their shelters.

Browning and Tyler, on the helitack crew, were last seen on the ridge jogging upwards, heading northwest, possibly toward a flat outcropping, but were caught by the fire. Eight others to the south fled up toward a helicopter landing spot on higher terrain on the Main Ridge, deploying their shelters 100 and 200 yards below it. They survived.

On our 2004 hike, the time the boys were elementary-school aged, as we reached the Main Ridge, Teddy said, “Let’s all take off our hats.”

We started carefully down the loose slope to the main site, me in the rear, searching for the memorials below. “A cross!” the boys called out, coming to Scott Blecha’s, so terribly, painfully close to the ridge top. We gazed at flags, medals, beads, and hats left there for him. Then we descended, the boys calling out as they came upon each cross, and reading each firefighter’s name aloud. Names. As my life proceeds, I have found names more and more important; speaking them to be an honor. We brushed the red dust off little treasures and marveled at pocket knives, badges, always more hats, empty bottles of favorite beer. We gently opened an enamel box to find a guitar pick, then closed it again.

On the way home, I asked the boys what they learned. Teddy said people should communicate, and his friend Carson said, “That nature is powerful, and to pay attention.” I need to remember that myself.

June 2024

As I write, it’s fire season, with two devastating blazes in New Mexico and another in Southern California. I’ve already seen two small wildfires where I live, heard the sirens; seen posts about fires along nearby highway 70; known, as ever, to be grateful when it rains. I often think of what the Storm King crew went through and what the young crews fighting fires endure today. şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř has published stories about many wildfires, including Torched, about smokejumpers across the West, in 1997, and 19: The True Story of the Yarnell Hill Fire, investigating the deadliest fire in the U.S., in 2013.

A few days before my most recent hike with Ted, our third time to Storm King, I looked through Fire on the Mountain again, gazed at the faces of the ten men and four women, most in their twenties. Wildland firefighting is an exhausting job often done by students or youth with seasonal work.

At the trailhead a metal box contains a visitor register and many dozen custom patches and stickers, left by hundreds of visiting firefighters. In it is a photo of a young Jon Kelso, labeled as “entertaining his cousins,” ages four to 15.

We start up the first section, and Ted stops partway to wait for me. “They were just young men and women drawn to adventure,” he says when I join him.

Cicadas chirr, my trekking poles click. I smell sage.

Ted has grown up. He’s now 30 years old. This year he moved in with his partner, Aisha, and—after years in finance and much thought—recently bought a longtime area guiding and horseback company, Capitol Peak Outfitters, in Old Snowmass, near Aspen. He has been hunting with his father since age five and knows more about the woods than I do.

We step over an oval of scat in the trail. “Coyote,” he says.

“How do you know?”

“By the hair in it, and the shape.” He nudges it with his toe. “Sometimes you can see bones in there.”

The air is dusty and hot, with temps in the 80s and the sun blasting the sandy slopes, and I keep coughing, dry little barks.

“Is that cough from the thyroid cancer?” he asks.

That was eight years ago. So many things have happened in 30 years. In 1994, his brother hadn’t even been born.

After my father (for whom Ted is named) died, suddenly and at only 54, my mother sometimes said: “I feel so bad for him. He’s missing everything.” I keep thinking of the 14 firefighters who have missed everything in these years.

Higher, we make out the marble crosses, always a poignant sight, and the still-maintained fireline. We cross the drainage and begin the final ascent.

Birds sing and, using an app, Ted identifies the spotted towhee and evening grosbeak. Lizards scuttle in our path.

We traverse the ridgeline, stopping to read a plaque, festooned with flags, bracelets, and beads, marking the helitack crew sites. An empty green bottle flanks the stanchion. “Jagermeister,” Ted says with a chuckle. We pass a flat red rock covered in ten firefighter medals. Finely wrought belt buckles from other squads line another stand.

Moments further, I tell Ted, “This is where they took the pictures.” I gaze down, remembering the images, taken from this spot, of the landscape and fire line.

Often over the years, I have thought of the dilemma of Hipke, the sole survivor of the west-flank group. Third in line on the way to the ridge and feeling urgent as the crew evacuated along the fireline, he thought of hurrying around the two people in front of him but out of decency hesitated. When they paused, however, one saying the word, “shelter,” he ran through, in the last seconds hurling himself over the top of the ridge.

A report on reads: “We estimate that after a short hesitation, Hotshot [Scott] Blecha stepped around the group, and continued up the hill. Our timeline places Hipke about 45 seconds behind [Kevin] Erickson [who had waited at The Tree]. We estimate that Blecha followed about 40 seconds (100 feet) behind Hipke.”

Hipke has since made a documentary film, which came out ten years ago, called “.”

At the first cross, for Scott Blecha, Ted and I feel a fresh rush of sorrow.

“Scott was trying so hard,” Ted says. “Think if you gave it everything you had, and you were so exhausted. And it was so hot.”

Jim Thrash is next. We read all the names, stop at every one. Some of the crosses are so close together. More mementos—chainsaw chains, pocket knives, dreamcatchers. Skis: for Levi Brinkley, the triplet. The skis have been here since the first time I hiked the trail.

I remembered that Jon Kelso was found beside Terri Hagen, to whom he had once been engaged. Around his cross’s arm a chainsaw chain is rusted fast.

So many ball caps. Some newish, some tattered. “This one has lichen!” Ted says, turning over a white brim with delicate orange-rust patches. A foot-tall dreamcatcher hovers above Terri.

We find the cross for Don Mackey, who had reached safety but circled down to warn his crew, and brought up the rear, with Bonnie Holtby, a third-generation firefighter. “Traps,” Ted says, pointing to the rusted iron teeth, and I suddenly remember the boys identifying those hunting traps last time.

Last time, though I knew Bonnie’s cross was here, I was bewildered to have trouble finding it. It turned out to be overgrown by a bush. That has been cleared now.

Ted reads aloud from the words scratched into her father’s own helmet, left here now: “This hard hat is left in memory of our daughter, Bonnie Jean… Here in respect to Bonnie, where she gave her life on the line.” He looks up at me, stricken, and repeats, “Our daughter.” At 21, Bonnie was the youngest of the lost.

All this area was once black, and now it’s green. Full regrowth takes 100 years.

We begin our descent, cross the gully. “Look!” Ted says. “A bear!” I have difficulty spotting it, then pick out the roly-poly cinnamon body just before it trundles into the thick oak below the lowest point of the fire line.

“It’s probably a boar,” he says.

“How do you know?”

“No cub.” He adds: “It covered that hillside in about two minutes. Put its snout down and just went through that tangled scrub oak.”

I often recommend the memorial hike and experience to visitors. No one has ever taken me up on the idea except my brother. He understood the hike and returned reverent.

In the car, Ted says, “It’s very tragic, but going there is not horrible, because of all the respect shown by the other firefighters.”

Many lessons were learned, too (see video below)—such as for firefighters to become situationally Ěý(and to be included in briefings and able to speak up more); for managers to have intimate knowledge of terrain and conditions; for weather warnings to be communicated to those on site; and for better cooperation and coordination between agencies, and better communications between managers and firefighters. Storm King is considered a turning point in wildland firefighting culture, helping those to come later.

July 6, 2024, marks the of the Storm King tragedy. Please give the families privacy and refrain from hiking the memorial trail that morning.

The trail is just off I-70, commonly used by people traveling to the Colorado mountains and Utah desert. It is south-facing, better done in spring or autumn than the summer sun, but always a sacred journey. Stay on the trails to protect the hillsides, and bring plenty of water. Go and remember the people, honor them, say their names.

During this fire season, let’s salute and appreciate the people who are on the line trying to keep the rest of us safe.Ěý

Watch: Lessons From the Storm King Fire

Alison Osius is a senior editor at şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř magazine and şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online. She has lived in Western Colorado since 1988, when she moved to Aspen for a job at Climbing magazine. Now residing in Carbondale, she is an avid climber, hiker, and skier. She can be reached at aosius@outsideinc.com.

For more by this author, see:

This Is the Most Beautiful Town in Colorado

Must-Know Camping Tips from a Lifelong Camper

In 2022 A Stranger Saved Us in a Storm at Green River. Trying to Find Him, I Just Got a Surprise.

The post Colorado’s Storm King Mountain Memorial Trail Takes You to Sacred Grounds appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

Mile marker 120, 4 p.m. on a Sunday. Three of us were heading home to Western Colorado after a great climbing and camping trip to Maple Canyon, the Uinta National Forest, Utah. The drive is about six hours, much of it on I-70 with posted speeds of 80. It’s a beautiful, big-horizon route, cutting through the San Rafael Swell with its overlapping fins and upthrust white-rock formations named Ghost Rock or Temple Mountain.

On a straightaway 40 miles west of Green River, the halfway mark on the trip, we drove into a curtain of rain just ahead of a blind curve. Through sudden hard splats on the dusty windshield I spotted a man on the shoulder to our left, in front of a bluff wall. He was violently waving downward, over and over. He had a beard, a white T-shirt. No rain jacket.

“Slow way down,” I said to my husband, Mike Benge, already starting to brake. “Way down.”

We decelerated around the curve onto an eighth- or quarter-mile hill. In front of us were two lines of cars at a full stop on the highway, with ahead a chaos of flung vehicles. They were semi trucks.

All I could think of was my friend Laura Kirk’s husband, Dave Carpenter, who came along on I-70 in winter, slowed to a stop upon seeing an accident ahead, and said to a coworker, “I think we’re going to be here awhile.” Just then they were hit from behind and spun completely around. (They were somehow uninjured; the car was totaled.)

“Pull over to the shoulder,” I urged, and we swerved off.

The rain was now hammering; cars behind us were also braking hard. We heard the first siren.

In probably five minutes the line of backed-up cars stretched up the hill and around the curve, so that taillights would at least be visible to approaching highway traffic. About 20 cars ahead of us was a four-semi pile up, with glass and metal pieces strewn for hundreds of feet on the highway.

“We were probably three or four minutes behind it,” our friend Jim Gilchrist said from the back seat.

More sirens; pounding rain. It poured in thick noisy gushers over the nearby banks, outward onto the road. When the torrents eased, I left the truck, tried to ask around for information. A helicopter arrived, circled, landed.

We saw rescue vehicles arrive, the Jaws of Life carried down the hill: one set, and behind it another. Somehow, only one person was injured, we were told; but he would have to be cut out from his truck.

The truck must have come around onto the suddenly greasy hill and skidded; the truck behind him couldn’t stop in time; and a third one managed to pull over but was hit by the fourth, which ripped the third open in massive glancing blows all down its side.

We were to wait there for a long five hours. By providence no cars or citizen pickups (like the one we were in) were tossed around in the mayhem. Grateful to have been those few minutes behind the pileup, and for a guy who thought fast, bolted up the hill, and stood out in the rain to warn others, I asked people who he was to try thank him. No one knew.

I can still picture him in a T shirt, though I may be wrong that it was white. In any rain, you get soaked and cold immediately. He saw the implications and instantly acted. I’m certain he prevented other crashes, and I wonder if he saved lives. We’d have all come around the bend at highway speeds to rows of stopped cars.

People milled around, walked their dogs. Mike, Jim, and I met others; I talked to the woman driving the third truck, which had been hit. “It’s such a random group, thrown together for hours,” Mike said. We shared food from our coolers, asked for information as possible from a doctor who had walked down to the site to see if he could help.

I only knew that the driver was in his 40s or older, not young and inexperienced, as many truckers seemed to have been in recent accidents on I-70. The interstate, for many a line to recreation—hiking, skiing, rafting, climbing—is crowded and beset by heavy weather.

Finally the helicopter flew away with the injured driver, all of us watching in fraught silence as it diminished and disappeared.

“He’ll be there in 20 minutes,” Mike said. I thought of how my old roommate, a critical-care nurse, always said the hospital in Grand Junction was excellent. Finally cars began moving in a slow roll, and we passed the truck, now missing its entire front end, and drove the four hours home.

In the next few days, I found two short news items, and at least saw nothing about a fatality. I asked a friend in the medical field, who was able to discern that the driver had many injuries but should survive. That was all we knew.

That was in July of 2022. It was my sixth or seventh trip to Maple, with Mike and, when they were younger, our kids, or with friends and more friends and their dogs. I’ve been again since, and will always think of that accident at Green River.

I am originally from Annapolis, Maryland, and was there in the early winter of 1982 when a Boeing 737-222, Air Florida Flight 90, took off out of Washington, D.C., in a snowstorm, and crashed into the 14th Street Bridge and the ice-covered Potomac River, breaking into pieces.

The fatality toll was 78, including four people in vehicles on the bridge and 74 from the plane. Five people—four passengers and a single crew member—from the flight survived, rescued from the river. Another person was in the water, but at least once when a rescue helicopter arrived, he passed the lifeline to others. When the chopper came back, he had gone under.

We in the region waited, appalled by the news and images, wondering who the man had been. For a time no one could say. But I remember that co workers of Arland Williams, age 46, believed it was congruent with what they knew of him. For a time there was even something mystical in not knowing: a sense that maybe we could attribute the best in human nature to anyone there.

Eventually Williams’s body was retrieved, and, while it is hard to know what happened, he was identified as the only passenger who died of drowning.

I’d like to think the guy in the white T shirt could be any of us. I’d be willing, but doubt I’d have thought that fast. Maybe now I would, and that, too, is thanks to him.

It is now the summer of 2024. The above story appeared one year ago, after a subsequent trip to Maple Canyon. This week, to my amazement, I received a very feeling email update from someone who at first signed herself “the trucker’s wife,” though then gave her name.

Jessica (she approves a post but prefers first names) and Brian have been trying to, as she put it, connect the dots from that day. Brian has been through many surgeries and has more to come, but Jessica wrote that he is positive and tough, saying, “He is doing very well considering all his injuries. His determination to get better for his wife and four sons is amazing.”

The couple’s sons were aged 4 to 18 at the time of the accident.

“We have always been a very close family,” she wrote, “but this experience has brought us closer.”

As the two-year anniversary of the accident approached, Brian, who cannot remember the first three weeks after the accident, was looking on the internet for information, and stumbled on this article. He and his wife had only previously seen police and news photos.

Her email continued: “We have heard how heroic the whole scene felt as everyone came together and rallied around…We spoke to one bystander who said, ‘Men were walking around with their shirts missing, as they had used them to apply pressure to the wounds, and everyone was helping where they could. I could see his wedding ring so I tried to keep him conscious by talking to him about his wife.’”

She and Brian would like to thank everyone, from bystanders to all emergency responders and medical caregivers, who helped.

Brian was flown to Denver, 400 miles from their home in Farmington, New Mexico, and remained there a month. Jessica wrote, “The two older sons helped care for the younger ones, and we have a wonderful family, friends and employers who also helped with the boys while Brian and I were in Denver.”

I still haven’t found the stranger who waved us all down, and she’d very much like to, too: “The stranger is a true hero, and I would love to thank him as well for helping to prevent other injuries and taking action….Every day we are thankful for all the people who have helped to keep Brian with us.”

It is a long shot, to think we’d ever find the guy in the T-shirt in the rain, but then again I never expected to hear from the driver, which alone would be enough.

Now and then the internet helps us solve a mystery, such as when, ten years ago, a curious Aspen Times reporter, Tim Mutrie, unearthed an old climbing pack in an office closet and wondered where it came from. By chance I saw his note on Facebook. In 1988, four of us had found that lone pack, a disquieting sight, on top of the remote 400-foot Moses Tower, Taylor Canyon, Utah. Tim opened the old camera within and had the film developed. A week later we had a face, and in three weeks, again by chance, we had

Maybe the internet can help here. If you think you know who the quick thinker was at accident, please write aosius@outsideinc.com.

Alison Osius is a travel editor at şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř.

The post In 2022 A Stranger Saved Us in a Storm at Green River. Trying to Find Him, I Just Got a Surprise. appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

Over the years, as a kid and then a climber, I’ve camped a lot, starting in a moldy canvas army pup tent with my friends in the backyard, age 9. Or in tents with classmates on trips to Assateague or Catoctin, in Maryland, where it always seemed to rain and our tents always leaked. Or in my own tent at Miguel’s Campground, Red River Gorge, in Kentucky, where it poured day after day and, as if in a horror movie, salamanders began coming out of holes in the muddy ground by my door. In Patagonia, where you could hear the wild wind coming, and I decided I might never need to camp in the cold and wet again. In Red Rocks, Nevada; El Potrero Chico, Mexico; Shelf Road, Colorado; and Penticton, B.C, and Banff, Alberta, with my climbing friend Susan Price, our little tents side by side each trip. Safety, companionship, and a bit of our own space.

Long ago, in the climbers’ Camp 4, in Yosemite Valley, I had a voluminous red family-style tent, joined in it by my friends Rin Harris and B.A. Doyle. One day we came into camp to find the tent down. What? Foul play?

“What happened?” I exclaimed.

“Oh,” said the nearby laconic Brits, “there must have been a good stiff gust of wind of about five miles an hour.”

It wasn’t the most technical tent.

Moreover, we’d set it with the entrance pointing toward the valley walls, unknowingly in a drainage. When it rained, the tent filled up. It wasn’t very good at repelling water, but certainly held it. Our sleeping pads were floating. A box of tampons blew up. My paperback copy of Shogun, 1,200 pages, swelled into a thick round paper fan. We returned one afternoon to find a laughing crew of Japanese climbers taking pictures of the tent, opening it to the flooded interior, immortalizing our terrible campcraft.

These days my preferred method of camping is in a six-person standup tent—you can never go too big— with a pillow and cot, and a vehicle nearby.

Besides not to point your tent into runoff, here’s what I’ve learned.

Need-to-Know Camping Tips

1. Remember mustard. It just seems to be what people forget.

2. It’s also really easy to forget the pot holder for camp cooking in the backcountry, although after burning your fingers you’ll remember.

3. Spring for that extra few degrees of warmth in a sleeping bag. In Patagonia, last November, though my friend Erin VanSickle had brought a sleeping bag rated to 35 degrees, and the nights didn’t get below the upper 30s, she is slim and was cold, sometimes too cold to sleep.ĚýShe had to put on all her clothes at night, including her sturdy, stiff, crinkling rain jacket. How comfortable does that sound?

4. Also in cold weather, bring your headlamp, phone, and external charger (the latter two in a Ziploc bag) into your sleeping bag. Cold drains batteries. In Patagonia, my headlamp was dead after one night, and I had to borrow someone’s spare to read in the evenings. After I recharged the headlamp days later, and then put it in the sleeping bag each night, it was fine for the rest of the trip.

5. Paperback books can be ripped into chunks to share if several of you are tent-bound—or, as friends and I once were in Chamonix, cave-bound—in weather for days.

6. Bring a “baby Nalgene” or other half-sized bottle, and at night fill it with hot water to put in the toe of your sleeping bag. (A liter bottle will work, but takes more water and fuel.) You can thank my guide friend Jaime Hanson for this one.

7. If you have an infant or toddler along, bring a few wipes in a baggie into your sleeping bag. (I appreciate that it’s getting pretty crowded in there.) When my husband and I took our then five-month-old to Canyonlands in Utah, the diaper wipes left outside froze brick-solid, which didn’t go over, at all.

8. Pack a spice kit! Ed Viesturs, Himalayan mountaineer, once told me he eats a spicy dinner before a cold night in his tent “to get the engine going”—giving his body a start on keeping warm. He simply brought spicy dehydrated meals.

9. Bring a small camp towel (extra easy to forget) and a cord for a laundry line.

10. Take earplugs—my friend Jaime gave me a pair connected by a string, a brilliant touch. People nearby snore or worse. Dogs bark, roosters crow. The high schoolers in another site keep partying even after you yell to shut up. (It did help to stomp over and tell them to shut the f’ up.)

11. You will eat more than you think. It’s OK and part of taking care of yourself in cold temps. It’s great. Bring extra food. Lots!

12. You will awaken to birdsong, and it will be heavenly. How about a bird book or app? When I was growing up and our parents took us sailing and snorkeling in southern seas, my father used to bring fish books and at dinner have each child name a new kind we’d seen that day. “If you don’t know its name,” he’d say, “you don’t know the fish.”

13. “Wear sunscreen. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it.”—Baz Luhrmann music video, from a Chicago Tribune column by Mary Schmich. Enough said.

14. Hats. A wool beanie is your best friend for sleeping in the cold, and ball caps or other hats fend off sun (see no. 13) and sometimes other things. Once when I was bivvied on a flat boulder in Rocky Mountain National Park, a mouse kept running in and chewing on my hair, waking me up. I groped around and pulled a pair of tights onto my head. I will never forget my now spouse’s face at daylight when I sat up, the tights legs trailing down from my head like a jester’s cap.

15. Everyone, every age, loves s’mores.

Alison Osius, a lifelong climber and hiker and a travel editor at şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř, has camped across North America; in pouring rain in the Scottish Highlands and less rain in England and Wales; in sun-drenched but also drenched France; and in the cold and wind in Patagonia. Only once has she willingly camped in snow.

The post Must-Know Camping Tips from a Lifelong Camper appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

February, 20 years ago, long before OceanGate’s Titan submersible imploded.ĚýIt kept snowing and snowing and snowing. Slopes that hadn’t gone in 20 years were sliding. Five skiers from the Front Range were missing in the mountains outside Ashcroft, near Aspen, Colorado.

Each night as darkness fell—I remember it clearly—I’d peer out a window and wonder, Are you still out there? Can you make it to morning? The people were missing for five days. I didn’t know any of them. But I had—have—a friend, Hugh Herr, who in 1982, at 17, was lost in the wintertime mountains of New Hampshire for days, dying of cold and thirst, fearing he’d never see his family again. As a lifelong climber and skier, I’ve known many people who’ve had accidents, and haven’t exactly avoided risk myself, just tried to be careful.

That year of 1993, people with backcountry skiing experience in the Aspen area felt off-the-record certain the skiers had been buried and killed. When I heard on the radio that they had emerged, I stumbled into the common area at Climbing magazine, where I then worked. “Hey!” I cried weakly. I was trying to shout that they’d been found, but my voice cracked and failed.

People streamed out from their offices. We were all so happy—everybody in town was—but then came the harsh second-day analyses. The skiers had gone out amid storm warnings. They had split up, which is what you don’t do. There was further criticism; there always is. Usually some is fair. It’s hindsight.

Now here we are again, minus the happiness phase.

When word broke on Sunday about the missing Titan submersible, I started obsessively checking the news, wondering about the people inside. Many of us felt especially bad for 19-year-old Suleman Dawood, but I actually felt even worse for his father, Shahzada, imagining him down there looking into his son’s face, knowing that the trip had been his idea. My son, in his twenties, didn’t think the father should have castigated himself—he had offered his son an incredible adventure, and, yes, there was risk, and sometimes things go wrong. But I thought Shahzada would have been wracked.

I felt a huge jolt of hope on Tuesday night, when it was reported that banging sounds were being detected at 30-minute intervals. I remembered a brilliant, wrenching short story from 1960, “The Ledge,” which was very loosely based on a real incident in Maine. It was about a hunter, his son, and a nephew who are stranded on an offshore ledge in December, hoping for rescue as the tide rises.

The fisherman tells his son and nephew to load their guns.

“I’ll fire once and count to five,” he says. “Then you fire. Count to five. That way they won’t think it’s somebody gunning ducks.”

The systematic nature of the reported banging, possibly coming from Titan, gave me hope. On Wednesday night, knowing that oxygen in an intact-but-immobile submersible would be running out, likely gone by morning, I kept picturing the five people in there: cold and huddling, rime forming on the surfaces around them, with a boy who was afraid and a father who felt responsible for the death of someone he loved. I did not sleep for hours.

I accept that preoccupation with the °Őľ±łŮ˛ą˛Ô’s predicament was giving short shrift to a in the Mediterranean, off the Greek coast, five days ago. Much commentary on social media and in writing, such as on Tuesday, showed how our attention to the Titan was a misplaced priority, focusing on the few rather than the many. “Widespread outrage and anguish for the hundreds of souls taking an extraordinary risk in search of a better life,” the author wrote, “and those who failed them along the way, seems much more justifiable than the frenzy over a small, lost group of hyper-niche tourists, tragic as both circumstances may turn out to be.”

But I was sickened by the lack of sympathy I saw on social media. “Rich people are a drain on society,” one person wrote on Twitter. “Not sure why taxpayer funds are being expended on people who bought into a fancy underwater coffin.” The same kind of schadenfreude was on display in comments attached to stories published by the Washington Post, the paper I grew up with. Sneering and jeering because the people involved were wealthy, bored billionaires who somehow deserved what was happening to them. There were jokes, with more cropping up Thursday after the implosion and deaths were announced. I saw awful puns on my Facebook feed—“sinking low,” “subpar”—and references to Darwin Award winners. Morbid humor is a common response to tragedy, but the aggregate this time was next level. I know: It’s the internet, what do we expect? Yet those on the submersible were real people.

All week, many in the nation were fixated, as I was. Why? I have no simple answer. It involves many things, one being that the Titanic shipwreck is an icon, a symbol of tragedy, the way Everest is a symbol, of both excellence and tragedy. But I think the main reason we were drawn in is that the drama was happening in real time—or so we thought, until we found out on Thursday that they’d died the first day. The passengers could still be alive, we mistakenly thought. They had over 90 hours of oxygen. I kept thinking of the Aspen skiers. They came back.

In the end, many of us were pulled into this story by the power of the individual. The most influential piece of journalism I read as a graduate student was John ±á±đ°ů˛ő±đ˛â’s New Yorker story from 1946, “Hiroshima.” It was pioneering in its approach and structure. As the professor who assigned it explained, if a reader takes in an article about hundreds or thousands of people being killed, he or she often thinks, That’s terrible, and then turns the page and goes on to something else. Hersey based his story on individuals, six of them, survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. He noted where each was at the time of the blast, how far from the epicenter, and then followed them through his or her day, struggling amid the devastation. Readers experienced the events as seen by that person. It made a difference to know their names.

±á±đ°ů˛ő±đ˛â’s New Yorker editors saw what they had, a human account, all the more powerful for its muted tone. In magazine and later book form, “Hiroshima” humanized the Japanese to Americans, who were accustomed to dehumanizing them during the war. These were real people, men, women, children and babies on the ground, people with eyes burned out and skin falling off, a young mother carrying her dead infant for days, refusing to let go.

“That kid didn’t get to live his life,” I said to my husband, referring to Suleman Dawood.

“A lot of people don’t,” he said.

Ever hear the parable of the starfish? In it, a boy is walking along a beach where a storm has washed up thousands of starfish. He is picking them up and throwing them back into the waves. An old man asks why he is bothering, saying there are too many to save. “It won’t make any difference,” he says.

The boy listens, then reaches down, picks up another starfish, and wings it into the water. “Well,” he says, “it made a difference to that one.”

The point of that tale is that you can make a difference, if only to one person. My husband is in the Buddy Program, a friend and mentor to a 12-year-old; several friends work with that program, too. Why? Because there’s a world within one person.

Each of the people in the submersible was a human being, and at the end of the day—the sad end of the story—that is why we cared.

Alison Osius is an editor at şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř, and a former editor at Climbing and Rock and Ice magazines.

The post What Made Us Care So Much About the Titan? appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

Each time.

Whenever I come home from visiting a certain town in my state of Colorado, I look around at the wide basin where I live, punctuated by the one looming peak that is the symbol of this old mining community, and wonder, Where are all the goddamn mountains?

I live in Carbondale, under the gaze of the 12,965-foot, twin-summited Mount Sopris, jutting high above the river valley and ranchlands. From its peak, which stands alone in our sky (a 14-mile round-trip hike I try to do each year), you can see everything: up the Roaring Fork River Valley to Aspen, 30 miles away; downvalley to Glenwood Springs; and across to the Elk Range. From the Flattops above Dotsero, an hour away on the Colorado River, I’ve looked across and been startled by the isolated, shoulder-y hulk of Sopris.

Though it pains me to be disloyal to the place where I live, I must take off my hat to this other Colorado town: Telluride, which I recently visited for the 15th time. The visuals and anticipation always zing me as I drive down from Delta and Montrose toward the gateway town of Ridgway and first see the jagged skyline crowned by the pyramid of Mount Sneffels, at 14,155 feet the highest peak in the Sneffels Range, part of the San Juan Mountains. I roll down that long hill, turn right at the only stoplight in Ouray County, and start the steady rise up Dallas Divide. That last part of the drive always feels shorter than expected.

Then I’m there: entering the deep valley, enclosed and folded in by the soaring box canyon, a waterfall ripping down its walls. Mountains shoot up in every direction. The road before me curves into the jewel that is Telluride.

An old Victorian mining town, Telluride sits at 8,750 feet, with a gondola arcing up over the ski slopes to Mountain Village, situated even higher at 9,547. The architecture in its National Historic District is quaint and congruent, the Victorian homes recalling the latticed Gold Rush cabins of yore. The red-brick Sheridan Opera House (built in 1913) and the old Nugget Building with its arched windows and striped canopies (1892) are familiar, welcoming forms.

In a dream of mountain grandeur, Ajax Peak dominates the view as you approach town, and faces of granite, conglomerate, and sunny sandstone—red rock, gray rock, in horizontal striations—encircle the canyon. Deep green forests run up the slopes, and bright snowy couloirs interlace the whole network.

With friends, I’ve climbed on the rock walls and boulders (last time hiking up to the Falls Wall, level with the 365-foot Bridal Veil Falls), and hiked the classic three-mile looping up through aspen, ponderosa, and spruce, and opening to wildflower meadows, with widening views of downtown Telluride, the ski area, Bear Creek, Ballard Mountain, La Junta Peak, and Wasatch Mountain.

On both sides of the Telluride Ski Resort are the slopes where my husband and friends and I have skied and our kids used to ski race, and where the boys also raced mountain bikes each summer. One winter, from the meadows above a high pass outside of town, I snowshoed up to the towering spire of Lizard Head.

Back near Ridgway, my husband, Mike, and I have camped in the Ouray Town Park, where he was up at 3:00 a.m. to pace his friend Garett Graubins 25 miles over to Telluride as part of the Hardrock 100 endurance race in the San Juans. Garett, who in the past had placed in the top 10 in ultras, was now living in Minnesota and no longer acclimated, but he had gotten a prized entry and wanted to come.

He arrived in Ouray, mile 50, ashen and vomiting, lay on a cot doing his best to ingest some mashed potatoes, and asked me to warn his wife and son, who would be at the aid station in Telluride, that he might drop there. A few hours later, when I found Holly and Sawyer in the Telluride Town Park and delivered the message, their faces dropped. “Really?”

We three waited and worried. Garett and Mike were to tackle the steep scree slopes up and down from Kroger’s Canteen, an aid station named for a beloved local, Chuck Kroger, who personified this race and was lost to cancer in 2007. Chuck, a Stanford geophysics grad, also meticulously and not entirely legally created Telluride’s now celebrated two-mile Kroger’s Canteen, at 13,000-plus feet,Ěý is the race’s highest aid station, and workers pack the supplies up the col every year.

As Garett and Mike neared Telluride, we spotted their shirt colors, strained in silence to see their faces. They arrived smiling. Chatting.

Garett leaned back on a picnic bench and beamed—and then looked at his watch and leapt up. “I’ve gotta get going!” His new pacer hopped in, while Mike turned to fretting, getting up all night at our friend’s house to check times, hoping Garett would make the two-day cutoff. Garett finished in 46:07:52.

One of my favorite bike events used to be the Full Tilt in Telluride each July. Our sons, Ted and Roy, raced mountain bikes in their age divisions, Mike would sometimes enter an adult rec division, and I’d hike or climb. We and other families and friends stayed in the campground by the Town Park. The kids could ride around independently and take the free gondola to Mountain Village, where race activity centered.

Telluride is an expensive destination, and Mountain Village is studded with five-star hotels, but the area has always had great camping options. It has also always had a local community of hard-core athletes and solid all-arounders: runners, rock and ice climbers, kayakers, and skiers, the latter including various lifelong devotees, emergent high school and college racers, and ski mountaineers pulling multiple-hour approaches to no-fall couloirs.

I have heard some locals say they avoid restaurants on weekends due to crowds, but they still go to their coffee shops, like the Phoenix Bean, which closed last fall after 30 busy years. Now Bruno, which doubles as a bookstore, and the Coffee Cowboy, by the gondola, are local faves. Bakeries, such as Baked in Telluride, founded by the laid-back skier Jerry Greene in 1977, are community hubs as well.

My memories of the area are not all good. Mountain life and sports carry risks and can dole out terrible luck. The first year I went to the Mountainfilm festival—an annual late-May gathering that brings in great outdoor films and filmmakers—in 1989, my friend and housemate Katie Kemble was at the base of the 1,000-foot Ophir Wall as she belayed another climber. The news trickled in as baffling drabs. She had “broken her leg,” been taken away in a truck, been helicoptered to Grand Junction. She had, I found out in a phone call from her climbing partner Ric Hatch—who’d carried her out from the cliff as she held her near-severed leg on with both hands—been “taken into surgery to have her leg amputated.”

I left Telluride after one day there to go to Junction, an excruciating drive. Julie Kennedy, also from Carbondale and visiting with our crew, jumped in my car, saying, “You’re not going alone.” We arrived to find Katie just being wheeled out of surgery, and Julie, Ric, and I danced with joy to hear that due to the two-finger-wide remaining section, the surgeon had reattached her leg. Yet this was no simple blessing. Katie spent months in the hospital, underwent dozens of surgeries, and is still affected, but has gone on to have a family and a great life as a nurse practitioner who also started a nonprofit, the EASE Cancer Foundation.

Another time at Mountainfilm, in 2018, I was planning to stay with my friend Charlotte Fox, with whom I used to climb when she lived in Aspen. I had stayed at her Telluride place (built by Chuck Kroger) a couple of times, once about ten years earlier with my son Roy, then age 11 or 12, for a junior ski race. Roy rode up and down the elevator—“Oh, all the kids do,” Charlotte said with a smile and shrug—in her narrow, five-story house, and he lay on the floor petting her avalanche dog, Max. She and I had coffee out on her deck overlooking the whole town, across to the ski slopes.

The night before my intended recent visit, Charlotte, who’d summited and survived the Everest disaster of 1996 and also climbed Dhaulagiri, Cho Oyu, Gasherbrum II, and Manaslu (doing five of the world’s 14 8000-meter peaks, and many other mountains), died in a fall on her steep stairs. Even still, though it’s been five years, I keep hearing of more of her kindnesses. My friend Randy Levensaler just told me that when he lived in Carbondale and was dating a Telluride local, and as an outsider would shyly enter dinner gatherings, Charlotte would call out his name and pat the chair beside her. “Randy! I’ve got a seat for you right here!”

Thankfully, there have been many good, uneventful Telluride trips. It’s a town with joyous festivals and gatherings, including the summer Bluegrass Festival (which turned 50 this year) and the Telluride Film Festival as well as Mountainfilm. The latter I have been to (at least) five times, once with friends when all our kids were tiny, many years seeing exceptional films, and a couple of times climbing on the Pipeline Wall, which offers some of the biggest views in the valley.

This past May I arrived in Telluride in a new job at şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř and with a new team of coworkers. But some things were the same, like looking up from the streets in town and seeing the waterfall moving from two miles away. Among my crew, I was not the first to arrive, but I was the last to leave. I walked down to the final awards ceremony in the Town Park, and watched my friend and long-ago intern (at Rock and Ice magazine) Andrew Bisharat take the stage with four Palestinian climber friends, in the U.S. on miraculous visas, as their resonant film Resistance Climbing won the Charlie Fowler Best şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Film memorial award. Through a Mountainfilm-Telluride Academy partnership, youth from Navajo Preparatory School, Telluride High School, and Nucla High School named the powerful Full Circle as their Student Choice Award, announced by Makayla Yazzie from Navajo Prep and Akymia Ralstin of Nucla.

Leaving town, I caught a visiting bonsai exhibit at the Slate Gray Gallery on Main Street, just in time before the trees were loaded up in a truck for home. Telluride, like Aspen, has a longstanding creative arts and culture scene. The ski area is primo and vast, though I still claim our Aspen Highlands, with its hike-to Highland Bowl, as the state’s best resort skiing. But the sheer sight of Telluride—the tableau—always gets me.

Each time, I leave with regret. But I usually stop in Ridgway to say hi to Jim McCarthy, 90, who climbed historic first ascents in the Shawangunks, New York; was on the 1963 first ascent of Mount Proboscis in the Yukon; and was instrumental in opening the once-selective American Alpine Club up to anyone who wanted to join. We sit on his back deck and look out together at the Sneffels skyline.

Alison Osius is a senior editor at şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř.

Other articles by this author:

Don’t Let Altitude Sickness Ruin Your Mountain Vacation. Heed This Doctor’s Tips to Avoid It.

Colorado’s Storm King Mountain Memorial Trail Takes You to Sacred Grounds

In 2022 A Stranger Saved Us in a Storm at Green River. Trying to Find Him, I Just Got a Surprise.

Must-Know Camping Tips from a Lifelong Camper

The post This Is the Most Beautiful Town in Colorado appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.