What’s your pleasure? Allow us to present our secret instructions on how to plot an escape from your hardwired grind to wide-open adventure. Just in time for spring, plug in to our jammed database of North America’s sweetest getaways, rugged resorts, classic wild places, coolest mountain towns, and the finest riding, climbing, paddling, trekking, and exploring on the continent.

Rock the Red Rocks

Moab, Utah

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Fresh Tracks: You’ll never go wrong on classic Moab mountain-bike rides, like Porcupine Rim and the Slickrock Trail. But for something new, head 11 miles north to the Sovereign Trail, a motorcycle playground that’s recently added 16 miles of sweet singletrack. Spin through a sage-studded landscape, drop off small ledges, blast fast descents, and hammer up heart-pumping climbs. , 435-259-7882
Tower Power: Seventeen miles northeast of Moab, in scenic Castle Valley, 400-foot Castleton Tower is a sharp-angled sandstone monolith offering some of the airiest, hairiest climbing anywhere. Try the four-pitch Kor-Ingalls route (5.9)—one of the best climbs in the U.S. , 435-259-1117
Play the Slots: If slithering through shoulder-wide fissures of copper-colored sandstone, in chest-deep water, after a 50-foot rappel sounds like your kind of fun, head to the Cheesebox Canyon, near Blanding, 80 miles south of Moab. Bring a 100-foot rope and a wetsuit—even in summer—for this chilly eight-hour trip. , 435-259-3317
Rush the Colorado: Fourteen Class IV–V rapids riddle Cataract Canyon, a 17-mile stretch of whitewater just downstream from the junction of the Colorado and Green rivers, a half-hour from downtown Moab. Go in May for the wildest ride, or try July for a toned-down trip. , 800-346-6277
Big Air: will take you to 9,500 feet and let you free-fall for 35 seconds, hurtling—in tandem with an instructor—toward the orange desert deck before pulling the ripcord. 435-259-5867
Go Multisport: Can’t quite settle on one activity? Don’t fret. will hone your rappelling, climbing, mountain-biking, trail-running, night-hiking, and kayaking skills. 970-259-7771

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The , 17 miles north of town, delivers Moab’s only four-diamond accommodations. Enjoy views of the Colorado River to the west and Castleton Tower to the east. Sports massage, a cedar-filled sauna, and spa treatments are available after your four-course organic meal. Doubles, $279; 877-317-8244
Make advance base camp at Beef Basin, 60 miles south of Moab, where you’ll be a five-minute drive from hundreds of crack climbs and 15 minutes from .
Browse books in downtown Moab at the bookstore. 435-259-3330

Wet and Wild Appalachia

Fayetteville, West Virginia

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High Water: With two of the East’s biggest rivers plowing by right outside of town, Fayetteville is a washing machine of whitewater. The New River is a classic standby, offering Class III–V rapids all spring and summer, but Gauley River season—weekends in September and October, when the Summersville Dam releases its gates to create churning Class V+ rapids—is truly something to write home about. , 800-787-3982
Roll On: offers two-day kayaking classes on tamer sections of the New. Beginners and intermediates practice stroke technique and learn to roll, ferry across currents, and nail tricks in Class I–III rapids. 800-950-2585
Will Ride For Views: From the town park, mountain-bike the gentle, wooded 2.8-mile Fayetteville Trail to the head of the seven-mile Cunard-Kaymoor Trail, a semi-technical spin 500 feet up along the edge of the New River Gorge. Or, for more secluded singletrack, explore the developing network of rolling, forested paths surrounding Summersville Lake. Ridge Rider Mountain Bikes, 800-890-2453
Do the New: From one of four free National Park Service campsites set amid maples, poplars, and oaks at the bottom of the Gorge, you’ll be a short drive from more than 1,400 diverse sandstone sport and traditional climbs, known simply as “the New.” Take a stab at Discombobulated, a classic, exposed 5.11 with huge views. , 800-732-5462

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Need a caffeine wake-up call? Head to Cathedral Café, the local river runners’ rendezvous. 304-574-0202
, overlooking the river, cooks up a gourmet buffet with barbecued wild boar ribs and grilled quail. 800-252-7784

Northern Rockies Nirvana

Bozeman, Montana

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The Perfect Angle: About 50 miles of burbling Montana riffles roll between Ennis Lake and Quake Lake, on the Madison River, at such a consistent pace (five miles per hour, to be exact) that even beginner anglers can cast well enough to sucker fat browns and rainbows into swallowing a fly. Float or wade, but be sure to arm your tippet with caddis and salmon flies and yellow Sallies. , 800-227-7127
Spin Cycle: While new-school steepcreekers don body armor to push the limits of runnable whitewater on Big Timber Creek, the Class III rapids on the Gallatin River, near Big Sky, appeal to those who like to paddle without risk of reconstructive surgery. , 800-799-4465
Climbs and Pines: The limestone walls in Gallatin Canyon, 20 miles southwest of Bozeman, tower some 200 feet over spindly spruce and fir and come peppered with hundreds of rock-climbing routes. Test your mettle on the newest batch of sport climbs at Scorched Earth, near Squaw Creek, where you can tinker on the 5.9 Child’s Play before offering up your soul to the 100-foot-long Unholy Act, a 5.11a. Barrel Mountaineering, 406-582-1335
Grind the Divide: One of southwestern Montana’s newest trails, the 23-mile Bangtail Divide singletrack starts with a 40-switchback climb near Bracket Creek; spin the 1,000 feet of vert to the top and you’ll be rewarded with views of the Bridger Mountains, the Gallatins, the Tobacco Roots, and other toothy ranges. Keep your eyes open for bear and moose. Summit Bike & Ski, 406-587-1064
Park and Ride: The most remote spot in the lower 48 sits in southeastern Yellowstone National Park: Saddle up for an 85-mile horsepack trip through this area, the Thorofare district, by crossing the Yellowstone River and riding the meadows on the South Boundary Trail. Cast for trout in the Snake River, watching for grizzlies along the way. , 406-848-9953

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Swing by five-year-old ‘s tasting room Monday through Saturday for a pint of their Bozone Select or Plum St. Porter. 406-585-9142

Pacific Northwest Paradise

Vancouver Island, British Columbia

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Ride the Next North Shore: Remember playing Chutes and Ladders when you were a kid? Welcome to chutes and ladders for grown-ups. Nanaimo and Parksville locals have built the Doumont Trails—high-flying bridges, ladders, and drops that thread pine forests and sluice down needle-blanketed singletrack.
Paddle With Killer Whales: Slip across 54-mile Johnstone Strait and, with luck, you may get within ten feet of the largest orca pod in the world. Rent boats from or go with a guide on a one-to-six-day trip, snapping pics of seals, bald eagles, and humpback whales. 250-756-0094
Walk in Juan’s Footsteps: Fastpack the , a 29-mile shoreside ramble skirting 100-foot waterfalls and tide pools at Botanical Beach. You’ll cross wooden suspension bridges and slip through giant cedar forests, nabbing views of the Strait of Juan de Fuca along the way. 250-391-2300
Get High: Just off Highway 28 near the Campbell River, 19 granite crags—with more than 150 sport and trad routes— surround Crest Lake. Or go ropeless at Sutton Boulders, near Tofino.
Angle for Big’uns: Hook a trophy rainbow or cutthroat at one of a half-dozen inland lakes just 20 minutes by floatplane from Clayoquot Sound, in Tofino. , 888-534-7422

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At , off the west coast of Nootka Island, guests sleep 15 feet up—in a cozy tree house. By day, hit beach and reef breaks with head-high lefts and rights. At night, dine on grilled oysters and salmon kebabs. Doubles, $1,643 per week; 888-895-2011
The is like a safari camp—with Wi-Fi and 300-thread-count sheets. Guests stay in ultra-deluxe canvas tents set deep in the Bedwell River Valley, a jumping-off point for fly-fishing, hiking, and sea kayaking. Doubles, $4,151 for three nights (minimum stay); 888-333-5405
—which began as a giant purple truck plunked in the Tofino Botanical Gardens—serves mushroom enchiladas, cedar-plank salmon, and other “sophisticated bohemian” delights. 250-725-2341

New England High

North Conway, New Hampshire

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White Mountains Classic: With 100 years’ experience operating huts in the Whites, the has perfected the art of wilderness hospitality. Hike a 22-mile stretch of the Appalachian Trail from Pinkham Notch to Crawford Notch, staying in three huts along the way: Madison Spring, Lakes of the Clouds, and Mizpah Spring. You’ll traverse the largest chunk of alpine tundra in the East, and numerous peaks, including Mounts Adams, Jefferson, Washington, Monroe, and Franklin. Huts are rustic, but meals feature fresh bread, homemade soups, and entrées like marinated beef tips. 603-466-2727
Get Wet: Less than a mile south of Pinkham Notch, the smallest cliff jump at Glen Ellis Falls is 20 feet of pure aria. For something tamer, put on your oldest trunks and slide down Franconia Falls’ granite cascades, an hour’s hike off the Kancamagus Scenic Byway.
Sport Central: Rumney, about 50 miles southwest of North Conway, has more than 400 hold-riddled mica-schist sport-climbing routes from 5.4 to 5.14. For longer traditional climbs, like the classic four-pitch 5.6 Thin Air, head to Cathedral and White Horse ledges, outside North Conway. , 603-383-6976
Fleet Feet: Local trail runners are partial to the 32-mile Pemi Loop, in the Pemigewasset Wilderness; for shorter options, try the three-mile Lincoln Woods Trail, which connects to paths through oak, maple, and beech forests.
Go Fat: Moat Mountain’s 25-mile mountain-bike network has everything from logging roads to ridge-tracing singletrack. Overnight at the Forest Service’s Covered Bridge Campground, ten minutes away. 304-465-0508

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The , at Crawford Notch, is one rung cushier than its huts, offering family-style meals, a fully stocked gear room, and easy access to the Whites’ best hikes. Doubles from $135; 603-466-2727
For beer that flows as freely as the smoked barbecue, head to , a climbers’ hangout in North Conway. 603-356-6381
Or spruce up for , in Sugar Hill, where you can dine on maple-glazed salmon with caviar while watching the sun set over the Whites. 800-786-4455

Ultimate Cascades

Hood River, Oregon

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Wave Rave: From June to September, Oregon’s warm eastern desert sucks cool Pacific air through 4,000-foot-high walls to turn the Columbia River Gorge into a world-renowned wind tunnel. Kiteboarders flock to the Hood River Sandbar, where shallow water makes for easy launching. , 541-387-2440
Ski Summer Corn: About three-quarters of the way up Mount Hood, the Palmer Glacier stays open all summer, allowing skiers and snowboarders to carve 1,524 feet of vertical. serves up bloody marys and picture-window views of 10,495-foot Mount Jefferson. 503-622-7979
Gorge Yourself: The first paved road through the Columbia River Gorge lasted from 1922 until 1960, when the interstate made it obsolete. Today, segments of the Historic Columbia River Highway remain open only to hikers and bikers, including the ten miles from Hood River east to Mosier and back. , 800-443-6060
Stump Jump: With its gap jumps, ladders, and teeter-totters, the new Post Canyon stunt park, just west of Hood River, is quickly attracting the freeride mountain-biking set. Want to keep your collarbones? Start out on Family Man, where a biff on lower stunts will likely leave you bruised but not broken. , 541-386-4820
Classic Cascades: Summit 11,235-foot Mount Hood via the Hogsback, the traditional ascent from Timberline Lodge, where some climbers opt to pitch tents for a wind-blasted sleep. Come morning, crampon your way to the summit for views of the Pacific Ring of Fire volcanoes, from Rainier in the north to the Three Sisters in the south. , 503-227-2345
Cast the Chutes: Anglers will find one of the most productive trout streams in the West, where the lower Deschutes River pours cool Cascade runoff into the Columbia. Wander among alder trees and under basalt cliffs to fish for the redside, an endemic rainbow trout. , 509-493-3167

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The 1913 is listed on the National Registry of Historic Places and still maintains its Victorian flare with antique reproductions in its 41 rooms. The Cornerstone Cuisine restaurant’s pomegranate-glazed salmon will do a body good. Ditto the deep-tissue massage at A Salon Day Spa Boutique, just down the street. Doubles, $69–$119; 800-386-1859
Windsurfers and bikers meet over vintage Formica at for shots of Portland–based Stumptown Roasters Coffee. 541-386-4502

Upper Midwest Zest

Traverse City, Michigan

Isle Royal National Park, Michigan

Royal Flush: Isle Royale NP’s untrammeled shore

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Picture Perfect: Along the 42-mile stretch of , glide by 200-foot-high multihued sandstone cliffs rising from the waters of Lake Superior. Dock your boat anywhere you choose on the park’s 73,000 acres of beaches and dunes, then hike through conifer forests to waterfalls and cedar swamps. 906-387-3700
Pedal the Point: Copper Harbor, at the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula, boasts nearly 20 miles of rocky, rooty, hardpacked trails, marked by steep 900-foot climbs and technical descents. Zip through old-growth boreal forests and top out on ridgelines with views of Lake Superior. , 906-289-4303
Ridge Walk: Grab your backpack and hop a ferry or seaplane to Windigo, in Lake Superior’s . Then complete the 40-mile, three-to-five-day Greenstone Ridge trek, crossing 1,394-foot Mount Desor, ancient, 800-foot-thick lava flows, and pine forests where wolves abound. 906-482-0984
Lake Dive: Cold, yes, but also world-class. Lake Superior’s freshwater has preserved ten major shipwrecks off the coast of Isle Royale. Expert divers plunge 170 feet to the Emperor, a 525-foot steel bulk freighter that sank in 1947. Newbies can aim for the America, a passenger steamer that sank in shallow water in 1928. , 651-681-8434
Paddle Power: Boat the lower Montreal River from the Saxon Falls Powerplant, where a 13.8-mile stretch of Class II–III whitewater carves through a 200-foot-deep sandstone gorge. Check conditions by calling 715-893-2213.
Air Up There: Get high at Broneah’s Spode to Pro , in Traverse City, two hours south of the Mackinaw Bridge. Owners Keegan and Matt Myers show you how to arc, spin, and flip at one of 20 spots along a 40-mile stretch of Lake Michigan. 231-392-2212

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Need to decompress? Check in to the , in Treetops Village. Play 18 on one of its five championship golf courses, then head for a eucalyptus steam bath at the spa. Your digs overlook the Pigeon River, where you’ll find top-shelf fly-fishing and mountain biking. Doubles from $129; 989-732-6711
Crowdless and carless—that’s the mantra on Lake Michigan’s , a motor-free, 14,426-acre mega-wilderness accessible only by boat. From base camp, explore 400-foot limestone bluffs populated by bald eagles and endangered piping plovers.

Sonoran Multisport

Tucson, Arizona

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Crux Move: The fabled hideout of the Chiricahua Apache, Cochise Stronghold—a complex of domes and cliffs in the Dragoon Mountains, 80 miles southeast of Tucson—is home to 250-plus traditional and sport-climbing granite routes. Try What’s My Line, a three-pitch 5.6 with chicken-head holds all the way up. , 800-499-8696
The New Must-Do: Bust out your fat tires for a spin on a recently completed 22-mile section of the Arizona Trail. Park at La Sevilla picnic area, in Colossal Cave Mountain Park, 20 miles east of Tucson, and ride south on winding, technical singletrack with views of the Santa Ritas and Empires. , 520-296-9661
Cool Down: “Desert whitewater” isn’t a complete oxymoron. Between February and May, head two and a half hours northeast of Tucson to the Class III–IV Salt River for a two-day run through 2,000-foot-deep Salt River Canyon. , 800-567-6745
Go Avian: The Patagonia–Sonoita Creek Preserve and Patagonia Lake State Park, about 60 miles southeast of Tucson, host more than 300 species of birds, from flycatchers and phoebes to the Montezuma quail. Stop at the Village of Elgin Winery, Sonoita Vineyards, and Callaghan Vineyards to quaff the local vintages.

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Fourteen acres of manicured gardens—including citrus and palm trees—surround the ‘s 1930s adobe lodge and casitas, near the University of Arizona. With its cathedral-ceilinged library and vintage furniture, the lodge is pure class. But it’s also savvy to Tucson’s wilder side, offering free mountain bikes and a concierge to arrange horseback rides. Doubles, $199–$369; 800-933-1093
For classic Tucson burrito-stand fare, try El Guero Canelo, on South 12th.
, on East Speedway, has the city’s best smoothies. 520-321-9666

Blazing a Trail

Why I Want to Walk the Continental Divide

Continental Divide Trail

Divide and Conquer: Split the difference on the CDT across the spine of North America

Each spring, when I drive north from Jackson Hole to fish the Firehole River in Yellowstone National Park, I cross the Continental Divide at three places. There is nothing spectacular about these low mountains west of Yellowstone Lake; nonetheless, each crossing brings a thrill, the sheer dimension of being on the spine of a continent. The melting snowpack in this lodgepole forest will become both the Columbia River, entering the Pacific near Portland, Oregon, and the Mississippi, reaching the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans. One can wander about on the wet pine needles and watch these journeys begin. Doing so rekindles a desire for my own journey: to walk the Continental Divide, all 3,100 miles it, from Canada to Mexico.

Spanning five ecological zones, with diverse flora and fauna—from grizzly bears and dwarf shrews to whitebark pine and mesquite—the Continental Divide Trail (CDT) offers a glimpse of the West as it was when Lewis and Clark tra-versed its wild tracts. It enables us to know the Rockies with the soles of our feet.

The problem is, the trail is only half finished.

In 1978, Congress designated the CDT as part of the , joining America’s other great footpaths, the Appalachian and Pacific Crest trails. But it failed to allocate funds for the CDT’s completion, and though you can now hike beautiful sections through Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, 1,400 miles of the proposed route remain incomplete. The challenge now is to stitch together existing routes with new trails through a patchwork of federal, state, and private ranchland—an effort that depends increasingly on volunteer labor and private donations. (Mariah Media, the company that owns ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø, is a sponsor.) The has a plan to finish the path by 2008.

If the CDT is completed on time, I intend, one early-spring day, to skip the Firehole River and stand on the Mexico border at a point just south of the Big Hatchet Mountains and face north. Then I will take a 3,100-mile walk through the heart of the American West.

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I take a bearing before I drop off the mesa, then descend through long stretches of sandy hills and scattered juniper until I reach good ol’ Jurassic slickrock. Immediately I feel at home. In the distance is the main canyon of the Escalante River. It’s early spring, a quiet day beneath mackerel skies, though the forecast calls for snow. I am heading for a side canyon that ends in a steep, smooth slab of sandstone. I’ve climbed up the 30-foot slab before, but never down. I’m carrying a pack with a week’s supplies, and I am alone.

No one knows where I am, for the simple reason that I don’t know exactly where I’m going. Not knowing is a key ingredient in this game. It allows freedom from order and schedules, from what I expect and what I am obliged to do. I’m not worried about animals or getting lost. Mistakes are another matter—my mind possesses a vast archive of them. I have known dozens of people who have died in the wild, and I’ve had my own close calls with the Fates: from an avalanche to an overly enthusiastic bear to a half-dozen bad climbing falls. All of which provide fertile ground for my imagination, which grows wilder the farther I go into the wilderness, and sweet reason never quite conquers its intrigues.

Soon the Aquarius Plateau, the 10,000-foot-plus highland at the head of Utah’s Escalante drainage, fades behind veils of distant snow. I can barely see the main canyon of the Escalante, so I get the map out, place it on the slickrock, weigh down the corners, and try to take bearings on a rock buttress in the distance, all the while wishing I had brought my reading glasses. As I put on my parka, big, wet flakes spatter the map.

I head northeast through falling snow, across swales of wet rock. As I lose altitude the snow turns to slush, then rain. When I hit the buttress head-on, I’m terribly pleased. Then I reach the slab. It’s soaking wet. I don’t like it. I step onto the slab, canting my ankle so that my foot’s weight will be distributed over the whole pad of sticky rubber on my climbing shoe. I force my heel down—Climbing 101. Then I commit my weight. Step down. “Attend to just this one thing,” I always tell my climbing students back in the Tetons. “Let the rest of the universe be dark.”

I shoulder the pack and head downstream. At dusk I reach the Escalante River. It is low. I camp on a hard, rippled sandbar. I heat water on the stove for soup and tea; I put on more clothes. I set up my MegaMid tent, spread the space blanket, unroll the Therm-a-Rest, fluff the bag. These tasks are comforting, necessities that crowd out the junky monologues in my mind. An archaic order begins to reclaim my life, one based on warmth.

I carry a cup of tea to the river and sit in the dark among the coyote willows. I listen to the riffles and ponder with them yet again Zen master Bassui’s great question: “Who hears?” The nematodes, the leaves, and the minnows go about their business quite oblivious to my complicated world. Indifferent. Soon I will be more like them.

MUCH OF WHAT I HAVE LEARNED about myself I learned alone in the wild. The variety of solo adventures is huge, and so are the rewards, but no matter how you go about it there is always something to be learned.

To be solo and first is to win one of life’s great games. No one will ever trump Messner’s solo ascent, without oxygen, of Everest. No matter how many experts run British Columbia’s Alsek River gorge, they will not attain the respect accorded Walt Blackadar for making the terrifying first descent alone.

Me, I’m not in the Escalante to win prizes or acclaim. I’m just passing through. True, I’m a mountain-climbing guide who’s been doing this sort of thing for 40 years, but everyone has to start somewhere, sometime. The more interesting question is this: What compels you to make your first journey?

For many of us, it’s a book. Near the end of a trip down the Nahanni River in the Northwest Territories 30 years ago, my former wife and I encountered a lone man in a scow. He was beating his way up the braids of the Nahanni above where it joins the Liard River, a place called The Splits. He waved us over to an eddy and rolled a cigarette. He wanted to talk. After a while I asked him if he had read Dangerous River, R. M. Patterson’s great book about his solo trip to the Nahanni in 1927. He took a long draw and blew it out slowly. Then, with a rueful smile, he said, “That book has been the downfall of every man in this country.”

I read Captain Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World when I was growing up in California. It fired my imagination. Then I discovered John Muir’s account of his travels in the Sierra Nevada. When I began to climb, my first hero was a famous Austrian named Hermann Buhl. His book Nanga Parbat Pilgrimage: The Lonely Challenge culminates not just with his solo ascent but with a cold night he spent beneath the summit, at about 26,000 feet, standing on a ledge. Later I came across Bernard Moitessier’s The Long Way. His book gets my vote for the ultimate guide to the solo journey. It chronicles a ten-month sailing voyage one and a half times around the earth, beginning in England and ending in Tahiti. He did not touch land. A participant in the first round-the-world race, the Golden Globe in 1968, he was in the lead heading up the Atlantic when he decided he didn’t want or need to finish. He turned south again for the Cape of Good Hope, and kept on sailing.

Though I have spent at least a year of my life alone in the wild, my extended solo journeys have been few—something I regret. I began in the Wind River Range in Wyoming when I could find no one to accompany me for two weeks of backpacking in September 1973. By the time I headed back to my job teaching philosophy in Chicago, I was addicted. The following summer I explored the White Mountains of western Crete and the island’s long, and then-empty, southwestern coast. In the years that followed I managed trips in northern Pakistan—to Hunza and to the southern valleys of the Hindu Kush. Eventually I moved to a cabin in the Tetons and made solo trips into my new home range and the Gros Ventre Wilderness. For several winters I lived on a remote ranch on the Arizona-Mexico border and wandered the Huachuca and Chiricahua mountains. But most of my solo journeys have been in the Escalante country. For years I have spent my springs there exploring its canyons, one by one.

MY SECOND DAY I PACK UP CAMP and head down the Escalante. The day lacks even a hint of drama. It’s overcast and cold. The options for travel here are limited: wade the river, thrash through willows, climb up and down sandy hills. I decide to thrash in the willows for a while, until I’m flayed, then I start wading in the river. It’s even colder in the water, and I find I’m grumpy, obsessing about an annoying encounter with a friend back home. That’s where my mind is—seething. The great walls around me, somber in their beauty, pass unnoticed.

I camp early, on another rippled sandbar. I’m cold, and fed up with my anger. This is a good sign: The mind is bored with its old machinations. It needs fresh conflict, drama, the torrent of social stimuli that rouses it to activity. I intend to starve it. For the first time, I turn to my journal to record something more than factoids. I begin painting with watercolors and attend to the colors around me. Most of the sandstone can be represented with burnt sienna, but the Navajo caps are buff, and the Wingate walls require Indian red and Venetian red. The interior of a great alcove above me is yellow ocher. The cottonwoods are mostly bare; here and there a few incipient, minty leaves. Soon I am lost in the mixing of colors. The day passes.

The next morning, while wading a long stretch of the river, I begin to sink in sand. On my first trip into this country, in 1963, I sank in quicksand up to my thighs and had to be pulled out by friends. I flail in terror to the nearest bank, where I try to gather my wits. Suddenly my pack seems heavy.

For practical reasons it is now difficult to sustain a solo journey on land. Most of us no longer know how to do it. (Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild is a superb account of how not to do it.) And often we aren’t allowed to. There are NO TRESSPASSING signs. We can’t get a camping permit for more than, say, seven days. We can’t build a fire. We can’t hunt out of season. We can’t keep any fish over 18 inches. And so on.

And there are psychological barriers. The Red Cross tells us not to canoe alone, the Park Service tells us not to go into grizzly country by ourselves, we are not supposed to swim alone, and climbing alone is—ask anybody—crazy. For many, a solo trip is not even an option worth considering. And it’s true that going alone is more dangerous than going with groups. Everything is at stake. But that’s the point: You pay attention. You feel more alive.

Then, too, our social circle doesn’t want us to be alone. Tell your spouse you want to spend a month walking alone in the desert and you face anger and rejection. Live alone in cabins in the mountains, like I did for many years, and you are considered dangerous, untrustworthy, nuts. A potential Unabomber. We have effectively reversed the hermetic practices praised by virtually all religious traditions. We think that instead of bringing wisdom and insight, solitude in the natural world is at best useless, perhaps neurotic, at worst frightening. Even Emerson worried that Thoreau spent too much time alone in the woods.

Don’t get me wrong—I am not a misanthrope. I’ve led many group treks, and I love guiding. But the silence and solitude of going alone deserve a place in every life, and I worry that our facility for solo journeys is vanishing.

THE FOURTH DAY DAWNS COLD and clear. I linger, waiting for the sun to reach my sandbar. I hear my first canyon wren, the canyon country’s hymn. A flock of mountain bluebirds passes through, migrating north. I’m not inclined to move camp, so I don’t.

I lie on my sleeping bag in the sun and muse on what a friend said to me before this trip, during a conversation about solo versus team sports. He said that his son would never succeed in America because he had no interest in playing on an organized team. I took offense. My sole team sport, football, ended just as it was beginning, with a compound-fractured arm.

He pressed his point. Team sports inculcate necessary social values, channel competition, and prepare you for cooperative adult life. “Yeah,” I replied, “a happy life in the hive, like an insect, the drone as hero, or an interminable larval bliss and no metamorphosis to individuality …” He got the message.

I spend my summers working with groups of kids in the mountains. They must give up many things on these ventures—candy, caffeine, music. Music is the most difficult, they say. Silence is hard. They banter going uphill or down. Their counselors urge them to listen to the natural world instead of gossip: “Hear that Clark’s nutcracker?” The kids listen for a moment, then return to talk. Not talking to their friends is boring, they say. “Muir talked to the trees,” I hint. Instantly comes the witty retort: “Muir was probably bipolar.”

For many of them the possibility of being even moderately alone is terrifying. Some will admit they don’t want to be last in a roped party—no one to talk to, no feedback, all that silence, the void below. When I ask a young woman what she associates with the word solitude, she responds, “Solitary confinement.” Poor Thoreau.

I see the ability to be alone in the wild as an achievement, something truly radical that strikes at the root of our increasingly presumptuous levels of socialization. Well, let the drones please their queens; I’m going to have more tea and explore a side canyon. Nothing else to do.

THE FIFTH DAY BRINGS MORE SUN. I pack up and head down-canyon, choosing to climb sand dunes through shadscale and Gambel oak rather than spend more time with the willows. One hill gives me another glimpse of the Aquarius Plateau. Its white mantle seems out of sympathy with the raw, hot colors of these rock walls. I am lower in the canyon now, and after two days of sun there are, I notice, more leaves on the trees. My petty annoyances, worries, and squabbles with friends are gone.

That night I camp above the entrance to Coyote Gulch, the great bow of Stevens Arch glowing in the twilight. I’m struck by how difficult it is to reach this point in space and time and mind—to simply bear witness to the beauty and complexity of the natural world, and to glimpse, however obliquely, a bit of who we might become without an audience. After nearly a week in the Escalante, my world is a mirror that shows what there is when the audience is gone, the performance is over, and I am alone in the way I will be alone when I die. I stroll into Coyote—the friendliest of Escalante canyons—and, for the first time on this trip, see human footprints, though I never see their makers. I camp again. The routines are familiar, no longer tasks. This is my base camp. I’m going to wander up and down the canyon for several more days, look at things and think and write and paint.

Two days later, climbing out of Coyote Gulch above Jacob Hamblin Arch, I wander back onto steep sandstone slabs. The pack is lighter now. So is my mind. Before I step up, I brush the rock with my hand to remove the surface grains of sand, then blow them off, then step up carefully.

I climb on in solitude and silence. Submit to them and you will learn things about yourself that you will not learn in civil society. Would you press on up that lonely wall on Baffin Island or rap back down to base camp? Portage or run the rapids? Sail farther into the high latitudes, seeking wind but risking storm, or hang north, in the doldrums, and read War and Peace again?

You will never know who you truly are until you decide, all by yourself, alone with the world.

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THE JOHN AT 11,600 FEET on the Lower Saddle between the Grand and Middle Tetons in Grand Teton National Park is justly famous for its sublime view. It’s hidden behind a massive boulder on the windward side of what is often an intimidatingly windy col, and it faces southwest—the most frequent direction of storms. There is no roof, and the wooden walls are only slightly higher than your knee. More than once I have occupied this throne in a 60-mile-an-hour wind, squinting at sheets of stinging graupel and dreading the halos of electric fuzz surrounding the bolts that hold together the bombproof edifice. The experience is always…well, gripping.

A park service chopper hoists a honey bucket out of the Tetons.

There is a reason for the absence of a roof: It provides easy access to a toilet that embodies a mindset of convenience that is scarring the Saddle and disturbing its wildness. When the outhouse’s honey buckets are full, the National Park Service removes them by helicopter. In the mid-1970s, when the park began using choppers for the job, there were two flights per summer to carry out the 50-gallon buckets. By the summer of 2001, ten flights were carrying out three 60-gallon barrels. The risk of something going wrong increased proportionally, as did climbers’ complaints about the noise deep within an area that is supposed to be managed as wilderness. Once, during a similar operation in Rocky Mountain National Park, a cable snapped and the bucket dumped some of its load. Needless to say, climbing rangers are not fond of what is scatalogically known as the shit shuttle.
If you add to the Teton john cat holes, rock smearing, and other waste-disposal variations used on the Saddle, the situation, as in many other areas in our national parks, has become a stinking mess. And yet the john represents a bit of tradition at a time when bits of tradition are disappearing at an alarming pace. For teens especially, a snapshot on the throne with most of Idaho in the background is as coveted as a photograph on the summit of the Grand. But with 5,000 climbers camping in a limited spot each summer, something had to change.


In September 2001, Al Read, president of Exum Mountain Guides, put forth a radical policy, one that is gaining support in national parks across the country. In a meeting with Grand Teton officials, he suggested that everyone be responsible for packing their own excrement off the Lower Saddle. (Read says he made his decision based on “Leave No Trace” ethical and aesthetic reasons. But I also think the stench that wafts over the place on the long dog-day afternoons of August influenced my old friend.) The park agreed, and over the winter it considered various waste-disposal systems before deciding on RESTOP 2, an affair involving a zip-sealing plastic bag loaded with polymers and enzymes that rapidly convert solid waste into an odorless gel.


This year is a transition between the old ways and the new on the Grand Teton. Both Exum and Jackson Hole Mountain Guides require clients to use RESTOP 2. And what will become of the storied Teton john? The old two-holer behind the boulder will still be an option for non-guided climbers, at least for the near future.


The interesting question is why it’s taking mountaineers so long to get their shit together, as it were. How many years have we spent tiptoeing in the dark through fields of desiccated turds along, say, the Baltoro, or around base camps at nearly every important mountain in the world? Are we finally facing the reductio ad absurdum of the dirt-bag ethic, or are these dung-filled wastes simply another example of self-interest versus a more tiresome greater good? Many popular alpine areas have been desecrated to the point of being vile, and no one seems to care. Although I will miss the old john on the Lower Saddle, if and when it goes, I will not miss the deafening helicopter in the wilderness—or the stench of those dog-day afternoons.

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Since the bathhouse near the cabin where I live in Wyoming is closed for the winter, I haul cold water every day from the creek. The water must be heated for bathing and washing dishes, the stove requires wood, the rounds must be split, and the splitting makes you intimate with an eight-pound maul. Few things calm the mind like an hour with an eight-pound maul.

“The Tetons and the Snake River” (1942) by Ansel Adams

Around me is the ever-changing sky and the Teton Range, the mountains I love most. The rut is in full force. The bulls bugle, the cows answer with their little barks. The pronghorn are gathering for their journey back to the Green River. Geese and eagles are heading south. Three black bears have pestered me for a week; one of them was enthusiastic about pepper spray and kept coming back for more—two canisters' worth. The trout refuse every fly I've ever heard of. A friend got his elk on the first day of the season. It snowed for the first time since June, a storm I call the Winnebago because it sends all the RV folks south for the winter.
If there is fear around me in the wake of the terrorist attacks, it is not so much the fear of bombs or germs as the fear of a collapse of civil order. As a person primed by a diet of Richard Preston's The Hot Zone and The Cobra Event, and Stephen King's apocalyptic The Stand, I bought extra ammo for my sweet-shooting .270 rifle and my grandfather's 12-gauge. Batteries. Extra fuel for the chainsaw. A spare chain.

People have started doing strange things. A friend who traps deer mice with a Havahart trap talked to me about purchasing a 9-millimeter Glock pistol. There were reports of telephone calls from people in cities wanting to know if Jackson Hole was safe. At the stores in Jackson, part of the standard chitchat has become how safe Wyoming seems, especially if you come from a place where the population density is 24,000 people per square mile.

Despite setbacks in Somalia and Vietnam, we have endured and celebrated many victories—World War I, World War II, the Berlin Wall, the demise of the evil empire—but our historical trajectory now seems headed into a worrisome labyrinth. So some people smoke more, some drink more, some decide not to get divorced after all, some start going to church again, some just watch it all happening on television. And some, like me, go into the wilderness.
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I've always gone into the wild during trying times. When I was a kid, I would hunt and fish near my home in Oceanside, California; later, I'd take long solo trips climbing or on snowshoes into the mountains of Colorado. During the midseventies I spent over a year in northern Pakistan, much of it in the mountains along its border with Afghanistan. I was an unhappy academic in Chicago enduring the remains of a broken marriage, and my home wilderness in Wyoming and Utah seemed insufficient to my needs. When the adventure outfitter Mountain Travel offered me an opportunity to help lead a trek to K2 in Pakistan in June of 1975, I went. Afterward I turned west and spent the rest of the summer traveling in the Hindu Kush, a place I told myself was real wilderness, the kind that could soothe a battered heart.

I visited Hunza. I wandered west from Gilgit to Yasin, then north into the mountains along the Wakhan corridor, the narrow sliver of Afghanistan that leads to the border with China and is adjacent to Tajikistan. Then I walked and rode jeeps south down the Yarkhun and Mastuj Rivers to Chitral, and on to the dreary town of Drosh, and then back up into the mountains to Malakand and by bus to Peshawar. Beyond Drosh the river plunged down a valley into Afghanistan and became the Konar, which in roughly a hundred miles joined the Kabul River near the then-obscure town of Jalalabad.
The land was like Death Valley, but higher. Vast mirages covered the valleys. The passes were sometimes 15,000 feet high, broad saddles veined with ancient trails. The mountains rose another mile or two but were often obscured by dust storms. The only trees in the high mountains were dwarfed birch.

The border with Afghanistan was guarded by soldiers, but their presence back then was merely symbolic. The guard station at the top of the Yarkhun Valley consisted of two men, one horse, a flintlock rifle, and a hand-cranked radio. One of them was reading—somewhat optimistically, I thought—a volume of Rommel's letters. In broken English he railed at us about American support for Israel at a time when “the Jewish infidels” had invaded Uganda. Uganda? He insisted on it, pointing to his radio. When I reached Islamabad, I learned of the commando raid at Entebbe.

The people inhabiting the villages in the northernmost valleys of Pakistan were farmers, masterly irrigators who were invariably kind and helpful. Some of the older village leaders had been educated at English schools at Srinagar, in Kashmir, before the partition of Pakistan from India in 1947. They wore Harris Tweed coats over their flowing Pakistani clothes, and several smoked English pipes. They hunted with modern British and German rifles. Occasionally they would show off fine markhor horns, a snow leopard skin, or an ancient scimitar.

At their invitation my groups and I often ate yogurt and paper-thin chapatis off silver platters arranged on old carpets spread on lawns beneath mulberry and apricot trees. Their tone was one of interest and amusement that Americans would come so far. For what? Just to look? To find what? Wilderness? They did not know that word. Beauty they understood, but it was faraway, in the cities, the beauty of fine mosques, mosaics, carpets.

And indeed it was not wilderness, it was their home. Much of the land was like what Thoreau, in The Maine Woods, called wild pastures, a blank on the map with few roads and little population but lined with trails and munched on by goats for thousands of years. The forests were logged to the point that many valleys looked like they'd been clear-cut. The game, especially predators, had been hunted almost to extinction. Nowhere did I find the carpets of flowers, the crystalline streams, or the concentrations of wildlife I so loved in Wyoming. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, refugees poured over the passes and up the Konar River into Pakistan. Trekking and climbing along the border came to a virtual halt. Eventually, I came home.
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A few years later I settled into guiding for the Moose, Wyoming-based Exum Mountain Guides and was living in a cabin in Grand Teton National Park. It had suffered the same fate as the valleys of the Hindu Kush, although here the damage was limited to a hundred years of grazing. Sheep chewed their way through the Wind Rivers and the west side of the Teton Range; cows did the same in the Escalante, the Gros Ventre, and the east side of the Teton Range. But with the creation of national parks and the Wilderness Act, the land and its diversity, for the most part, had come back.

I became less concerned with the new and novel and more concerned with attaining an intimacy with what was at hand, in my home wilderness. I wanted a haven, my own safe place, thoroughly known and loved, however vast and empty—a place removed, as it were, from human history and its vicissitudes. I thought about my nation's foreign-policy record of oscillation between engagement and escape, commitment and separation, and of my own struggle, of how much, or how little, to engage with the world.
I was in search of places that were indifferent to the incessant march of human foible, the unending political squabbles, the putative reality presented each moment by CNN. And yet, I soon discovered, there is no escape. The truth expressed by Muir and Leopold and ecology, by modern physics and Buddhism—that everything is connected—is unrelenting. After the tragedies of September 11, we are almost unbearably conscious that remote forces, of which we are only marginally aware, might suddenly determine our fate, the fate of our families, the fate of our friends. And being far from human tragedy is comforting only if you maintain a rather solipsistic stance toward the well-being of those you love.

When the planes flew into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, a friend's son was in Kazakhstan working on a thesis in geology; another friend's son was in charge of a Navy SEAL team; another friend was flying from Boston to Montana that morning and was grounded in Michigan. Like virtually everyone else in America, my friends and family live far away—in Washington, D.C., Seattle, California, Utah, Colorado, and Hawaii—and there is no escape for any of us. Still, I believe that living in a meadow in the Tetons had a certain advantage on that sad day and in the sad days that followed. I have no television and my modem is too slow to run videos, so it wasn't possible for me to watch the interminable replay of footage that feeds our addiction to tragic events. I wanted to shed those images instead of magnifying them; to be informed, not inured. The means to do that was near and known. I went to the wild places I have gone to for 40 years.

I went up the Gros Ventre River and into the wilderness, walking up the stream where I caught my first Wyoming cutthroat many years ago. I said I was looking for hatches, but mainly I was throwing sticks in the creek for my dog and wondering what my heroes, the hermit monks and poets of ancient China, would have done about anthrax and the Taliban. They lived in a time of great strife: a civil war, the suppression of Buddhist monasteries and practice. What did they write about?

I climb the road to Cold Mountain,
the road to Cold Mountain that never ends.
The valleys are long and strewn with stones,
the streams broad and banked with thick grass.
Moss is slippery, though no rain has fallen;
pines sigh, but it isn't the wind.
Who can break from the snares of the world
and sit with me among the white clouds?
ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý—Han-Shan

Wang Wei wrote a book he titled Laughing Lost in the Mountains. Whenever I get too serious I like to remember that title. I was rather lost myself by the creek in the Gros Ventre when suddenly a shadow passed over me and tore down my little valley faster than any bird could fly, ever. Then the blast, shattering and implacable. As the dim glow of the afterburners disappeared over Lavender Ridge, my wild valley transmuted into a landscape out of Top Gun.
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The vice-president and his retinue had arrived in Jackson Hole aboard Air Force Two, accompanied by helicopters, squads of Secret Service agents, and jets to patrol the airspace around town. And patrol it they did: around and around all day and night and all day again. But I still had a slew of other places to go, my collection of havens.

My mate and I went to the Green River Lakes in Bridger-Teton National Forest with our dog, paints, and books. We loaded the canoe and paddled up the first lake, then waded and hauled the canoe up the creek toward the second lake. It was so shallow I was stepping on sculpins. Two men with horses had a camp at the other end of the lake, but they left just after we arrived. We set up our tent and drank hot toddies on the sandy shore and watched the light fade from the great cliffs surrounding the summit of Square Top. We didn't come home for two days.
And soon I left again. I walked alone up the lower face of Teewinot, the Teton peak that rises just west of my cabin, across the meadow. I followed an old climbers' trail, unsigned, unmarked on the maps. It leads over talus and avalanche debris and onto a broad ridge. I paused at the waterfall just off the trail, a place I always visit. Just a trickle now. Then I climbed into the forest until I reached the first whitebark pines—my favorite trees. I settled there and looked around.

Things have changed since September 11, we've heard it said, again and again. Yes, and we are all obliged to speak and act in this newly dangerous world. But at the same time, I find a measure of relief in the things that haven't changed: the geese that fly south in the autumn, the fir that resists the maul, the winter that has arrived, and the spring to come. I can see a hundred miles of open spaces, mountains and rivers I know and love. The only sound now is the caw of a Clark's nutcracker.
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