Almost every hiker box I have ever seen after 11,000 miles on American trails has the same litter problem: the thin plastic water bags that accompany the popular Sawyer Squeeze, the most efficient and reliable water filter I have ever used. In theory, these ubiquitous black-and-blue mylar bags are a hiker’s dream, able to hold nearly a liter of water in exchange for less than an ounce of weight.

But water filters get clogged, and gear gets dropped on jagged rocks, these thin bags rip in the middle during the second scenario and burst at the seams with the first. Weight savings and water filters are useless if you don’t actually have a way to hold your water.

Seven years ago, a product designer named Gilad Nachman began solving the problem caused by the flimsy bags when his fledgling company, Cnoc Outdoors, . A soft-sided and completely collapsible water bladder, the Vecto offered a simple but welcome upgrade: thicker walls and rugged seams that could withstand the pressure needed to force water through a dirty filter or the abrasive chaos of a long-distance hiker’s cluttered backpack. The Vecto’s real genius, though, is that one end screws neatly into a Sawyer Squeeze; the other end opens completely and easily, making it simple to scoop water from paltry sources, or dip the thing into a lake.

And so, as long-distance hikers have replaced their Sawyer water bags on trails with Cnoc bladders and bottles, they have gotten into the sensible habit of tossing the ones that come free with the Squeeze into our repositories of collective junk and gear, hiker boxes. The discarded bags wait for whatever unlucky walker next needs some emergency water-storage fix. I have donated at least a dozen during my adventures. Those bags are still sitting somewhere, I presume, awaiting oblivion or apocalypse.

Hopefully, this wasteful practice is over: In January, the two companies finally partnered, making the unofficial hydration fix of thru-hikers official by and selling them as complete units. Not only did they make this sensible pair a legitimate couple, but the combination costs less than buying the two products separately.

These units are sold through Sawyer’s distribution channels and on its website, and the Vectro bladders feature both brand logos on them. But make no mistake, the bladder is definitely made by Cnoc Outdoors. Sawyer’s own water bags should gradually become a little less common in trailside piles, making it easier to spot the free Knorr sides and Pop Tarts always lurking in hiker boxes.

The companies have considered this collaboration for years, since it made so much sense. If people were already doing it, after all, why not make it easier, cheaper, and less wasteful by slimming the packaging and shipping needed for two products into one? But Sawyer—which also makes splints and sunscreen, bug repellants and sting kits—was in the process of trimming its individual products, or of simplifying the assorted SKUs it sold. “We had hundreds, and it was so hard to manage,” Amy Stead, an account manager at Sawyer, recently told me during a call alongside Cnoc’s Nachman. “When Gilad approached us, we were fighting against that.”

Previous partnership talks proved preemptive for Nachman and Cnoc, too. From my own experience, I know he’s right when he says that the quality of the Vecto has improved in recent years. Today, the bladder’s seams are able to take much more pressure before they, too, succumb. (If you’ve ever superglued a Cnoc together in a hotel room while on trail, you know true Sisyphean frustration.) And in recent years, Cnoc has introduced and then upgraded a water bottle called the ; it’s one of a few items that is with me on day hikes and thru-hikes alike, and Sawyer is now selling one of those with .

What’s more, Cnoc’s production capacity needed to expand to keep up with the potential demand of a company as large as Sawyer. Still a relatively fledgling business, Cnoc has now tapped into the more robust distribution network of Sawyer, a brand that has been making life outside easier for 41 years.

“Our early bladders were just not as good, and there was a natural maturity curve for Cnoc,” Nachman said. “And then we had to grow to a point where we could teach our factory to produce at this scale. And now is finally the time.”

This is, admittedly, not some revolutionary shift. Sawyer and Cnoc have simply opted to sell a combination of their own products that lots of us have been pairing ourselves for years. But I appreciate the idea that their move makes this bit of semi-hidden thru-hiker wisdom accessible to anyone that doesn’t necessarily have long-distance dreams. Sure, you could have learned about this pair through Reddit, YouTube, or any number of hiking blogs, really. But now you can just walk into REI or so many of the outfitters that sell Sawyer products and ask for it. A Sawyer atop a Cnoc is the fastest route to reliably clean water on trail; now, it’s faster and easier to get in the first place.

The post This Hiker Hydration Hack Is Now a Product You Can Buy appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

In a previous lifetime, my idea of a long-distance hike was a music festival. For four days, I’d parade across dusty fields or clotted city streets, traipsing from stage to stage in pursuit of the next show. Who knows how many miles I clocked in those peripatetic bursts, but at that extended moment—a music critic in his 20s, way more committed to partying than pulmonary fitness—it was the exercise I knew best.

Not long after I crossed the threshold into 30, though, that lifestyle caught up with me. Headed west on Gay Street in Knoxville, Tennessee, I sank onto the sidewalk and pulled off my boot, squeezing my left foot as though trying to force it back together. It was broken, I knew, a stress fracture from all these steps; why else would each step now feel like another new knife fight, as though someone were jamming a blade between my bones? I endured, switched into a pair of sneakers and limped around Tennessee until the festival’s end.

Back home, my symptoms suddenly subsided, appearing only sporadically during the next few years as I became obsessed with distance running. But in 2019, soon after I entered Maine some 2,000 miles into a northbound thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail, that old ache returned. Was my foot broken, my hike done? Nope.

After staying up late one night in an AT lean-to for a tailspin into online medical sleuthing, I realized it was cuboid syndrome, when the pointy joint on the side of your foot shifts slightly out of line for a spell. With just enough bandwidth to stream a , I learned something called the cuboid squeeze and fixed it myself.

But now, I don’t even need that technique. After 11,000 miles of hiking and countless more miles of road running in almost every state in the country, I simply never leave home without a 1.5-ounce piece of sculpted silicone that’s changed my fitness and the way I travel: toe spacers.

Wait, What Are Toe Spacers—And Why Are They So Popular?

Toe spacers are having an unexpected moment. There are, right now, some 38 million that mention them. has suggested they’re a panacea, and the notes they are “transforming people’s lives.” Neurosurgeon and frequent TV medical commentator , Philadelphia Eagles star , body-positive model : They’ve all become advocates for a fitness craze I never expected to work, in late 2019, when I was desperate for anything to help me run again.

After finishing the Appalachian Trail, my first long-distance hike, my body was a mess—every attempt to return to running felt like another litany of physical insults. I’d already gone to multiple physical therapists and yoga classes, trying to recover, when a young pedorthist building custom inserts for my shoes took one look at my feet and told me I needed toe spacers. Bunions were forming on the sides of my feet, and my little toes were starting to scrunch into claws, or hammer toes. I needed, he said, to spread my toes back out after years of stuffing them into running and hiking shoes that squeezed them together. He pulled a clear zippered pouch from the wall and asked me to try them—, curved ribs of silicone with three holes through which your middle toes slide.

For the next several months, I wore them almost everywhere, tucked between the toe socks he’d also recommended and inside shoes with wide toe boxes, like Topos or Altras. I winced when I had to take my shoes off anywhere, knowing someone would inevitably exclaim “What are those?!” when they saw my spacers. But in the best way, my feet have never been the same again.

Which Toe Spacers Should I Buy and Try?

As best as I can tell, Correct Toes—developed by a podiatrist and runner named Ray McClanahan, who I interviewed for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű in 2022—are the most expensive models on the market, at $65 per pair. They’re also the only ones I’ve ever needed, because they haven’t warped or ripped after five years of sporadic use. (More on “sporadic” in a bit.) I’ve never once resented what I paid.

But there are more affordable options now: There’s a on Amazon, though some reviews there suggest you indeed pay for what you get. s version for the same price looks more rugged, and I am certainly entertained by the idea of black toe spacers to match my endurance-black toenails. Correct Toes occasionally slip out from between my digits, so I like the way the and The Foot Collective’s wrap around all five. (The inclusion of an exercise band is a welcome bonus, too.)

You can even try with built-in toe spacers from Happy Feet, though I am slightly suspect of the oversized spacers that look more like toe bracelets from for a reason I’ll get into right now.

So, How Do I Use Toe Spacers?

At the start, slowly. Have you ever stretched a muscle for the first time in a while, maybe because you noticed a new stiffness in your body? It was uncomfortable, right? That’s how toe spacers will feel for a bit, as you begin the business of prying apart bones, tendons, and ligaments that have been stuck inside narrow shoes for most of your life. I started with 15 minutes a day and gradually increased until I was wearing them almost all of the time, taking care to remove them before I fell asleep. (There is some suggestion that they restrict blood flow, especially at night; my toes simply feel stiff when I wake up with them still on.) Yoga Toes aren’t appealing to me, because they’re too big to slip inside shoes.

These days, I don’t use them all the time. My feet feel better, because I’ve changed my entire routine—foot socks always, Topo tennis shoes with wide toe boxes unless I’m “dressing up,” and a regimen of toe exercises using resistance bands. But whether I’m hiking across the country or going to another music festival, I always have a single toe spacer in my bag, ready to slot between my toes if my cuboid slips its position, as it sometimes does, or my arches begin to ache as though they’re on fire. I rarely travel with two toe spacers these days, because both of my feet generally don’t hurt at the same anymore. I’ve spent years learning how to manage them, after all.

During a recent 1,200-mile trek along Wisconsin’s Ice Age Trail, I would often end 30-mile days by wearing toe spacers in my tent, letting my toes stretch as I massaged my legs and made my dinner. I don’t think you need to use toe spacers for the rest of your life; I do think, however, they can be crucial for taking care of the body part that actually makes contact with the ground and supports the rest of the body in the process.

Do Toe Spacers Actually Work?

Toe spacers have reached such a critical mass of popularity that you can easily find opposing answers to this question, bandied about from the to . I’m not a doctor or a foot-health researcher, so I won’t pretend to tell you anything prescriptive or definitive.

But in the last five years, or since I started using toe spacers, I have logged close to 20,000 miles on my feet, whether hiking long trails, running on roads, or, yes, attending music festivals. I also turned 40. But I have rarely felt stronger as a hiker or a runner than I do right now, and I’ve had no substantive problems with my feet in a long time. My knees are better, too, and knee pain was often linked with the foot woes I experienced.

Again, I’ve never seen toe spacers as a cure-all; I massage my feet, strengthen them, stretch them. But when they ache, whether I’m on a long hike or a reporting trip in another city, a day with toe spacers is my first line of defense. It’s perhaps the best $65 I’ve ever spent on a piece of fitness gear—so much so, in fact, that I bought a second pair in an alternate color so that I can mix and match them as I travel. Hey, I’ve got to keep them looking surprising and ridiculous, since so many people now seem curious about what toe spacers are and if they can change how you feel, too.

Grayson Haver Currin is °żłÜłÙČőŸ±»ć±đ’s thru-hiking and trail columnist. He finished the Triple Crown in November 2023, ending with the Continental Divide Trail, and has written about his and others’ adventures on trails across the country since 2019—including, most recently, how you’re hiking downhill wrong, as well as the woman who smashed the Appalachian Trail record, and ridiculously expensive hiking shorts that chafed him anyways. He still takes toe spacers to music festivals and on his adventures.

The post My First Thru-Hike Wrecked My Feet. Now I Never Trek Without Toe Spacers. appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

In early August, on the shoulderÌęof Colorado’s highest peak, 14,439-foot Mount Elbert, I suddenly found myself unable to do anything except apologize.

I had started up the mountain so early that morning you could still call it night, hiking the remote Black Cloud Trail that leads to Elbert’s southeast ridge. The trail was lit by so many stars I sometimes forewent my headlamp.

Delirious from a lack of sleep and the increasing altitude, I was barreling back down the mountain not long after dawn, visions of breakfast skillets back in Leadville dancing in my head. But my post-summit reverie was broken by a nightmare scenario: a trail-crew looking up from their work to judge me. They were silent, but their scowls might as well have been screams.

At a junction a few hundred vertical feet up from them, I’d instinctively taken what appeared to be the most direct route down, plunging across the slope. I thought the route seemed especially steep, not like the kind of steadily graded trail the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative typically builds and maintains. I hadn’t seen any obstacles blocking access to this part of the trail.

Alas, this wasn’t the trail at all, and I had inadvertently cut several switchbacks, realizing it only when I ran into the very crew that was managing them.

“I’m so, so sorry,” I repeatedly stammered to the Sunday morning gang, explaining that I was a strict switchback-cutting-is-for losers apostle and that I’d simply missed a turn.

“And it doesn’t look like I’m the only one who made that mistake,” I continued, pointing to the sizable rut I had followed. They sighed, less at me than their Sisyphean task: trying to maintain a mountainside in a world where most people simply want to get somewhere else as quickly as possible.

“It’s cheating,” Lloyd Athearn, the executive director of the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative, told me with a laugh two weeks later, the “it” in question being cutting switchbacks while coming down a mountain. “We just got done with the Olympics, and someone can’t just cut the turn on the track and still be in the race,” he added. “They’re disqualified. You’re not doing the trail any faster—because you’re not doing the trail.”

Indeed, switchbacks—and, namely, cutting them in an effort to save time—had a big year. A month after my conversation with Athearn, on Labor Day, Idaho pro runner Michelino Sunseri appeared to set a new for getting up and down one of the country’s most totemic peaks, Grand Teton. Trouble was, he cut a switchback to avoid what he called the “Congo line of hikers” who weren’t paid athletes, since his record was apparently more important than their joy or the trail itself. His FKT was revoked, and the National Park Service issued a hefty citation, prompted in part by his very public flouting of the rules on—where else?—Strava.

The outcry against Sunseri was swift and sustained; many in hiking and running communities rightfully resented someone who seemed to see himself as better or more important than the hoi polloi, “the Congo line.”

But Grand Teton National Park—like most every mountainous public land I’ve ever encountered in the United States—is often an endless spiderweb of unofficial trails created by cutting switchbacks, sometimes unintentionally built by individuals looking to save a little time. Collectively, though, these decisions lead to massive environmental degradation. It’s easy to scorn Sunseri, but we’ve all done it. I make every effort to never cut switchbacks, but, just as I did on Elbert, I still make mistakes. Making less in the future is a nearly effortless way to preserve the trails we all share.

“When trails switch back up a slope, it does two different things: It lessens the grade of the trail, as opposed to just going straight up that slope,” explains Athearn. “And then it allows water to flow down the backslope, across the tread, and then the bottom part of the slope. That’s much less impactful to the trail’s tread.”

That first reason is why people cut switchbacks at all. They see where the trail is eventually going and they trust they’re strong enough hikers or runners to get to the same place in a more direct albeit steep way. They shave off a few hundred feet and maybe a minute or so of movement; done enough times during a long day or even an FKT attempt, that adds up to getting to that breakfast skillet much faster. I understand the temptation entirely, and I’ve certainly done it in the past.

But switchbacks aren’t just for us; they’re for the benefit of the landscapes we’re there to see and the trails we use to visit them. Water wants to get from a high point to a lower one as quickly and efficiently as possible, so when we help foster a steep rut by cutting a switchback, we give water a chance to rush downhill—and bring precious soil with it. Athearn tells me that in high alpine environments, he expects only a foot of soil to linger above the rock, and it often takes a millennium to build just an inch of that soil. Cutting across a switchback can wipe it out immediately. “You’re looking at 10,000 years of evolutionary process just flowing down a hillside,” Athearn says.

And then, of course, there is the human effort that goes into building and maintaining these trails. It is easy to look at a trail and not understand the effort they require, but these things are built and maintained by people who, more often than not, love a place as much as you do. When Athearn describes the process of constructing a trail, my brain breaks a little—the scouting and inspecting and permitting and staging and building and maintaining. The folks on their hands and knees, moving rocks and smoothing dirt on that Sunday morning, were part of a multi-year effort to help that particular route endure increased traffic and erosion. Cutting a switchback is, then, a wordless “screw you.”

Athearn and his crews have heard hikers talk of trail gnomes who emerge in the middle of the night or pure divine intervention as explanations for trails and their maintenance. He can only laugh. “No, it’s just a bunch of us smelly workers out here for weeks at the time,” he says. “God didn’t place rocks there in a miraculous fashion. Mere mortals did.”

For me, this conjures the war against litter, which, as a species, we are still losing. If you’ve got trash in your car, the most expedient thing to do is toss it out, to make it someone else’s problem, to make it the environment’s issue. Why wait for a trash can when all the world’s available to be one? And why wait for a switchback when you can just head straight up hill? The same answer holds for both questions: because there’s more to the world than our immediate needs, and hoping to finish a trail a few minutes faster is not much of a need at all.

Grayson Haver Currin has written about long-distance hiking for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű since 2020. He completed the Triple Crown in 2023 and has logged more than 11,000 miles on the United States’ National Scenic Trails. He writes about music for The New York Times, GQ, Mojo, Pitchfork, and many more. He lives high in Colorado’s Front Range.

The post For the Love of Hiking, It’s Time We All Stopped Cutting Switchbacks appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

The Green Bay Packers were suddenly not the most interesting entertainment optionÌęin Mac’s Pub and Grub, a dim dive packed with people wearing Packers gear on a Sunday afternoon in October in the lakeside Wisconsin town of Merrimac. Unfortunately for me, I was.

Midway through the first quarter, I had slipped inside Mac’s, found an unoccupied stool, and leaned against a wall with clear sightlines of the bar’s TV gallery, exhausted and half-frozen like a piece of melting ice. I’d left camp 11 hours earlier, at 4 A.M., hustling 31 miles through a Sunday squall in order to make Mac’s, or to watch the Packers’ bout with the Detroit Lions among the locals. But I looked as if I’d emerged from the depths of Lake Wisconsin, as puddles of rainwater pooled beneath my feet and around my backpack. Every play or two, someone else glanced askance from the bar, as if Cheers had been invaded by some primordial beast from the bottom of Boston Harbor.

“Are you hungry?” a broad-chested man in a Packers jersey, belly to the bar and bottle in hand, finally asked. When I nodded, he grinned and pointed. “There’s food over there. Help yourself.” For the next three hours, my wife, Tina, and I gorged ourselves on what surely must have been the most delicious potluck ever—finger-thick slabs of candied bacon, brie wheels topped with baked salmon, tortilla chip smothered in cheese-laden chili. As we slowly warmed back to life after the windy November downpour, the regulars steadily realized we were hiking across their state, endeavoring to finish the 1,200-mile Ice Age Trail before the infamous Wisconsin winter arrived. Some of them, at least, became fans.

Mac had first said I looked like a wet rat; now, he spun our laundry in the bar’s dryer, then offered to let us camp beside the bar. A couple, Paul and Deb, peppered us with questions about the adventure, then feted us with their own wilderness stories—and several shots. Sue, a retiree who would soon head south for the winter, offered up a bathtub and bedroom, which we accepted after needlessly worrying we were being soft. “You kids be safe,” Mac said, smiling like a proud father as we followed Sue to her car, “and let us know when you finish.”

So goes my overall experience on the Ice Age Trail, a 40-day slog through pleasant but repetitive woods and along often-busy highways, alleviated by bouts of unexpected support and kindness from Wisconsin natives. Strangers handed us candy bars from open car windows. Fathers running errands made U-turns to scoop us from seemingly ubiquitous rainstorms, while trailside bar owners treated us like Edmund Hillary and Tenzig Norgay before offering to deliver us breakfast the next morning. A fleet of Ice Age Trail volunteers was seemingly always on call, too, ready to drive us from hotel toÌętrail or offer camping intel during extended road walks.

Though it is one of , alongside the more familiar and acclaimed Appalachian and Pacific Crest, the Ice Age Trail is decidedly not a premier thru-hike, best done in one continuous push. I do not recommend it as a thru-hike. But after 11,000 miles on such trails, I can say it is the friendliest long-distance experience I’ve ever had, both in terms of the people on or around it and the way its stewards have shaped and maintained it. Really, it is more of a linear community center that happens to stretch between the Minnesota and Michigan borders than a wilderness experience. The Ice Age Trail is, in every positive sense, Midwest Nice—pleasant to look at, if a tad boring, but as accommodating and kind as can be.

“Everybody takes pride in it in our own special way, whether it’s the person serving you breakfast in a trail town or the guy who walks the same five-mile segment every day,” Jared Wildenradt, who has now hiked the entire Ice Age Trail eight times, told me two weeks after I finished my walk.

“There’s a definite community here that people don’t expect when it comes to hiking in the Midwest,” he continued. “The people that power through here get to experience that, just like you did in 40 days.”

What is the Ice Age Trail?

More than many of its National Scenic Trail counterparts, the Ice Age Trail remains a work in progress. First envisioned in the fifties by a Milwaukee-born outdoors enthusiast named Ray Zillmer, it was only established by Congress during 1980. The trail roughly follows the terminal edge of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, as it about 10,000 years ago. Kettles, moraines, eskers, drumlins, wetlands, hanging valleys, outwash plains: Across, down, and up Wisconsin, you crisscross these glacial vestiges, repeated in random bursts like a particularly chaotic and tremendous .

Still, after more than four decades of route-finding, trail-building, and parcel-buying, only 700 miles of the 1,200-route is contiguous, winding across forests, around fields and farms, or through tiny towns. Nearly 500 miles still depend upon what the Ice Age Trail Alliance calls “connecting routes,” a euphemism for rural roads and busy highways. The imperative, then, is closing those gaps, pulling hikers off those connecting routes by securing land for actual footpaths.

Wildenradt has helped find six such parcels; he talks about the first one—a glacier-carved patch of property that interrupts a 25-mile road walk via a 0.7-mile roller coaster through the woods—like a father might extol a firstborn. When we spoke, he sat plucking seeds from pine cones that he intended to plant on that plot soon. “I went away and hacked at the dirt, started clearing away for trail. I was beat up from head to toe,” he said, laughing about the spot’s temporary nickname, Prickler’s Property. “I had close to 300 volunteer hours when it was done. I could easily drop 100 more.”

All that, mind you, for less than a mile. When the current executive director, Luke Kloberdanz, thru-hiked it in 2003, he was the eleventh person ever to do so. Only two decades ago, the mileage ratio was reversed, with nearly 700 miles of road walks to 500 on trail. He now believes the path will be finished within his children’s lifetimes, meaning his grandkids could walk from Minnesota to Michigan and touch very little asphalt.

“I always thought that completion was a long way off, that I was never going to be part of that,” Kloberdanz told me. “We may not reach the end of the tunnel in my lifetime, but we’re at least starting to see the light. I’ve never felt that way in my 20 years here.”

That aspirational pride animates the Ice Age Trail, end to end. I’ve never hiked a better-blazed path. Hikers can spotÌęits bright yellow stripes by headlamp as by sunlight. (When you fill out a thru-hiking certification upon completing the trail, the Ice Age Trail Alliance even asks how many times you get lost, so they can fix the problems.) And I’ve never encountered a volunteer network so robust and eager to help hikers; wherever you are in the state, you are almost always a phone call away from a free ride, meal, or bed. These volunteers raved about the contributions they and their friends had made to the trail, as if thanking me for using them, for making good on their hard work.

The trail is also dotted with benches, sometimes more than one per mile, and often dedicated to a late hiker who loved the place. They’re meant, of course, to make the trail more accommodating, to give people who aren’t aiming to finish 30 miles in a day a chance to rest. You won’t see that on any other National Scenic Trail. The friendliness is by both circumstance and design, pervading everything.

In 2020, to celebrate its 40th official year, the Ice Age Trail Alliance launched the Mammoth Hike Challenge—essentially, a reward for anyone who hikes 40 miles during the month of October, when the foliage of the Wisconsin fall is at its apex. The trail’s mascot is a . It’s so cute I now have one on my desk, dutifully carried for the last 400 miles. They’ve added one mile to that requirement each subsequent year.

On weekends, we’d meet couples and crews of friends in pursuit of their 44-mile quota. They were eager not only to share the best things they’d seen but also to hear ours. More than once, my answer was you, the people who love this trail so much.

Did I Like the Ice Age Trail?

On a cold Saturday morning at a Kwik Trip, a particularly bountiful chain of convenience stores launched in Wisconsin in the sixties, I was waiting in line at an automated espresso machine. “Are you hiking the Ice Age Trail?” said the woman ahead of me, her smile as bright as her pastel tie-dye. When I answered yes, her grin somehow grew wider. She introduced herself as Tarra. “I want to do that someday, too.” Several hours later, Tarra sent us an Instagram message with her phone number and an offer of help should we need it as we neared her home a few hundred miles east.

Turns out, we did. Due to a few work deadlines, we’d pushed our pace on the Ice Age, hiking at least 30 miles every day with zero rest days. As we neared the 1,000-mile mark, my body—specifically, my left IT Band, suddenly as intractable as a massive team of mules—tightening to the point that each step felt as if a knife was being jammed into my joint. At night, crawling into the tent, my knee looked like a balloon. I knew it was time to stop. The next morning, I hobbled two miles to a gas station and texted Tarra, asking if she knew where I might rent a car nearby. The sun wasn’t up yet, but she told me she was on her way.

As I lamented my knee an hour later, she texted a friend who happened to be her physical therapist. How soon could she see me? For two hours that afternoon, Jeanie Crawford—a , a blessed sorceress per my experience—pulled, tugged, straightened, bent, jabbed, and corrected seemingly every bone in my body. I had almost crawled into her office, but I somehow walked out with a mostly normal stride. She charged me half of her hourly rate, ostensiblyÌęexcited enough by the effort to cross her state that she practically gave away her day.

For the next week, I returned to more than 30 miles every day, moving at my normal pace because a stranger had been willing to leave her home long before her workday began and find me help. The Ice Age Trail didn’t dazzle me with scenery or variety, and it didn’t prompt me to learn any new backpacking techniques. Most days, truth be told, I didn’t even like it. I contemplated quitting more often than I’ve ever considered such for anything in my life.

But it did remind me of something obvious, something that can be easy to forget high in the mountains or deep in the woods: Hiking trails are for all people, and those interactions can take a dozen different forms, from the married couple hustling from one end of a state to another to the bartender who keeps asking for more of their stories, from the gaggle of retirees out for a slow Sunday stroll high on an esker to the trail runner bombing down a rock face in the rain. The Ice Age Trail is a gift from Wisconsin’s past to Wisconsin’s present and future. I’m grateful its people share it so generously.

Grayson Haver Currin has written about long-distance hiking for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű since 2020. He completed the Triple Crown in 2023 and has logged more than 11,000 miles on the United States’ National Scenic Trails. He writes about music for The New York Times, GQ, Mojo, Pitchfork, and many more. He lives high in Colorado’s Front Range.

The post Wisconsin’s Ice Age Trail Is America’s Friendliest Thru-Hike appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

French outdoor apparel brand Satisfy has perfected running shorts. Founded a decade ago by , the Paris-based company has performed a paradoxical miracle with distance running’s necessity. Their best shorts, the , feel as if you’re wearing absolutely nothing while actually being sturdy enough to store fuel (and even car keys) and prevent skin from rubbing against skin.

Since hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in a leopard-print pair in 2021, I have logged more than 10,000 miles in assorted versions of the Rippy with such devotion that, when it’s laundry day and I must wear something else outside, I will briefly consider not running or hiking at all. And despite the high price tag ($260), I’ve been stockpiling them for years, like a squirrel hoarding nuts, just in case Satisfy someday discontinues them.

Earlier this year, Satisfy announced it was upgrading the Rippy in an experiment, replacing the nylon ripstop shell for which it is named with a layer of Dyneema. Three decades ago, what would become known as Dyneema helped the AmericanÌęsailing team overcome the heavily favored Italians in the America’s Cup. As resilient as it was lightweight, the seemingly miraculous fabric—polyethylene sandwiched between polyester—has spread into cut-proof gloves, body armor, shoes, and both the waterproof backpacks and tents I have used for years. .

Still, the idea seemed silly, maybe even horrible, from the start: How would Dyneema, which repels water like a tin roof, respond to my excessive sweat? Where would it go? And how would material that can feel coarse and even stiff glide against my bare legs at high speeds and over long distances? Also, would they be hot? (“Hard boiled eggs,” one Reddit user said of his testicles when he imagined wearing them.)

Oh, and what about that price? Sure, the stateside shipping was free, but I wondered how many people could afford a $420 pair of shorts—and why did they cost that much, anyway? (In the sake of transparency, my pair was a sample sent to me by the company.) Aside from Satisfy’s limited-edition collaboration with eyewear brand Oakley, the Rippy Dyneema Trail Shorts are—as best as I or any of the multiple running aficionados I asked could remember—the most expensive pair of running or hiking shorts ever made. A Satisfy stan, I assumed they must be worth it.

I was absolutely wrong. All summer long, from the highest peaks in Colorado to long-distance lakeside runs in Chicago, I wore Satisfy’s Dyneema Rippy shorts, hoping to find a function that justified the indulgence. They have been hiking, running, swimming, and soaking in baking saunas, glacial lakes, slot canyons, and radiant deserts. And mostly what I’ve gained is a season of chafing so ghastly and intense that I’ve wondered more than once if I needed to see a dermatologist. Satisfy has perfected running shorts; by adding Dyneema, they have proven just how delicate perfection can be. Turns out, Satisfy agrees.

“If I had to do a Version 2 of these shorts, I would probably not go for Dyneema,” Partouche told me on a recent weekday, laughing from his office. “It’s a failure, because we tried to be over-technical. People overpaid for a technicality they didn’t have a chance to fully explore. It’s good to accept that some products are better than others.”

The idea to substitute nylon for Dyneema has a sensible-enough origin story. Satisfy wanted to build an ultra-durable pair of shorts that could withstand ultramarathonsÌęthroughÌędesert brambles and snagsÌęor forests dense with deadfall. What’s more, they wanted a fabric so strong it could hold heavy loads for runners moving long distances between aid stations. And, of course, it needed to be light. Dyneema fits those criteria.

These parameters, Partouche admitted, are very particular, and Satisfy never spelled them out clearly. They never specified how limited their functionality might be. It’s the kind of small-run experiment, he said, that big companies ship to athletes to try in challenging conditions. “For us, that would be way more expensive,” he said. “At Satisfy, what we give to athletes in terms of technology and what we offer the final consumer is exactly the same.”

All my apprehensions about the shorts were right. Satisfy’s regular Rippy shorts work so well because of the way they hold sweat. As the traditional nylon cover becomes saturated, it begins to cling to a base layer of “technical silk” Satisfy has dubbed “Justice”—basically, the most comfortable pair of biking tights you’ve ever worn. They stick together and move in tandem, meaning you mostly avoid the friction that leads to chafing over long distances.

This doesn’t happen with Dyneema. The top layer instead bunches up, so the silk beneath it rides upward as it absorbs water. You see where this is going, right? A discomfort so intense you want to bail on whatever miles you have left, then jump into a vat of Gold Bond.

Fall is coming quickly to the mountains of Colorado, where I now live. That means that my summer experiment with Dyneema—in which I tried but failed to test the second-most expensive running shorts ever until I fell in love with them—is almost over. Last Sunday, though, I slipped them on one more time for a long run followed by a long hike.

All season, I’d been stuffing gel packets and drink mixes into the three pockets that line the rear waistband. I finally remembered to try the two pockets that Satisfy added to the silk layer beneath the Dyneema, a first-time feature for the company. I loved them, slipping gels out of the pockets on the front of my legs without breaking stride, even as I made haste down a canyon. When I asked Partouche about those pockets a few days later, another Satisfy employee, Tommy Hubert, told me they would soon make several more appearances in their 2025 lineup. That is, I could have the pockets without the chafing.

At last, I realized that’s what makes Satisfy stand out—a willingness to try, fail, learn the lessons, and then succeed. They attempt outlandish things all the time, from that are a real joy to wear on a hot day to a with modular Primaloft padding that remains the single most confusing piece of clothing I own. Some work. Some don’t. All of it helped lead to the shorts I covet, and maybe, next year, willÌęget even better. Partouche often talks about Satisfy in terms of punk rock, which can be hard to square with a pair of shorts that costs as much as aÌęcar payment. Part of the ethos, at least, translates.

“We dare to try. We dare to change the status quo, to polarize. Big companies can’t polarize, but Satisfy can,” he told me. “I don’t care if people love us or hate us, which puts Satisfy in a very unique position where people say, ‘What the heck?’”

That’s when I learned to love the shorts I thought I hated, even if I don’t think I’ll ever wear them for long distances again.

The post I Tested $420 Running Shorts This Summer. I Got Chafed. appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

On Tuesday morning, three days after Hurricane Helene ravaged swaths of the Southeastern United States, I began making calls to old friends and hiking experts who live along the Appalachian Trail.

I had seen the of Hot Springs, North Carolina—a place I called home for years and one of the few towns the 2,200-mile trail bisects via sidewalk—drowned in the brown waters of an incoming creek and the mighty French Broad. I had seen images of the in Erwin, Tennessee, which leads just past one of the trail’s famous hostels and from one sweeping ridgeline to another. And I had seen the near Damascus, Virginia, one of the trail’s spiritual epicenters, cracked in pieces like overcooked pecan brittle. I had seen reports of the 220 dead and many more missing. Communities of longtime friends were entirely marooned, and little towns I’d cherished as a lifelong Southerner were ripped open like wet cardboardÌęboxes.

I asked them about the state of the trail—a pathway that has changed so many lives (including my own). I assumed the worst, that it was either washed away or buried by landslides in extended stretches. Online prognosticators didn’t improve my assumption.

“One-third of this trail is destroyed,” a TikToker named said in a by Wednesday. Using a map of the AT as her greenscreen, she speculated about the devastation. “This catastrophic storm is actually going to change the map of North Carolina and Tennessee, the actual topography.”

But my phone calls yielded a surprise. As best as anyone can tell right now, the claims of complete destruction aren’t true, either for the AT or for the half-dozen other long-distance trails that radiate through the lower reaches of some of the world’s oldest mountains. Misinformation and assumptions based on that request—and then broadcast for TikTok likes—make a bad situation worse, unnecessarily adding to the weight of a region’s already seismic loss. The Appalachian Trail is a point of pride for people there, for people in the midst of losing everything; saying it is destroyed based on no data adds insult to inestimable injury.

While it is true that the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, the nonprofit that helps manage the path and the lands surrounding it, has , or its lower third, it is not true that those miles are destroyed. Sources I spoke to talked of toppled trees, down branches, and flooding.

“It should be posted that—on four miles of this 2,200-mile trail—there’s a lot of devastation. It’s four miles of flood devastation like I’ve never seen before,” Warren Doyle, a longtime AT expert and the person who’s hiked the AT more than anyone else ever, told me Wednesday afternoon. Doyle’s estimation takes in the stretches that pass through the towns hit the hardest along the trail. “But that doesn’t mean you close the whole trail down,” he said.

The same seems to hold for the , which takes an alternate path through the Appalachians. “Nothing out of the ordinary—branches, limbs, and a few blowdowns,” the president of the trail’s association, Bob Cowdrick, told me late Wednesday of the trail’s southern half. He hopes to get eyes on the rest of it within two weeks.

But information on trail conditions remains scant, as efforts to save lives and communities continue. In that light, the ATC’s request is reasonable.

Joshua Niven and Amber Adams Niven live just outside of Hot Springs, the Appalachian Trail oasis 275 miles north of the southern terminal. Its famous outfitter has been ripped apart like a box of candy by a black bear.ÌęIt is the Nivens’ favorite place in the world, Joshua tells me, and it will not be a functioning trail town for a while. The safety of its own residents, of course, is paramount now.

But Niven can see the trail from his window, and he seems almost sanguine about its status. He and Amber are chronicle of the trail for Falcon Guides; he ticks through the places in those first 865 miles that may be a problem and names surprisingly few—perhaps the Roan Highlands, where Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina meet, or maybeÌęthe steep embankments leading north out of Hot Springs itself. Like Doyle, he is concerned for the tiny Appalachian towns themselves but suggests workarounds for hikers.

“Saturated trees—that’s always going to be a thing. But I haven’t seen anything that’s catastrophic that a hiker couldn’t navigate,” Joshua said, adding the caveat that there will likely be pockets where destruction is greater. “It might be unpleasant, given how many trees are there,” he said. “What’s the issue with hiking in woods that have trees down?”

And there are, of course, a lot of trees. To put it in perspective, the highest point on the Appalachian Trail is , at 6,644 feet (The entire range tops out at 6,684.) There are many trailheads on the Pacific Crest Trail and the Continental Divide Trail higher than that. This means that the AT rarely exits treeline—that is the essence of its so-called “green tunnel.” It’s constantly passing through terrain where wet ground and even mild winds can clot the trail with a seemingly infinite number of downed trees. That’s the worry.

Betsy Brown is the associate director of Friends of the , an 1,175-mile path that meets the AT atop Kuwohi before extendingÌęeast toward the North Carolina coast. More than a third of the trail is , as employees await reconnaissance on its conditions. So far, one volunteer has been able to hike just two miles near the famous Blue Ridge Parkway, which has been . There were 27 new trees across it. That kind of cleanup will take time to complete.

“The trees down is a huge problem,” says Brown. “But the bigger problem is that, in these more remote places, our volunteer crews are smaller, with vigorous retirees. Having to walk in with chainsaws and fuel is hard. And for now, they’re dealing with their own issues, just trying to get back to normal.”

Indeed, time will be key to reversing the damage—not outright destruction, at least in most places—on the trail. Dan Ryan, who works with land stewards along the AT, outlined an extended process for clearing the trail of downed trees and fixing any sections where running water ripped it asunder.

He told me that, over the next month, the National Forest Service and National Park Service will assess damaged areas and offer a report about what needs to be done where. Only then, Ryan said, can the ATC begin deploying its half-dozen volunteer trail crews to begin work. Restoring every mile, he said, may take years; some of its most beautiful places have been forever changed, as hiker and runner Sarah Baker recently noted at the Walnut Mountain trailhead, an exquisite bit of Appalachia. Ryan worries, too, about the damage so many newly downed trees might have on long-term ecosystem health, from new pests to wildfire risks. But they have to start somewhere.

“Trail clubs are champingÌęat the bit to get out and help,” Ryan said. “It won’t be a challenge of deploying resources, because those are in place, regardless. It’s just a matter of putting them where they need to be—in safe conditions, in the priorities those agencies have dictated to us.”

While these agencies assess damage and determine how to address it, the ATC is advising that hikers—even southbound thru-hikers, with less than 1,000 miles left in their walks—to stay off trail. Visitors will require resources from towns simply trying to survive and rebuild, like Hot Springs. Again, this seems reasonable enough. But I also understand the perspective of Doyle, who sees the trail as an absolute avenue of liberation and is still more than miffed about the ATC’s stance on Covid-19 back in early 2020, when the trail was actually closed.

“It is another liability-informed directive from the ATC,” he told me. “It’s an overreaction.”

Still, even Doyle—perhaps the AT’s most important living evangelist—had to change his plans for the week when he learned how many trees had fallen near his home not far from flood-ravaged Damascus, Virginia, one of the epicenters of AT hiking culture. On Tuesday, he took five new students at his Appalachian Trail Institute for a six-mile hike. I’ve done that walk in Doyle’s weeklong seminar before, and it takes a few easy hours. His students spent six arduous hours climbing over fallen trees.

So on Wednesday, he dropped them off again, and told them to hike two hours in one direction, and then walk back to the car. The damage is extensive, he told me, but it can be overcome. “When they came out of the woods yesterday, they were talking and laughing. They worked as a team, and they learned a lot of important things about each other,” he said, sitting in his car, awaiting their return. “They experienced adversity.”

Doyle knows, of course, that such adversity withers in comparison to what his neighbors are facing just down the mountain road. But he’s still proud to be teaching people to get ready to hike the AT, hopefully next year.

The post Did Hurricane Helene Really Destroy One-Third of the Appalachian Trail? appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

One of the most grueling records in American endurance sports fell late Saturday night in northern Georgia. Tara Dower, a 31-year-old ultrarunner and long-distance hiker born in North Carolina and based in Virginia, reached Georgia’s Springer Mountain, the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, at 11:53 P.M. She completed the arduous southern thru-hike of the iconic trail, crossing 14 states and 2,197 miles, in 40 days, 18 hours, and 5 minutes. It’s the fastest known time for hiking the iconic trail in either direction.

Her finishing time cleaves approximately 13 hours off the 2018 benchmark set by Belgian runner Karel Sabbe, who in 2018 hiked the trail from south to north. It alsoÌęreturns the overallÌęrecord to a woman for the first time since 2015, when Scott Jurek eclipsed Jennifer Pharr Davis’ then-record by only three hours. What’s even more impressive is that Dower, who goes by the trail name “Candy Mama,” had to come from behind to topple Sabbe’s record after falling off pace during a particularly rainy spell in New England.

“The number of people that have hiked the Appalachian Trail before Tara in less than 50 days is ten, only one of them a woman,” explained Liz Derstine, who set the women’s record for a northbound hike in 2020 at 51 days and joined Dower for a stretch of the trail earlier this week.

“And Tara has done it faster than all of them, including the men,” Derstine added. “This is one of the greatest achievements of all time. It’s huge.”

Statistics aside, what’s most remarkable about Dower’s achievement may be her rapid and unexpected rise through the ranks of distance hikers and runners. Less than a decade ago, when Dower was a student at East Carolina University, she became fascinated byÌęthe Appalachian Trail after idly watching a National Geographic documentary. She graduated in 2016, and the next year she set off northward from Springer Mountain, making it only 80 miles before her grandparents picked her up.

“I had really bad, untreated anxiety, a panic attack on trail,” Dower told me Wednesday morning as she pushed through Great Smoky Mountains National Park. “I vowed not to thru-hike again and was pretty bummed.”

Of course, she did not keep to her vow. I met Dower on the Appalachian Trail back in 2019, when we were both 200 miles into our respective first-time thru-hikes. She and her husband Jonathan had gotten married six months earlier; withÌętrail names “Candy Mama” and “Sheriff,” they were still in a sort of honeymoon glow, doing handstands atop Appalachian balds and beaming for her . The couple did not push for speed during that trek, and they reached Maine in a little more than five months, a perfectly average time.

Dower had seen a clip of Karl “Speedgoat” Meltzer’s 2016 record-setting effort and assumed that wasn’t for her. “He was so tall, so athletic, and I thought he had this perfect endurance body,” she told me. “I couldn’t fathom doing anything close to that.”

Dower’s perspective changed during the pandemic. She moved to Hot Springs, North Carolina, an iconic AT trail town, to work for a guiding service owned by Jennifer Pharr Davis, the earlier record holder. Dower began running the mountains around her, and in 2020 she paced Derstine on two nearby sections during her own FKT attempt on the AT’s northern route. Dower then spent that September racing east across North Carolina on the 1,175-mile Mountains-to-Sea Trail, establishing a new speed record of just over 29 days.

“That felt plenty hard and plenty long. It was a struggle, and I was unhealthy” she said, laughing as she tried to cough up a bug she’d swallowed while moving down the trail. “It didn’t cross my mind to try something else.”

But she soon began mounting an impressive running resume—four ultra victories in 2021, plus a course record on the Devil Dog 100-miler in 2022. She set a new record for the 300-mile Benton MacKaye Trail, often seen as a miniature AT, that year, and then shattered a long-standing women’s benchmark on the 567-mile in a cooperative effort with Derstine.

Along the way, Dower also went viral in the ultra-running world due to a painful encounter with a cholla cactus—while she wore cat ears, no less.

Dower pondered and planned her record-breaking AT attempt for more than a year, but in 2023 she chose to lean into extreme endurance training to prepare her body, rather than rest her legs for the attempt. An overall win in North Carolina’s Umstead 100-miler that summer became her preamble for one of running’s most daunting races, Colorado’s Hardrock 100. Dower finished fourth, seven hours behind one of her inspirations, Courtney Dauwalter.

In fact, Dauwalter’s record-breaking wins last year at the Western States Endurance Run and the Hardrock 100 within a three-week window—followed by her subsequent victory at Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc—inspired Dower to start the AT just a month after the 2024 Hardrock 100.

“A lot of people told me what I shouldn’t do, especially doing Hardrock so close to the AT. But no one’s ever tried it, so I wanted to see if it helped,” said Dower, pausing a playlist of Madonna and Ice Spice to talk. “I knew I would have mountain-racing legs and would be acclimated to 10,000 feet, so I’d have an advantage in Maine. And I felt like I was on Cloud Nine.”

Appalachian Trail guru Warren Doyle told me that one of Dower’s secrets to success was her consistent speed on the trail. On most days she hiked slower than Sabbe’s pace, he said, but she traversed more total miles. “She put in longer workdays,” Doyle explained Friday, just as Dower neared the North Carolina-Georgia border. “I hope this puts it to rest: It’s not about speed. It’s about endurance. It’s not the Fastest Known Time. It’s the Shortest Known Time.”

In recent years, as the popularity of FKT attempts have grown, corporate sponsorships and larger support crews on trail have become de rigueur. Dower, however, kept her posse small, with only her mother, Debbie Komlo, and a hiker she befriended on the AT in 2019, Megan “Rascal” Wilmarth, joining her the entire time. (Multiple other hikers others paced her or arrived at assorted trailheads to offer help, but they came and went.)

Dower and Wilmarth slept in a Ford Transit van nicknamed “Burly,” while Komlo trailed them in her Dodge Durango. They worked relentlessly to get her in bed by 10 P.M. and up at 3 A.M., feeding her upwards of 10,000 calories each day. They also replenished Dower’s massive snack box of, as Komlo put it, “not a lot of healthy stuff” with Rice Krispies Treats, Twizzlers, Gushers. Four times a day, Dower downed a 320-calorie protein shake.

“At stops, we just shoveled food into her face,” Wilmarth told me. “We’d always have a sit-down meal, but, of course, she wouldn’t sit down.”

What’s more, rather than emblazoning Burly with a corporate logo, the rear window of the van listed the 14 states of the AT, which Dower systematically crossed out as she reached each border. More prominent on the window, though, was a call for , a nonprofit that teaches kids through physical education. When Dower reached Springer Mountain, she’d raised $21,000 of her $20,000 goal for the organization.

I spoke with Dower a half-dozen times during her trek. I rarely got the sense she was frustrated, angry, or even in much pain. She laughed a lot, making jokes about the bugs she swallowed or her struggles with the rains of New England and the resulting sores on her feet. She seemed, more or less, like the same lighthearted person I’d met on trail in 2019: Candy Mama, just with a tougher shell. It was inspiring to witness, really, an old friend realizing new potential without forsaking herself in the process..

Endurance athletes often talk about grinding through our favorite activities, the very things we do for fun. I’m as guilty as anyone of these complaints. But as Dower approached Newfound Gap, at the border between Tennessee and North Carolina, it finally struck me that she had instead chosen to glide through this challenge, and toward this astonishing endurance record. She could, however, probably do without swallowing bugs.

The post This Hiker Just Smashed the Speed Record on the Appalachian Trail appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

I turned down this assignment the first time my editor mentioned it.

Pick the 10 most beautiful hikes in the United States? By this point in my still-brief hiking life, I’ve logged a few cumulative years in tents on trails themselves and in a van at trailheads in all 50 states. But still, I couldn’t imagine the difficulty of selecting 10 that felt the most epic, immersive, stunning, or however it is you want to begin setting the parameters of “beautiful.” In fact, while I’ve had bad days on trail, I’ve rarely encountered a “bad trail,” or one that didn’t change or at least charm me in some way.

And then there was the vainglory of the exercise: No matter how many National Scenic Trails I’ve thru-hiked, day hikes I’ve logged, or summits I’ve reached, there’s always more. My selections remain just a sliver of my individual experience.

But then I thought about the way my favorite hikes—all beautiful, in every sense of the word—had transformed my life. The way the Grand Canyon made me sell my house and move into a van. The way the Pacific Crest Trail made me commit to thru-hiking as a core of my identity. The way that living a few miles from Max Patch in Appalachia made me want to move to still-bigger mountains.

If I could talk about the way these landscapes and walks rewired my brain, and how they might do that for others, I was in. It is, I think, enough to witness nature; it is much more to let its lessons lead you somewhere new. That became my main criteria: the walks that had so many marvels that my insides had to shift to accommodate them.

There were two other criteria, more on the level of logistical details than existential underpinnings. Each of these trails is in the Lower 48, as Hawaii, Alaska, and territories like Guam and Puerto Rico warrant rankings of their own. And none of these spots are secret—that is, hikes that stand to suffer from a sudden explosion in traffic by winding up on such a list. They are the transformative places that sent me in search of bigger adventures, more obscure delights, novel ways to be rearranged.

I’m hoping they do that for you, that—to paraphrase the great Barry Lopez, who would have surely hated a hierarchical list like this—they cause the world to flare up for you, too, with a real sense of wonder.

Black Elk Peak, South Dakota

Length: 7–13 Miles
Duration: One day
Elevation Profile: You’ll almost always be climbing or descending, but the grades are mostly accommodating.
Best Trailhead to Start From: Sylvan Lake Parking Lot
Why We Love It: In a region rich with geologic oddities, this uplifted zone of ancient granite possibly lets you see into five states.
For Fans Of: Learning about difficult history, the idea that there’s more to South Dakota than prairie, skipping Mount Rushmore

If you are an enthusiast of the National Park Service, you’ve probably either been to South Dakota’s Black Hills or added it to your must-see docket. It’s home to six NPS sites, including Mount Rushmore, Wind Cave, and Jewel Cave. The first two are truly under-heralded treasures; the less attention the former gets, the better. But if you skip simply because of its lesser designation, you’re getting the passport stamps but missing one of the country’s best expanses of protected land.

Pristine lakes and idyllic streams, wallowing bison and roaming mountain lions, giant granite spires and a staggering highway: At more than 70,000 acres, Custer State Park could rank as a national park. (I think we could stand to lose the name of a Civil War hero who became a gold-hungry butcher, anyway?) It’s also home to Black Elk Peak, the highest point between the Rocky Mountains one state over and the Pyrenees, one ocean and chunks of two continents away. Far more than a geologic footnote, Black Elk Peak hosts a summit hike that suggests you’re amid an amusement park.

There are a half-dozen ways up Black Elk Peak, via a byzantine network of trails thanks in part to the area’s many managing agencies. The most stunning might be the simplest, too, with an ascent via Sylvan Lake Trail No. 9 and a descent via Little Devil’s Tower No. 4. You’ll work your way through gaps in rock walls, up twisting rock-hewn steps, and over stairwells that feel like Manhattan fire escapes until you reach an architectural marvel of a fire lookout that’s perched atop the mountain like some monstrous castle’s turret. You may believe you’re in a video game.

Named for a Lakota medicine man whose make for indispensable American reading, Black Elk Peak—renamed only in 2016 after commemorating, for more than 150 years, an Army commander who killed Indigenous peoples —is a colossal reminder of our national crimes and the ongoing and necessary quests to correct them. Black Elk Peak is a gateway to the West and questions about it, plus a marvel all its own.

An Easier Alternate: One of my favorite places to swim in South Dakota is Sylvan Lake, where you’ll park to start this hike. If you don’t feel like climbing Black Elk, clamber instead around Sylvan’s rocks.

Coyote Buttes North: The Wave, Arizona

Length: 6–10 Miles
Duration: One day, given you’ve secured a permit
Elevation Profile: You’ll feel the steady and occasionally steep climbs on a sunny day, but there’s nothing too crazy here.
Best Trailhead to Start From: Wire Pass Trailhead
Why We Love It: Within a few miles, you can begin to understand the surreal and surprising intricacies that are so abundant in the Southwest.
For Fans Of: Deep oranges, color-field painting, perfect photos

“The Wave is mostly unknown, except to the cowboys running cattle in that area.” So reads the laminated poster in the Kanab Visitor Center at Utah’s southern edge. Though that may sound like some 19th-century fantasy, the sign actually refers to the 1960s, long before one of the world’s most surreal and sublime sections of sandstone also became one of the country’s most in-demand .

In the decades that followed, guidebooks, foreign documentaries, the 2002 Olympics, and, of course, social media created repeated surges of attention for a pocket of wind-eroded buttes so perfectly contoured and colored they look computer-generated. Four dozen people are now allowed to see The Wave per day, six times the quota when the Bureau of Land Management began issuing permits in the ’80s. I have friends who have applied every month for years to “Coyote Buttes North,” as the zone is called, and they’ve still never seen their dream. I’ve been close, but I haven’t marveled at the masterpiece yet either.

It is tempting, of course, to lampoon fever for The Wave, to see the hubbub as some artificial creation of influencer culture. But in nine relatively easy miles, you can sample the wonders of the Southwest without worry about massive crowds. After moving through an emblematic desert wash, for instance, you cross the pristine tracks of Sauropodomorph dinosaurs (and a tail drag)—“a dinosaur dance floor,” a once called it.

Continue past The Wave, and you’ll find windows around the Melody Arch and a great recessed amphitheater positioned among massive dunes, dubbed The Alcove. In a region so rich with geologic miracles, social media obsession with The Wave may indeed seem myopic, but, permits notwithstanding, it may be the most instant portal to seeking out those other sights for yourself in years to come.

An Easier Alternate: The barrier to The Wave isn’t physical; it’s getting a permit. Space is almost always available in the neighboring zone, Coyote Buttes South, which is nearly as striking as the social media star next door.

The First 30 Miles of the Florida Trail, Florida

Length: 30.6 Miles
Duration: 2–3 Days
Elevation Profile: It’s southern Florida, as flat as a flounder
Best Trailhead to Start From: Oasis Visitor Center, Big Cypress National Preserve
Why We Love It: This adventure will be the stuff of your dreams forever, from nightmares spent escaping an alligator underwater to fantasies where you remember the glory of reaching the interstate and finding a shower.
For Fans Of: Flirting with mortality, asking yourself “What the hell, man?,” grinning like a goof

Very few people believe me when I insist, so I’ll just tell you the truth here as plainly as possible: There are few stretches of trail more gorgeous, mysterious, and outright fun in the U.S. than the southernmost 30 miles of the Florida Trail. That span begins at the Oasis Visitor Center in Big Cypress National Preserve, a 700,000-acre expanse of perpetually murky swamps, enchanting pine glades, and prairies that suggest some sunken-world version of Kansas. It ends as you cross the east-west portion of Interstate 75, so notorious for its wildlife that it’s long been dubbed Alligator Alley.

And yes, that means the first 30 miles of the Florida Trail are full of alligators and water moccasins, softshell turtles and frogs so tiny they look like leaves. If you’re lucky, as I was when I hiked it in the early winter of 2022, you might encounter the long-endangered Florida panther or the invasive Burmese python. I almost forgot to mention that these could all be in or around the brown water through which you will walk.

I get it if you’re terrified, but hang on. As you wade through the swamps of southern Florida following orange blazes that mark the trail markers painted on any available dry surface, you will also be surrounded by wild orchids and air plants so thick you will sometimes need to push them out of the way. They seem to sprout out of the trees themselves, less like epiphytes than some novel chimera. It appears as a flooded Eden.

From time to time, though, you will have the surreal experience of swearing there is a little mountain on the horizon, though this is pancake-flat Florida. It is an oasis, an allusion: Those are cypress domes, rounded mounds of trees that are tallest toward the center, where the water is deepest and where camping doesn’t actually exist. Instead, rest for the night in a hardwood hammock, a stand of trees just above the water line that is, in essence, a tropical forest teeming with life. These 30 miles reinvent ideas not only of what hiking can be but where beauty can exist. Just look out for eyes of alligators and big cats, in or around the water.

An Easier Alternate: Want to see the Florida wildlife without walking in the same water they swim? Head to the Royal Palm Visitor Center in Everglades National Park for the and trails, brief primers on how much Florida fun you can have.

Franconia Ridge Loop, New Hampshire

Length: 9 Miles
Duration: A half-day
Elevation Profile: You’ll have a steep climb followed by a merciful rolling ridge walk and then a big drop back down.
Best Trailhead to Start From: Lafayette Place Campground, Franconia Notch State Park
Why We Love It: This is a welcoming introduction to mountain climbing, to reaching a summit ridge (and some peaks, too), and feeling like the whole world unfurls before you.
For Fans Of: The vague suggestion of danger, the satisfaction of summits, the company of strangers

The axiom of outdoor adventure travel is that it makes us feel small, that it transports us beyond the egotism of our own daily concerns if only for one out-of-body instant. But this happens because, in those moments, we understand just how vast our surroundings are, just how unknowable it all is to us and how unknown our concerns are to it. This sensation is the manna of mountain climbing, a reason that so many of us return to peaks so high and massive the world seems infinite.

There are few places more magical and convenient when it comes to that feeling than New Hampshire’s Franconia Ridge, a thin but very manageable air-bound isthmus of land between a half-dozen 100-million-year-old peaks. Standing on the two-mile runway between Lafayette and Little Haystack, you are three hours from Montreal and two hours from Boston or the New Hampshire coast. From up there, though, the entire world seems like a mountain range, as rich with beauty as the seasonal green or white on each peak’s flanks.

It is no surprise, then, that the loop that climbs to and descends from Franconia Ridge is one of the country’s most popular hikes. Arduous without being technical or terrifying, this trek squeezes a lot of diversity into just nine miles, from the climb through thick forests (where stands of maples and birch give way to spruce and fir) and past one of the White Mountains’ iconic to its descent alongside rushing waterfalls.

But it hinges on the phenomenon of being surrounded by nothing (so much sky!) and everything (so many peaks!) at once that you get after reaching Mount Lafayette’s 5,260-foot summit, then walking through a rare Eastern stretch of alpine tundra. By Colorado’s standards, for instance, that’s much lower than a trailhead for a climb. But in New Hampshire, because of the high latitude and the proximity to coastal weather, it is an accessible taste of how humbling and galvanizing high mountains can be. Caveat emptor: I got addicted to that rush somewhere around there, so proceed with caution.

An Easier Alternate: Seen those “This Car Climbed Mount Washington” bumper stickers? If you’re not feeling a hike, take the scenic Auto Road to its top, but give yourself time to wander around this landmark Eastern summit.

The Grand Canyon: Rim-to-Rim, Arizona

Length: 20–30 Miles
Duration: 1–3 Days
Elevation Profile: Hey, at least the several thousand feet of downhill and uphill on either side are broken up by a nice canyon stroll.
Best Trailhead to Start From: North Kaibab Trailhead, so you can indulge in burgers and beer on the South Rim when you’re done.
Why We Love It: Not only will it be a feat of personal endurance, but it will also change your perception about how dynamic time and space can feel.
For Fans Of: T-shirts that commemorate lifetime achievements, bragging rights at parties, very steep but slow roller coasters

A true story: Less than a decade ago, on a free trip to Sedona, my wife, Tina, and I took a last-minute drive at dawn to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. It was socked in with clouds, so we dropped briefly beneath the rim on South Kaibab Trail, long enough for us both to gaze into what seemed infinite folds of red rock. Two months later, we’d quit our jobs, sold our house, put everything in storage, and moved into a van. That moment with the Grand Canyon turned us into van-dwelling, mountain-climbing thru-hikers, and I’m eternally grateful for that vista. We’ve since crisscrossed the Grand Canyon multiple times; the scale of its wonder only ever increases.

Hiking between the Grand Canyon’s rims opens your mind and rearranges the furniture inside. Intellectually, you confront the reality of deep time, as you move down, along, and up two-billion years of geologic history; to witness the is to understand the pull of mystery, of the unknown. Aesthetically, you are walking in an art installation so vast it is not yet entirely understood and so enchanting we have yet to stop trying; it is like seeing a new detail in your favorite painting, except the canvas has no end, or at least one you cannot see.

And physically, you are moving across a marvel of our world, a gap so big it can be seen from space; to finish it is to realize just how much you can do, even if it’s over the course of several days. In fact, slow down as much as you can, since you could spend a lifetime looking and never be satisfied here.

An Easier Alternate: If you’re short on time or worried that your knees aren’t ready for the rim-to-rim gauntlet, drop from the South Rim to , where, yes, you will probably say that.

Longs Peak: The Keyhole, Colorado

Length: 14 miles
Duration: One day
Elevation Profile: You’re here to go up a legitimately big mountain, so it can get intense.
Best Trailhead to Start From: Longs Peak Trailhead
Why We Love It: Though it should not be your first of Colorado’s 58 14ers, it could well be the one that introduces you to mountain climbing that involves gumption and the thrill of encountering your mortality.
For Fans Of: Geologic features with evocative names, bursts of adrenaline, big pizza rewards

In the continental U.S., just surpass 14,000 feet, the threshold required for that celebrated category of “14ers.” Three-quarters of them are in Colorado, topping out at 14,438 with the gentle slopes of Mount Elbert. Most of these peaks are deep in Colorado, far from the shopping centers and urban bustle of the Front Range. But not Longs: On a bluebird day, Longs and its mammoth neighbor, Meeker, can be seen from Denver. They make better bulwarks of the Colorado skyline than the city’s tallest buildings.

Longs happens to be one of the country’s , too, from the Salvador Dalí-like towers of its Keyboard of the Winds and an imposing face dubbed ‘The Diamond’ to the massive “Notch” that makes it identifiable from many miles away. It is a showcase of geologic forces, a marvel of strange geometry.

And it is entirely , even if you’re rather new to the state sport of 14ers. (But please do not head straight from the airport to climb Longs. Acclimate, and maybe hike a 14er like Quandary first.) Every year, an estimated 15,000 people attempt to climb Longs, the highest point in Rocky Mountain National Park and one of the few places in the park that requires neither a permit nor a fee. Most of the climb is a splendid hike, first through a forest so fragrant it feels as if you’re walking through a candle shop and then across rocky slopes and boulder fields that conjure jungle gyms. (You should start early enough that Boulder’s lights twinkle behind you.)

The fun—and, yes, the danger—start when you cross through the famous Keyhole, following a series of painted bullseyes through the vertiginous Trough and the aptly named Narrows. From the summit, the kingdom of the Front Range is in view, from the Wild Basin below to the Indian Peaks beyond. This is one of the most marvelous places in the U.S. to spend your morning.

An Easier Alternate: If the first four miles and 2,000 feet of the climb up Longs Peak drain you (or if it’s long past sunrise, honestly), stop. Go instead to , the jewel at the base of Long Peak’s gargantuan wall, The Diamond. You won’t be disappointed.

Lost Coast Trail, California

Length: 25 Miles
Duration: 2–4 Days
Elevation Profile: You’ll see steep terrain nearby, but you won’t be climbing too much of it. This is mostly gentle.
Best Trailhead to Start From: Mattole Beach Campground
Why We Love It: In California, some of the country’s best nature has been bent to society’s will; here, engineers just gave up.
For Fans Of: Salt spray kisses, black sand beaches, elephant seal calls

Tell someone you are going to hike on the California coastline, and they’ll likely be confused, picturing beach-ready bodies bounding in and out of the surf as you stroll awkwardly by wearing a backpack. But California’s premier coastal hiking—and, really, one of the best stretches for breathtaking beach walking in the U.S.—is in northern California, in a region so remote and rugged that highway engineers simply gave up on trying to route roads through it: the Lost Coast.

For backpackers, that engineering abdication has been a boon, leading to a 25-mile span of undeveloped beachfront where black bears roam, elephant seals cavort, and tides lash against cliffs and coves with might. This is the Lost Coast Trail, one of the last secluded and most untrammeled places in a state of development dreams.

Only a few miles inland from this gnarled shoreline, King Peak rises almost to 4,100 feet, an impressive height considering the nearby Pacific. In fact, the surrounding is not far from the Mendocino Triple Junction, an offshore intersection of tectonic plates and intense geologic activity that led to the land’s sudden rise from the sea. The Lost Coast Trail moves back and forth from the beaches to the quickly rising shore above it.

Several sections of the hike cling so closely to the walls above that you can pass only when the tide is low, making these miles more about planning than perseverance. Oh, and you’ll need a , too, since the Bureau of Land Management rightfully wants to keep the Lost Coast 
 well, not entirely lost, but at least much less crowded than its counterparts to the south.

An Easier Alternate: If you’re worried about navigating the tides, you can stick to the trail’s middle section only between Sea Lion Gulch and Miller Flat by starting at Kinsey Ridge Trailhead.

Max Patch, North Carolina

Length: 1.5 miles
Duration: 1 Hour
Elevation Profile: You’ll likely stroll right up it, even the few bits that seem steep.
Best Trailhead to Start From: Max Patch Road
Why We Love It: The shortest walk here offers one of the grandest glimpses of Appalachia anywhere.
For Fans Of: Little walks to big views, jokes about Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, lessons in crowd control

There is a strange phenomenon in Southern Appalachia, where both the mountains and the latitude are so low that even the highest peaks, like Mount Mitchell and Clingmans Dome, can sustain trees. But a series of so-called “balds” do not, their rounded tops given over to mountain oat grass and diminutive flowering plants.

There are a half-dozen for why this happens, and balds generally come in two categories—cultural, meaning they were once cleared by people, and ecological, meaning it’s simply nature at work. In either case, balds often offer panoramic views of the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains and Roan Highlands, some of the most pastoral and pleasant ridgelines in North America at any height or distance.

About 250 miles northbound on the Appalachian Trail, Max Patch may be the best; a little loop hike from an oft-overrun parking lot, it is certainly the most accessible. Cleared for grazing long ago, Max Patch is particularly broad, its viewshed letting one peer one way into nearby Tennessee and the squiggles of the ancient French Broad River and the other way to some of the East’s tallest points.

I hesitate to put Max Patch, once practically my backyard, here, because it has been so overrun by revelers in recent years that the National Forest Service has . But the ecosystem has started to recover, a testimonial to good management of places whose demand speaks to their majesty. Go to Max Patch. Marvel at the uninterrupted views. And then leave it for the next person, please.

A Harder Alternate: If you want to experience the sylvan charm of the AT and endure its chronic ups and downs, have someone drop you at Max Patch for the 20-mile trek into Hot Springs, North Carolina. You’ll drop into several gaps and cross gentle Bluff Mountain along the way.

Pacific Crest Trail, California, Oregon, and Washington

Length: 2,655 Miles
Duration: 3–6 Months
Elevation Profile: You will be surprised by how rarely daunting the PCT is as it rolls from one border to the other.
Best Trailhead to Start From: Southern Terminus, Campo, CA.
Why We Love It: Of the country’s three iconic long trails, its reward-to-work ratio is by far the highest, with each day looking like another stunning photo ripped from the pages of a National Geographic calendar
For Fans Of: Looking at your Apple Desktop photos, pretending to be Ansel Adams, putting your life on hold

To call a 2,600-mile, multi-month journey between the borders of the U.S. one of its most beautiful hikes is a cheat, I know; such an endeavor at least seems impossible to many for reasons of practicality and privilege. But mile for mile, no long-distance hike in the nation is easier or more visually rewarding than the Pacific Crest Trail.

For that first compliment, remember that the PCT is so long because its grades are so slight, meaning that you wind around canyons and peaks rather than shoot straight up or into them, as on the Appalachian or Continental Divide trails. If you can walk at a reasonable pace, you can finish the PCT. And especially if you’re headed north, 700 miles of desert (and the occasional mountain) will prepare you for the more daunting stretch that is the Sierra Nevada.

Speaking of the Sierra Nevada, it is the rare mountain range to combine relatively easy hiking, very high elevations, and completely spellbinding sights. To move between the high passes and among the glacial lakes and verdant glades of the Sierra is to be dumbstruck by the same landscape that catalyzed U.S. conservation. This goes for the entire PCT, really, where almost every day feels like you’re walking through a screensaver or a wall calendar.

The Goat Rocks Wilderness and Mount Rainier views in Washington? The Three Sisters and Crater Lakes zones of Oregon? Almost the entirety of California, from the reaches of San Jacinto to Shasta? It’s a stunning journey, the long trail you should do if you have one in you.

An Easier Alternate: Though it’s no piece of cake itself, California’s High Sierra Trail offers a relatively short but incredibly scenic route through the mountain range that is the PCT’s crux.

Teton Crest Trail, Wyoming

Length: 35–40 Miles
Duration: 2–4 Days
Elevation Profile: You’ll encounter occasionally steep climbs out of basins and over passes, but this one is often cruisey.
Best Trailhead to Start From: Phillips Bench Trailhead
Why We Love It: With both an airport and a great mountain town nearby, there may be no better or more accessible way to understand the immersive splendor of the country’s most distinctive peaks.
For Fans Of: Mountains that are sculptural masterpieces, carrying bear spray on your hip, marveling at wildflowers

Since my first climb in Grand Teton National Park nearly a decade ago, I have returned every year for new mountains and fresh hikes with a fanatic’s devotion, as if this were my annual pilgrimage. Still, after all that time, I feel like I haven’t even started to understand the bounty of the place, the marvels it hides in the folds of its mountains or the basins and ridges between them. I often ask myself if, even after a lifetime of visiting, I will still feel the same way about my favorite bit of land in the U.S.? I’m intent on finding out.

There may be no better sampler of the place than the Teton Crest Trail, a masterpiece of a route that winds between the park itself and the Bridger-Teton National Forest. It’s a , which is for the best: You want to have the occasional sense that you have this landscape all to yourself. You’ll probably find yourself longing to return, too.

Despite its name, the Teton Crest doesn’t simply stay high, and you don’t really near the summits of the . Instead, you often stick close to the park’s myriad lakes—Phelps, Marion, Sunset, and so on—and cling to elaborately shaped shelves just above deep canyons. You’ll cruise through Alaska Basin wide-open expanse and many alpine meadows, then climb atop Paintbrush Divide, the trail’s highest point, for gobsmacking views of the Tetons.

It’s not all geology, either, since Wyoming wildflowers are some of the best in the West, clusters of purple and yellow, red and white pushing up from endless seas of bright green grasses. Moose, deer, elk, and, yes, brown and black bears roam the same trail. Few places in the U.S. proclaim the marvels of wilderness more loudly than this grand bit of western Wyoming; this is your avenue to listen and see.

An Easier Alternate: If you want to understand what it’s like to climb at the edge of the Tetons without spending days among them, the uphill haul to gets you closer to them after a five-mile spiral among wildflowers and forests.

Grayson Haver Currin is °żłÜłÙČőŸ±»ć±đ’s hiking columnist and a Triple Crowner. He has logged over 10,000 miles on the U.S.’s National Scenic Trails and countless more on other trails. A North Carolinian who moved into a van with cats, a dog, and his wife, Tina, in 2017, he now lives high among the mountains of Colorado’s Front Range. He is also a music journalist for The New York Times, Pitchfork, NPR, Mojo, GQ, and others, and you can subscribe to his forthcoming newsletter, Out and Back, .

The post The 10 Most Beautiful Hikes in the U.S. appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Snacking is the secret pleasure of backpacking, but it can also feel like the biggest chore. During a day of long miles and steep climbs, calories are as important as the right shoes, the fuel that makes it all possible. But how many Clif Bars, Snickers, Haribos, and peanuts can one human stand? After 10,000 miles, I’ve lost the ability to stomach those hiker standards very often. I forever crave something novel.

So in trail town grocery stores, or when thinking about before a long hike, I’m always on the hunt for a new snack, a new texture or taste that entertains me as I literally move through my day. These additions are mutable, of course, though some have stuck with me, little treats I tell fellow travelers about around the night’s cookpot or when we’re in the aisles together, trying to decide what food we’re putting in our packs for the next several hundred miles.

Below are the five best hiking snacks that I’ve discovered recently, listed chronologically for how I consume them during the day. These are all small businesses to one degree or another, so don’t expect them in a trailside convenience store. You may need to order them online in advance of your hike, or, if you’re lucky enough to have someone mail you supplies from home, have them add it to your tab. Food is a joy of long-distance treks and day hikes alike; here’s what’s providing so much of it for me lately.

no normal’s Coffee Paste

Gummies, powders, gels, bars, and, of course, coffee: If there is a way to transport caffeine on trail, I’ve tried it. Or at least so I thought until a friend sent me a link to coffee, a Zurich startup squeezing ultra-concentrated coffee paste and a touch of beet sugar into a big black metal tube. The strategy, founders Philippe Greinacher and Alexander HĂ€berlin told , stems from Switzerland’s postwar prepper strategy, where innovations with shelf-stable foods were safeguards for potential invasion.

On trail in the Swiss Alps and on the beach in Africa, the pair longed for coffee that tasted better than flakes of the acrid instant stuff and didn’t need much water. They got it right. Though the paste works well dissolved in hot or cold water, I find myself taking tiny sips straight from the tube before an arduous climb or a long haul, the stinging bitterness soon dissolving into a subtle sweetness. It works as a spread, too. , it’s pricier than Folgers Instant but cheaper than the new wave of niche instant brands. And the satisfaction of swilling coffee from a tube in front of strangers? Priceless.

Best Buckin’ Jerky

During my first thru-hike, I had been a vegetarian for a decade. But nearly every account of on-trail nutrition I read referenced the supremacy of jerky as a lightweight vehicle for protein and flavor. So my wife, Tina, and I bought boxes and boxes of vegan jerky, devouring it along the length of the Appalachian Trail with near-religious devotion. It tasted, I must admit now, like salty cardboard, but twice as tough. There have since been remarkable advances in meatless jerky, from to ’s textured soy protein. But I have recently been on a meat jerky tear, trying to find a brand that has the strongest flavors without filling me with preservatives or the dregs of the butcher-shop’s wastebin.

I finally found it in , the rightfully named company of San Antonio meat-curing fiend Joli Phillips. A former spa manager in Santa Fe and catering company owner in Austin, Phillips is on a few parallel missions. First, she wants to buck the notion that jerky is a manly domain. Though her husband, Adam, is a professional chef, he is only her taste-tester.

“This gal doesn’t sit side-saddle,” as her website proclaims. (, too, an organization linking girls with STEM educations.) Second, using specifically chosen and especially lean cuts of beef, she aims to create thin and tender strips of jerky with piquant flavors. Inspired by Ruth’s Chris steakhouse, her Cowgirl flavor melts in your mouth like carpaccio. And loaded with bird’s eye chilis, Phillips’ Khaw Keirl version kicks harder than any jerky I’ve yet to find in a grocery store. I’ll be ordering a box before my thru-hikes this fall, and it will certainly taste better than the cardboard in which it arrives.

ČőłóÄć°ù’s “Original” Trail Mix

Spend long enough on trail, and the G in —that is, good ol’ raisins and peanuts—sublimates into “gross.” As the name implies, that two-ingredient blend is a standby and the basis for with most anything you can imagine, from M&Ms and almonds to peanut butter cups and Beer Nuts. Browsing the grocery store’s trail mix zone, I sometimes get the sense that manufacturers suss out their surpluses and simply dump whatever’s there into bags. I do not get this sense from Peter Rushford, a former pro skier turned gear guru who has spent the past decade trying to find his perfect trail mix, one that balanced salt and sweetness, crunch and chew, nutrition and taste. The quest led to , his Austin-based company that, simply put, makes the best trail mix I’ve ever eaten. And there are no peanuts or raisins.

Instead, his “original” nine-ingredient blend pairs four whole nuts with coconut slivers and three fruits dried just to the point of chewiness—blueberries, cranberries, and incredible . Oh, and there’s chocolate from a 160-year-old San Francisco chocolatier. Rushford was so careful in his quest to create the perfect trail mix that each ingredient sports a , and all the packaging forgoes plastic. As a small company with big ambitions, ČőłóÄć°ù isn’t cheap, but the stuff is potent; I downed a small bag midway during a recent six-summit day, and I had energy to finish the hike without more food.

Honey Mama’s Cocoa Truffle Bars

I have a possibly unhealthy ritual on long trails: Every night, whether tucked into a tent or spread out under the stars, I take a few puffs from a joint, massage my tired legs as deeply as possible, and eat an entire candy bar. The problem, of course, isn’t the puffs; it’s the fact that and are rafts of corn syrup, sugar, and palm or sunflower oil. Maybe that’s not the best for a body that’s walked 30 miles—with plans to repeat it in the morning. I was relieved, then, to stumble upon three years ago on the Pacific Crest Trail. I began lining my food bag with enough of the paper-wrapped wonders to make it to the next town. My ritual feels a bit more reasonable now.

In a previous life, Portland, Oregon, native Christy Goldsby ran a traditional bakery with her family. While helping a friend negotiate a health struggle, though, she began searching for a dessert that didn’t skimp on the indulgence of a cake or brownie but offered up better nutrition. Her truffle bars became a Pacific Northwest hit that have since hit refrigerated shelves nationwide. Always starting with honey and coconut oil, Goldsby makes rich treats with surprising or comforting flavor profiles—tahini and tangerine, for instance, or coconut, pecan, and cocoa. My favorites? Lemon Blueberry and Peanut Butter Cup. Though cooled in the store, they stay soft and safe for several days on trail, giving you the uncanny sense that you’re somehow downing brownie batter in the tent. That’s not just the indica talking, bro.

LMNT’s Chocolate Caramel Hydration Mix, Served Hot

If I stay somewhere swanky on trail, I tend to leave with a half-dozen tea bags, pilfered from the hotel lobby or the breakfast spread. When the weather turns toward winter, I turn into the tent-bound version of the , its living room and red stocking cap swapped for my Dyneema confines and a blaze-orange beanie. You can guess the tea’s upshot: I inevitably crawl out of my cozy lair at least once per night, losing whatever warmth I’d gained. The new play, though, is a packet of LMNT’s , especially formulated to be enjoyed hot. Simply drop it in eight ounces of warm water and swirl. That’s not enough water to send me outside past hiker midnight, and it serves a crucial purpose: replacing some of the day’s electrolytes without giving me a late-night sugar buzz.

LMNT is passionate, above all, about salt. “Stay Salty,” reads one company slogan. Another? “Salty AF.” Cofounder Robb Wolf has even regarding sodium, writing that the link between sodium and blood pressure rests on “conjecture.” LMNT uses three ingredients—salt, potassium citrate from Aspergillus niger, and magnesium malate—to deliver electrolytes in several flavors with less than 10 calories. (If you favor their science but not LMNT’s cost, they offer , too.) The ones meant to be taken hot work as my new nightcap. Drinking salty water with a touch of cocoa powder from a titanium pot? Surprisingly delicious.

The post Move Over, Snickers: These Bougie Trail Snacks Are Our New Faves appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Normally at this time of the year, I am hustling along some absurdly long trail, trying to get from one end of the country to another at three miles per hour. But my wife and hiking partner, Tina, took a new job as a seasonal park ranger this year, meaning our thru-hikes won’t happen until the leaves begin to yellow this fall.

Instead, I committed myself to a series of guided hiking trips in some of the most staggering places in North America—a wonderfully mild British Columbia, an oppressively still Utah, a perfectly green Wyoming. Thus, throughout the summer I have hiked slowly, taking my time through forest-bathing sessions, pausing often for breaks to stand among wildflowers.

In all three cases, I’ve been surrounded by two very different types of people: voluble area experts versed in local geology and ecology, and tourists eager to learn from them. The latter group,Ìę in many cases, cannot wait to go on their first, longest, or most arduous hikes ever. It’s been incredible to see the landscape through their eyes, to watch folks who spend more time behind desks than in the woods realize how endless the wonders can be beyond a laptop screen. My favorite moment of the summer so far remains witnessing an oral surgeon from Boston stare slack-jawed at a moss-clad boulder field near Canada’s Kootenay Lake. “Oh, the color,” he muttered, as if catching his breath.

It’s been instructive, too, to observe novice backpackers attempt it one hiking pole and electrolyte pouch at a time. Most often, they are folks who have written off backpacking for one of a dozen reasons—too hard, too boring, too equipment-oriented, and so on. Walking and talking, I’ve paid attention to the things they loved and hated, that burdened them or made their loads lighter. If you’ve been intimidated by getting into the woods, here are five beginner lessons they’ve taught me while we strolled together through the summer.

Buy a Simple Hiking Bag. Always Keep it Packed and Ready to Go.

During a , a new friend offered a confession about why she didn’t hike in the Bay Area, where she works alongside Strava-obsessed tech bros: She couldn’t share their excitement about gear, about enthusiastically amassing things in a city for a journey into the woods. I couldn’t agree more. Most gear is secondary or even tertiary to getting outside. Sure, the hiking-industrial complex is real and, to an extent, important, forever concocting a better widget for you to take into the wilderness. But the equipment you need to start hiking is pretty minimal—a backpack packed with snacks, water, a rain jacket, a layer or two should the weather change, a simple first aid kit, and maybe a headlamp in case you don’t finish as soon as you expected.

You do not need to buy some outsized Osprey or sleek Hyperlite before you begin. I’ve seen very serious hikers go hundreds of miles in Jansport backpacks. (Ultralight guru is even replicating that classic kids look with his new company, .) So start with whatever spare bag you have around the house or find in a thrift store, keep it loaded with the aforementioned essentials, and go when the time is right. Hiking can and should be simple.

Get a Professional Fitting for Hiking Footwear

Here is a little parable from the outdoor industry. Every so often, a brand invites writers on a trip to try out not only its new gear but also that of companies it considers partners. You arrive at a hotel to find a mountain of stuff to sample. A few weeks back, I joined a coterie for a three-day trek into the Wyoming Range, the wildflowers a riot of summertime splendor. With three miles left, a guide pointed out a rare flower, and I commented on the blessed afternoon breeze. But at that precise moment, one companion was wincing too much to marvel at either. Her new hiking boots—part of this particular junket’s raft of supplies—had made mincemeat of her feet. A blister beneath a toenail popped. Rightfully, she later offered to donate those boots to a local outdoor charity.

Let this be a lesson: Shoes are the one piece of hiking gear on which you should not scrimp. If you finish your first hike with fucked-up feet, why would you go back out? Go to a running store, tell them about your goals and history, and spend as long as it takes to find a pair of shoes that feels great. (NoticeÌęI didn’t say boots. You don’t need boots.) Your feet will swell, so size up slightly. And if you have tender skin, consider toe socks, too. Folks will tell you that a specific brand is best, but that is bollocks. I am a diehard , but I have friends who can’t stand them. Shoes are entirely personal, though having a pair that works for you is the only mandatory hiking universal.

Learn Something About the Region Where You’re Hiking

On the first day of a week-long atop the glorious Colorado Plateau, a guide pointed out a bird flitting between the red rocks and green pinyons of Capitol Reef: “A canyon jay,” she said. It was almost certainly a Woodhouse’s , but I liked that reductive and evocative little name more. We would spend the next several days surrounded by canyons, after all, and the bird’s faint flash of color immediately prompted “jay.” Over the next several days, I heard the phrase dozens of times from the retirees or near-retirees in our group, saying it with a sort of astonishment whenever they saw one fly past. It had become their way into the landscape, a piece of information that made them feel like interpretive park rangers in training. They heard lots about sedimentation, uplift, and erosion, pronghorns, Coues deer, and whiptail lizards. But it was the “canyon jay” that stuck.

When you decide where it is you’re going, learn something specific about the landscape, something you can take with you and look for as you walk. Maybe it’s the name of a bird or plant, some tell-tale sign of glaciation or deposition, or even traces of long-ago human history. When the temperature starts to tax you or your legs get weary, keep these facts in mind and try to spot them on trail to keep you entertained and motivated. A plant or animal identification app—maybe or —can help, but do some research in advance, as if you’re planning to play Punch Buggy with nature.

Ditch the Hydration Bladder and Bring a Bottle

In British Columbia, Utah, and Wyoming, there was one requirement I resented: a water bladder. Whether we were going for a day hike that would last a few hours or headed into the backcountry for several nights, each guide wanted each hiker to strap three liters of water to their back and steadily take sips as we moved. In my experience, it takes time to make water from a new bladder taste like anything other than plastic. Flavor notwithstanding, this is just bad advice. When a water bladder is crammed into your backpack, you have no sense of how much you’ve actually been drinking unless you stop moving and pull the thing out. What’s more, having constant access to that gigantic straw means you don’t take breaks because you can swallow as you stroll. I watched folks, myself included, wrestle with bladders on every outing. At least I didn’t see one burst.

May I suggest, then, the wonderful inconvenience of a few one-liter water bottles? Fill them up before you start, and stuff them in your side pockets or, if you don’t have them, into your bag’s central cavity. It will take practice to get them out and in while still moving, meaning you’ll have to stop and catch your breath from time to time. That’s good. You can also keep easy track of how much you’ve had and ration your water as need be. Unlike bladders, you can mix electrolytes, coffee, or flavors into bottles without creating a potential problem. Unless you’re running trails, bladders are an unnecessary expense too often recommend to beginners for no real reward. Skip them.

When You Stop, Prop Your Hiking Poles Against Something

I put down my hiking poles a few thousand miles ago, since I found that dealing with them distracted me so much from my feet that I tended to fall more. These days, I mostly keep one in my bag for setting up a tent at day’s end and use it on trail only when things get especially gnarly. But as you start hiking, they’re a good idea for balance and support. Extend them until your elbows are at 90 degrees, then lengthen them for downs and shorten them for ups. But for the love of your back and hips, do not throw them on the ground when you take a break. Lean them against a tree or dig their points into the dirt so they remain upright, or so that you do not have to bend over while wearing a pack to get them. This is the simplest way to make your backpacking life less tedious. If we ever hike together, I will pick up your poles so you don’t have to.

Speaking of poles, I learned a new trick on that Wyoming trek. When you stop, simply tuck them behind your back and under your bag at an angle. You’ll create a tripod of sorts, so that the poles rather than your shoulders support the weight of your pack while you’re at rest. There’s going to be a learning curve, of course, meaning the poles will inevitably slip out and fall down. Maybe I’ll be around to grab them.

The post These 5 Tips Will Help New Hikers Thrive on the Trail appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.