The Top 9 New England ���ϳԹ���s

Most serious adventurers think of the Northeast as a good place to catch a connecting flight. Which means they’re missing out. From Class IV rafting to some of the wildest sea kayaking in North America, here are the best trips on the right coast.

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The Best East Coast ���ϳԹ���s: Mountain Biking

East Burke, Vermont

The most extensive network of mountain-bike trails in the Northeast sits in the backyard of East Burke, a tiny village in Vermont’s wild Northeast Kingdom. Cross-country is king here: the well-maintained Kingdom Trails roll across green pastures and ascend ridgetop pine forests; easy doubletrack passes by farmhouses to link up with steep singletrack barely wider than your handlebars. Each piste in the 100-mile maze is named, mapped, and rated by the non-profit . Set out from one of multiple entry points ($15 fee), and ride flowing singletrack like the iconic Sidewinder—a beautifully sculpted trail that twists between 100-foot-high walls. Experts: try the combo of Upper J Bar to Burn ’em Down (accessible via the toll road on Burke Mountain) for a 2,300-foot descent. If that’s not enough, head to the local ski hill: added lift-accessed riding in 2010 ($30), with a high-speed quad that drops riders into flowing intermediate runs like Jester and double-black affairs like Knightslayer. Which, by the way, is also the name of a killer stout at Trout River Brewing Company in nearby Lyndonville. Pick up a rental at (hardtails, $30; full-suspension, $60) and crash at the , which has out-the-door trail access (doubles, $155).

The Best East Coast ���ϳԹ���s: Canoe Touring

Adirondack north country, New York

We wouldn’t recommend tackling the entire Northern Forest Canoe Trail, a 740-mile inland water route crossing New York, Vermont, Quebec, New Hampshire, and Maine. A through-paddle of the whole beast—originally a network of Native American trading routes that was mapped in 2006 by a non-profit group of paddlers—requires 55 miles of portages. But for a three-day canoe trip in the lower 48, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything better than the 42-mile segment from the town of Long Lake, New York, to the village of Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. This chunk, on the route of the annual Adirondack Canoe Classic, is accessible and user-friendly, with two portages and a set of locks as it traces Long Lake, the Raquette River, and the three Saranac Lakes. And the sense of wilderness is profound: once you put in, there’s just the densely forested beauty of the ’Dacks, with the High Peaks rising to the east. Lean-tos are scattered along the route. Get maps from , and rent your boat—and arrange a shuttle back to Long Lake—from Lake Clear-based (rentals from $35 per day; shuttle, from $125). Before putting in, treat yourself to a night at the on Long Lake (doubles, $120).

The Best East Coast ���ϳԹ���s: Sea Kayaking

Cape Chignecto Provincial Park, Nova Scotia

Paddlers on this side of the Mississippi usually make for the rugged coast of Maine. Which is fine if you haven’t been spoiled by Nova Scotia. Cape Chignecto, about four hours north of the Maine-New Brunswick border, offers the kind of stuff you can’t even find in British Columbia: 600-foot sea cliffs, wild rock formations, and, of course, the mercurial Bay of Fundy. The bay can get extreme, with 40-foot tides, but Chignecto is actually fairly benign. “It’s not inherently difficult to paddle here,” says guide Scott Cunningha, author of Sea Kayaking in Nova Scotia. “It’s just that conditions can change so quickly.” Which is why you want a guide on your first outing. Cunningham takes novices and experts alike on four-day trips from Red Rocks, near the town of West Advocate, to Spicers Cove. On the way, you’ll paddle down winding channels where harbor seals line the rocky ledges, over basalt reefs, under towering spires, and through sculpted caves near the remnants of 18th-century boatbuilding operations (four-day trips, including gear, $895). At trip’s end, recover at the (doubles, US$97), a converted lightkeeper’s residence near the put-in.

The Best East Coast ���ϳԹ���s: Road Biking

Northampton, Massachusetts

Most cycling outfitters steer you toward Vermont’s country lanes, but western Massachusetts has a much denser network of roads, meaning more choices and less traffic. Base yourself at the downtown (doubles, $196), and get rentals from (Cannondales available for $35 per day). Then pick from flat routes along the Connecticut River, a rolling century around Quabbin Reservoir, or farm-road rides that climb into the Berkshires—all of which will leave you wondering: Where are the cars? If you’ve got time for only one big ride, make it a 66-miler recommended by Patrick Brady, a cycling journalist and part-time guide. Head west out of Northampton on Route 143, turn south on Route 112, and head back to town on Route 66. Grab a fresh peach at Outlook Farm before a gentle descent into Northampton. Tip: don’t freak out if your paved road turns to dirt. The unpaved routes are super smooth around here; in fact, an annual 65-mile group ride called the , Massachusetts’ answer to Italy’s famed Gran Fondo rides, includes 20 miles of dirt.

The Best East Coast ���ϳԹ���s: Stand-Up Paddleboarding

Acadia National Park, Maine

has crowds, sure—but it also provides access and options that can’t be beat anywhere on the East Coast. Base yourself in Bar Harbor, entry point for the 35,000-acre park, where there’s always someplace that’s downwind, sheltered, or at least out of the fog to paddle. Get a room at the on the water in Bar Harbor (doubles, $279) and rent a board and—if you need it—a guide from (daylong rentals, $60; guided trips from $65). Warm up with a mellow cruise down Long Pond, located on the west side of the park (seven-day pass, $20). Day two: Take on dramatic, fjordlike Somes Sound. Launch in the village of Somesville, paddle 3.5 miles south to Valley Cove, then hang out and watch the falcons until the wind starts to funnel through the sound. Then rip a downwind return back to town. Day three: Opt for a sailboat-supported exploration of the rugged Porcupine Islands. For $55 per person, Thorfinn will send a 30-foot boat to accompany you on the two-mile paddle across Frenchman Bay. After gliding around the Porcupines beneath 100-foot cliffs, hop a ride back on the boat.

The Best East Coast ���ϳԹ���s: Fly-Fishing

Montauk, New York

For sheer density of fish, no place rivals Montauk during blitz season, from late August to November. That’s when huge schools of striped bass flood Montauk Point in search of the tiny bay anchovies that turn the water a swirling chocolate brown. During the blitz, just about every striper in the Northeast shows up to feast on the baitfish. Large schools of fishermen follow—locals surfcasting from shore and visitors working the action from guide boats. The only etiquette you need to know: boaters don’t encroach upon the range of the surfcasters. Whether you set up on shore or in a boat, bring a ten-weight rod, a reel with strong drag, and a bunch of anchovy-imitating flies. Then let ’er rip. “If you can get your fly out of the boat, you can catch fish,” says Captain Paul Dixon, a who started fishing the blitz 20 years ago (daylong trips, $650). You’re allowed one keeper (28-plus inches) a day, which the chef at Gurney’s Inn, a waterfront hotel and spa (doubles, $420; gurneysinn.com), will cook up for you. To go on your own, pick up flies and leaders from . Boat rentals are available at ($170 per day for a 16-foot dinghy).

The Best East Coast ���ϳԹ���s: Peak Bagging

Presidential Range, New Hampshire

Your buddy from Boulder might scoff at the elevations, but the Presidential Traverse in New Hampshire’s White Mountains is a serious project. The whole enchilada consists of 24 miles, 10 peaks, and 9,000 feet of elevation gain. Plus there’s the unpredictable weather above the tree line, where you’ll be for 11 of those 24 miles. The wind can get nasty (gusts up to 90 miles per hour), clouds can gather, and a warm day in the lower woods can turn bone-chilling up high. Purists maintain that the traverse should be done in a single day. But it’s a lot more pleasant if you take two or three, staying at the ’s cozy backcountry huts, which supply bunk beds and hearty meals prepared by bandanna-sporting seasonal workers (reserve a hut in advance; from $120). The best route is north-south—that way you get the most brutal peaks, like 6,288-foot Mount Washington, out of the way first. Start at the Appalachia trailhead on U.S. Route 2 and end with a hot meal and a shower at AMC’s Highland Center Lodge at Crawford Notch (bunks, $103), then catch the daily shuttle back to your car. In between, you’ll have 130-mile vistas.

The Best East Coast ���ϳԹ���s: Rafting

Kennebec River, Maine

In the fall, when many rivers are reduced to a trickle, the Kennebec is still churning Class IV whitewater through a steep-walled granite gorge in remote western Maine. This makes for what’s arguably the wildest and most consistent river trip in the Northeast, with no signs of civilization anywhere on the 12-mile run. True, the Kennebec owes its late-season flow to releases from the Harris Station dam, but there’s a big upside. Several times a year—including this September 8 and 22—the dam’s operators double the flow to 8,000 cubic feet per second. “We suddenly get big, curling-back standing waves 10 to 12 feet high,” says Northern Outdoors president Russell Walters. “You just don’t see that kind of thing in inland rivers in the middle of September.” The one-day trip is a roller-coaster anytime you run it—look out for the Three Sisters and Maytag rapids—though it mellows out after the upper gorge, where you can swim or paddle inflatable duckies down the Class II sections. In addition to day trips ($79), runs a lodge, cabins, and a brewery below the takeout on the Lower Kennebec (doubles at the Forks Resort Center, $105).

The Best East Coast ���ϳԹ���s: Hot Links

Moosehead Lake, Maine

This summer the venerable Appalachian Mountain Club is trotting out an 8.9-mile lodge-to-lodge hiking route near Moosehead Lake, Maine. Thanks to a brand-new connector trail, hikers can leave (opened in 2011) and hike north to Little Lyford Lodge. Both offer bunkhouse rooms, cabins, showers, and full meal plans. But the draw is what lies between. That’s Gulf Hagas, the narrow, 400-feet-deep slate canyon of the West Branch of the Pleasant River, and it’s full of waterfalls, rapids, chutes, and swimming holes. Other recommended detours from the lodges: the great north-woods views atop Chairback Mountain, Indian Mountain, and Laurie’s Ledge; the wild brook trout fishing near Little Lyford; and the pond paddling right out the back door of Gorman Chairback. Gratis canoes are available on-site. Lodges from $80.

The post The Big East appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

By Robert Earle Howells




By Meg Lukens Noonan




By Nick Heil




By Granville Green


PLUS: Resorts for all reasons-great hideaways on , , .

Tierra Secreta

Where do Mexicans vacation? Among the snowcapped volcanoes, frothy rivers, and mysterious ruins of Veracruz—gringo-free…for now

veracruz mexico rio bobos

I DIDN’T COME TO VERACRUZ as a tourist—but, hey, what American does? The economy of Mexico’s third-most-populous state, which curves between the rugged eastern Sierra Madre and a 425-mile coastline on the Gulf of Mexico, is driven not by gringo hordes but by a gaggle of tropical crops—from sugarcane in the sweltering lowlands to coffee in the mist-shrouded mountains—and a significant chunk of the nation’s oil reserves.


Which is why, after nearly a year living in the state capital, Xalapa, I’m wearing an impish Dr. Evil smile. I know the big secret: For the adventurous traveler, Veracruz is a find, its wonders known to Mexicans but mysterious to most outside the country. Hike a trail, climb a mountain, or paddle a river here and your comrades, if any, will be vacationers hailing from Mexico City or Puebla.


Wherever I go—from a raft on the burly Río Bobos, threading the state’s western mountains, to a lost stretch of the Costa Esmeralda beach north of the city of Veracruz—I’m always one of the very few norteamericanos around, if not the only one. So dust off your traveler’s Spanish and come south to Mexico’s travel frontier to enjoy these essential attractions of Veracruz; when you get back, your friends will want to know what the hell you’re grinning about.


:: RÍO BOBOS

A 40-square-mile preserve, Filo-Bobos marks the confluence of whitewater and history. Here, the thrill-inducing Bobos and six intriguingly mysterious archaeological sites, including Vega de la Peña and El Cuajilote (both abandoned after 1200), share a verdant valley.


The Río Bobos rapids are Class II–III during the dry season but work themselves up to memorable Class IV–V in September and October. The river’s upper section has sheer limestone walls, while the lower stretch winds past orange and banana groves and the omnipresent bougainvillea in rich purples, magentas, and oranges.

Trinidad’s Tropical Blend

Fierce jungle and tame beach mingle

Bonaire

Bonaire-Style Bliss

IT’S MORE THAN JUST STANDARD island-time slo-mo that turns a one-hour mountain-bike ride through the scrubby outback of Bonaire’s north end into an all-morning affair. It’s the exuberance and knowledge of your guide, naturalist Jerry Ligon, and the profusion of the weird and wonderful on this 24-mile-long, boomerang-shaped island in the southern Caribbean that keeps the pace many notches below breakneck. There’s just so much worth stopping for: the whiptail lizards darting across the rocky trail, the dusty-gray feral donkeys picking their way around giant kadushi cactuses. There are castor bean pods to pop, yellow-shouldered parrots to listen for, plump aloe leaves to palpate. Ligon has a story for nearly everything you see, and it becomes clear that he doesn’t merely hope you learn a thing or two on this outing; he wants you to fall deeply, madly in love. No need to work so hard, Jerry, you feel like saying. You were gone on the place an hour ago.

About 50 miles off the coast of Venezuela, Bonaire is the “B” in the “ABC islands” of the Netherlands Antilles—along with Aruba, known for its long white beaches and accompanying strip of hotels and casinos, and Curaçao, with its busy international port. Bonaire is the least developed and, with just 13,000 residents, the least populated of the three.

The mostly flat, semi-arid island has few natural beaches, so it may not fit conventional fantasies of the perfect tropical isle, but after a few days you’ll very likely be rewriting your definition of paradise. The day-in, day-out sunshine, the cooling trade winds, the limpid 80-degree water, and the painted-dollhouse Dutch-Caribbean architecture of tiny downtown Kralendijk—not to mention the way local brew Amstel Bright tastes, very cold, with a slice of lime, after a long bike ride—are more than enough to win you over. Add to that the island’s ahead-of-its-time commitment to environmental preservation and its warm, welcoming, ethnically diverse population—including native islanders (descended from Arawak Indians or African slaves), Dutch transplants, and American and Venezuelan expats—and you, too, may find yourself thinking that swaying palms and thundering waterfalls are way, way overrated.

Bonaire’s unique charms have long been known to scuba divers, who consistently rank it among the best destinations in the world. More than half of the island’s 87 marked dive sites are accessible from shore. So plentiful and diverse is the marine life that it’s possible for a fish freak to log a dream “century”—identifying 100 species during a one-tank dive. The vitality of the reefs owes much to the creation, in 1979, of the Bonaire National Marine Park, which prohibits commercial fishing, anchoring, or collecting anything—dead or alive—in the waters around the island.

On the leeward coast is a string of low-key scuba-focused resorts, including the well-regarded Buddy Dive Resort, which has sunny, balconied rooms and spacious apartments on the edge of a coral bluff. The place to stay, though, if you want a less diving-intensive environment and can splurge a bit, is the Harbour Village Beach Club, set on a peninsula at the entrance to a small but lively harbor. The cluster of artfully landscaped ocher-colored Spanish-Dutch colonial villas, which recently underwent a $4.5 million renovation, are decorated plantation style, with teak furniture and tile floors; some have patios with hammocks overlooking a powdery, big-for-Bonaire beach and the nearby uninhabited isle of Klein Bonaire. The beach club has a new full-service spa, a pretty swimming pool, an open-to-the-breezes bar positioned perfectly for sunset cocktails, and, just off the beach, the wreck of a 60-foot merchant ship to explore.

As good as the diving is, though, you’d be missing the soul of Bonaire if you didn’t spend some time topside. Hike and bike the island’s dramatic north, including the black- and red-rock wilds of Washington Slagbaai National Park, and stop to see one of the few flamingo breeding grounds in the world at a nearby lake called Goto Meer. Head south to the flatlands and past the salt pans to the ridiculously blue, 1.5-square-mile Lac Bay and some of the best windsurfing conditions in the Caribbean. You can rent a board or take lessons at one of two windsurf centers on Sorobon Beach—or hang out and watch the amazing “Bonaire Kids,” a group of young local hotshots who clean up on the international freestyle circuit.

Lac Bay is also famous for its Sunday-afternoon parties. Every week, locals and visitors gather at Lac Cai, amid mounds of sun-bleached conch shells, to picnic, swim, drink, and dance to bands playing the kind of island music irresistible to even the most rhythm-challenged. When the shadows get longer and the bay begins to turn silver, look up; you may see a line of carnation-pink flamingos, made pinker by the setting sun, heading toward South America in search of dinner. Now, really, who needs lush?

Dominica At Its Wildest

Untamed, unspoiled, and yours alone

KOOL & THE GANG’S “Jungle Boogie” was stuck in my head. I was scrambling up a near-vertical trail drenched by a tropical deluge, making my way back from Dominica’s Boiling Lake, a fizzing 31,000-square-foot sulfuric cauldron. The monsoon had arrived early in the southern Caribbean, and I was worried it would put the kibosh on my island adventure—particularly the rugged six-hour round-trip to the lake, in Morne Trois Pitons National Park, a route vulnerable to floods and mudslides.

“What do you do if it rains?” I had asked my guide, Ali Auguiste, a young, cheery Carib, when he came to pick me up for the hike. ���ϳԹ���, the clouds were heavy and as gray as a gull’s wing.

“Well, mistah,” Ali had said, a brilliant white smile cracking across his face, “we get wet!”

Wet we got. First the rain fell in a sweet, saturating drizzle. Then it came at us in curtains. Finally, as we crested a high ridge, it stormed with such primordial intensity that it rained up, our ponchos snapping above our heads so that we looked like some strange overgrown flora moving eerily through the ferns.

By the time we were crabbing our way to the top of the flooded buttress, I had achieved trekking’s equivalent of a runner’s high—energized by the tough hike, thrilled by the meteorological action, and humming along to Kool & the Gang. When I reached the lip, runoff hosing my chest and pouring over my head, Ali stuck out his hand to help me over the edge. We were both grinning like schoolboys. This was hardly some manicured nature walk: It was as close to mountaineering as you can get in the Caribbean.

Sandwiched between Martinique, to the south, and Guadeloupe, to the north, Dominica (pronounced Doh-mi-NEEK-a) is the youngest island in the Lesser Antilles—a volcanic chile pepper of green thrusting out of the tourmaline sea. I had come chasing reports of unspoiled rainforest hiking, hidden hot springs, secluded beaches, world-class diving, and a holistic, enviro-friendly culture that was just beginning to get real adventure tourism off the ground. While 29-mile-long Dominica is home to 72,000 people (5,700 of whom are native Caribs), it’s blissfully undeveloped. Thanks to the efforts of farsighted preservationists, Dominica has established more protected parks, forests, and marine reserves per capita than almost anywhere on the planet. As a result, hikers, bikers, and paddlers can explore 4,000-foot peaks, 128,500 acres of untrammeled rainforest, more than 100 miles of trails, and 365 rivers—”One for every day of the year,” locals like to enthuse.

After my Boiling Lake epic, I needed a day to convalesce in the Roseau Valley at the Papillote Wilderness Retreat, a botanical fantasyland about four miles from the capital, Roseau, on the southwestern coast. Though free of televisions, phones, and air conditioning, the rooms are comfortable, with arrestingly beautiful surroundings. Credit goes to Anne Baptiste, the expat owner and gardener from Florida, who visited Dominica in 1961 and was so enchanted with its horticultural splendor she spent the next 40 years creating this internationally recognized Eden.

“If you just stand still, you begin to realize how much is going on around you,” she said, pausing on a footpath to deadhead a begonia. Surrounding us was a rainbow gallery of indigenous and exotic species, though it was only a tiny sample of the island’s 1,200 species of flowering plants: glistening jade vines, cascading heliconia, ginger blossoms as big as your face, and, as Anne pointed out, an orchid smaller than your thumb, growing like spider silk on a tree branch.

That night, on the dining patio overlooking the lush valley, I was served prawns in garlic sauce, saffron rice, and rum punch made from guava juice. If Boiling Lake had shown me Dominica’s rambunctious side, Papillote was the pastoral antithesis. This was the binary character I would encounter all over the island: tough and serene; wild and peaceful. I fell asleep thinking my deep thoughts while fireflies flashed through the open-air room.

From Papillote, I headed about ten miles downcoast to the quaint, pastel-colored fishing village of Soufrière, where I connected with Nature Island Dive for a few hours of kayaking and snorkeling above a dive site, Champagne—so named because geothermal vents in the sandy seafloor emit streams of warm bubbles. The all-but-beachless “Nature Island” tends to get overlooked as a fun-in-the-sun Caribbean destination, but here, drifting above parrotfish, sergeant majors, brain coral, barrel sponges, and countless other forms of showy reef life, I tasted one of its premier attractions.

Afterwards, I embarked on a whirlwind clockwise tour of the entire coast. The most luxurious lodging—the historic Fort Young Hotel—is on the waterfront in Roseau, as is the best shopping for locally made jewelry, woven baskets, and wood crafts. It was a different scene as I crossed the northern tip and headed down the eastern shore: rocky coastline gouged by secluded coves, rustic banana plantations, languid villages, and the occasional black-sand beach or rum shop.

It was far down this coast, in the island’s southeast corner, that I saw Dominica’s future: a nearly completed luxury spa called Jungle Bay Spa Resort, the brainchild of Samuel Raphael, an island native with a degree in international studies from American University, in Washington, D.C. This self-contained eco-resort tucked into a hillside overlooking the Atlantic will offer studios for yoga and Pilates, two restaurants, conference facilities, and 35 private cottages built from tropical hardwoods.

I knew the arrival of such a place would mean little to those up the coast—the domino klatches, the rastas, the matriarchs balancing laundry baskets on their heads—but for overworked, overstressed Americans seeking a double dip of wellness, here was the promised land. As we chatted, Sam told me that the human with the longest known life span, Elizabeth Israel—a.k.a. Ma Pampo—was Dominican. She lived on this life-giving island for 128 years and died in 2003. Stand still and you begin to realize how much is going on around you. I stood as still as possible but couldn’t begin to fathom it all.

Little Cayman, Big Fun

The action here is out of sight

I BECAME A PRO DODGING snoozing iguanas while pedaling a beach cruiser along the narrow road that rings Little Cayman. That’s about as exciting as life gets on this ten-mile-long, scrub-covered British outpost south of Cuba, the smallest of the three Caymans. When visitors touch down on the grass-and-crushed-coral airstrip, they’re not coming for swinging nightlife and duty-free shopping.

On Little Cayman, the action happens underwater. The island’s claim to fame—aside from its unspoiled interior and gorgeous white beaches—is the Bloody Bay Wall, a spectacular span of coral off the northern coast that begins at 18 feet and plummets 6,000 feet into the big blue. Here, divers swim through narrow chimneys, fin past a vibrant gallery of sponges, and encounter eagle rays, sea turtles, and spotted drums. A popular T-shirt slogan sums up the lifestyle: LITTLE CAYMAN, A SMALL DRINKING ISLAND WITH A BIG DIVING PROBLEM.

There are only a handful of places to stay and one real store. I check in at the oldest resort, the Southern Cross Club, opened in 1959, when Little Cayman was no more than a fishing camp. Ten bungalows are sprawled out on a handsome stretch of gleaming sand studded with palms. Mahogany furniture fills the large, airy guest rooms, which have no TVs or telephones; shady front porches facilitate hammock lazing. Fishing and dive boats ferry guests around, and there are kayaks for the short paddle across the sound to tiny Owen Island.

After settling in, I set three goals: dive the Bloody Bay Wall ad nauseam, catch a bonefish on a fly for the first time, and spot the mysterious Toe-Sucking Bog Man, a nocturnal monster that, according to local legend, lives in murky Tarpon Lake (which, a more reliable legend claims, was fished by Ernest Hemingway).

By far the easiest of these efforts is diving. Every morning I board the dive boat for the resort’s daily two-tank trip to the Bloody Bay Marine Park, and it doesn’t take me long to rack up some memorable dives. A large resident grouper named Jerry allows me to pet him at Marilyn’s Cut, and as I swim into a grotto 50 feet down at Randy’s Gazebo, I arrive in time to see a massive barrel sponge spawning. But nothing beats the sheer drama of the wall itself: Seussian sponges sticking out in all directions, spotted eagle rays gliding past, and brightly colored parrotfish, queen angelfish, and filefish darting around.

Bonefishing is more frustrating. After hours of poling around the flats with my patient guide, a mellow young Floridian named Jeremy Loercher, I finally land a feisty three-pound bonefish on an eight-weight fly rod.

I somehow never make it to the lake to look for the Toe-Sucking Bog Man. Instead I content myself each evening with feeding squid bits to an octopus in Preston Bay and dancing on the bar at the Hungry Iguana, the local hangout, after a couple tequila shots. That’s pure excitement, here on Little Cayman.

Tierra Secreta

El Pico de Orizaba, Costa Esmeralda, & El Tajín

:: EL PICO DE ORIZABA

Known as Citlaltépetl (“Star Mountain”) in Náhuatl, the language of the Aztecs, 18,700-foot Orizaba hardly presents a technical challenge for the “Everest is easy” crowd. But the volcanic peak is no snap for the rest of us. Straddling Veracruz’s boundary with Puebla, to the west, it’s the highest mountain in Mexico and the third-tallest in North America, and most of the summit ascent is over a glacier and snow.


On a clear day, once you’re atop Orizaba, you can see her sister volcanoes, 17,887-foot Popocatépetl and 17,343-foot Ixtaccíhuatl, to the west, and, if you’re lucky, the Gulf of Mexico, to the east.


:: COSTA ESMERALDA

With its small, funky hotels and large private homes perched on a strip of grassy land between Highway 180 and the Gulf of Mexico, 12-mile Costa Esmeralda is reminiscent of the Florida Keys of a bygone era—with more cattle ranches and fewer Hemingway look-alikes.


The Hotel Torre Molino, with air-conditioned rooms and a swimming pool, is the best spot to roost. If you’re in the mood for a low-key paddle, the front desk can hook you up with a kayak to tour the nearby Ciénega del Fuerte, a protected freshwater wetland.


:: EL TAJÍN

Every pre-Cortesian ruin in Mexico gooses a different part of the anatomy. Some make your jaw drop. Some make your head spin. El Tajín always makes the hairs on my neck stand at quivering attention. The hulking stone pyramids and grassy ball courts of the four-square-mile site feel labyrinthine, almost claustrophobic. But wait—it gets creepier: Even after studying the place for more than 200 years, archaeologists still can’t say for sure who lived here. (They know the city peaked in the Classic Period, between 300 and 900, and probably waned in the 13th century.)


El Tajín—its modern name is Totonac for “Thunder”—was a contemporary of Teotihuacán, to the west, and the Maya cities to the southeast. Today, El Tajín exudes enigmatic charm. Don’t miss the 65-foot Pyramid of the Niches, which, with regularly spaced square niches on every vertical surface, looks like a cross between a Sumerian ziggurat and a Japanese pagoda. (Should be easy to spot: It’s featured on 2004 Veracruz license plates.)

Tierra Secreta

Access and Resources

veracruz map

RÍO BOBOS:: The best base of operations for exploring the Río Bobos is Aventurec (011-52-225-315-4300, ). A three-day, two-night package includes two river runs, guided hikes, a ride on a cross-canyon zip line, and meals ($140 per person for lodging in one of the outfitter’s new cabins; $127 if you camp).

EL PICO DE ORIZABA:: Reputable Orizaba operators, like Servimont (011-52-245-451-5009, ), expect clients to have experience climbing on ice and snow before tackling this volcano. Servimont’s six-day mountaineering trip, which includes meals and three nights in a historic lodge—a converted soap factory—costs $685 per person.

COSTA ESMERALDA:: The Hotel Torre Molino (doubles, $74; 011-52-232-321-0055, ) offers a breezy restaurant, which sits under a gigantic palapa and serves locally caught seafood in dishes like robalo à la veracruzana—sea bass sautéed with tomatoes, onions, green olives, and capers.

EL TAJÍN:: These mysterious ruins, crammed into a steamy, thickly wooded valley, are located an hour’s drive northwest from the Costa Esmeralda. Take Highway 180 north to Papantla and follow the signs five miles to the ruins. El Tajín is open seven days a week, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and admission is about $2.50 per person.

The post The Sun-Kissed, Hibiscus-Scented, Palm-Studded, Rum-Soaked, Blissed-Out, In-Your Dreams Caribbean appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Wilderness Outpost, Clayoquot Wilderness Resorts & Spa

british columbia adventure lodges

SOUP’S ON: a peek inside the dining tent at the Wilderness Outpost

british columbia adventure lodges

AERIAL VIEW: In a forest beside the Bedwell River, a dozen wood-framed safari tents connected by cedar-plank walkways link dining and massage tents and a fjordside spa. THE PROGRAM: Guides can take you hiking, horseback riding, mountain biking on old mining roads, and sea kayaking in placid Bedwell Sound. BONUS: Sack out on a four-poster bed beneath a down comforter listening to the river just beyond your private wooden deck. GETTING THERE: From Tofino, on Vancouver Island’s western coast, it’s a 30-minute boat ride to Clayoquot Wilderness Resort, then another 20 minutes to the Outpost.

Nimmo Bay Resort
AERIAL VIEW: On a remote mainland fjord, eight spacious chalets and cabins connect via a floating dock to the main lodge. THE PROGRAM: Expect everything from heli-glacier-trekking to heli-fishing for wild coho salmon to heli-kayaking amid the orcas of Johnstone Strait. BONUS: Two hot tubs sit beside the terminus of a waterfall that tumbles out of the spruce forest. GETTING THERE: From Port Hardy, on the north end of Vancouver Island, it’s a 25-minute chopper ride to Nimmo Bay.

Elisi Spa and Wilderness Resort at Sleeping Chief
AERIAL VIEW: Two cottages and an eight-room log-cabin-style lodge on the edge of 2,570-square-mile Northern Rockies Provincial Park, in B.C.’s far north. THE PROGRAM: On a hike or on horseback, watch for megafauna like elk and grizzlies. Or fish for Dolly Varden trout and grayling in the Muskwa River. BONUS: Melt muscles and soften the epidermis with a special two-and-a-half-hour, guys-only spa treatment. GETTING THERE: From Fort St. John, take a one-hour charter flight.

Bugaboo Lodge
AERIAL VIEW: A 35-room chalet in southeastern B.C.’s Bugaboo Range. THE PROGRAM: Guided climbs and heli-hiking among Matterhorn look-alikes. BONUS: An action-packed, chopper-fueled schedule. GETTING THERE: Canadian Mountain Holidays buses you two and a half hours from Banff, Alberta, for the eight-minute chopper flight to the lodge.

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BUYING A TICKET to the far side of the planet is easy. But before you hit the good stuff—wild adventures, amazing landscapes, exotic cultures, and fresh encounters—you’ve got to cope with the inevitable stress, exhaustion, and disorientation of getting there. Happily, a flurry of emerging strategies, new research findings, and time-tested wisdom is converging toward a bulletproof plan of action designed to minimize travel’s downside and maximize your dream trip.

Health And Fitness For The Traveler

TICKET TO RIDE: A short preflight jog helps you sleep en route—so you’ll feel better when you get there.

Health And Fitness For The Traveler

SCHEDULED MAINTENANCE: Push-ups will keep you fit anywhere.

RAMPING UP
Don’t wait until the boarding call to start your journey on the right foot. A smart pre-departure checklist can make or break your crucial first day in transit.

— Paradoxically, starting out tired will help you arrive energized. Go with the recommendation of Ken Husband, of the Berkeley, California-based tour company Backroads: “Go for at least a one-hour bike ride, or other workout, right before your trip. Then get on the plane tired and sleep like a baby.” Expedition climber Conrad Anker advises pulling an all-nighter: “I stay up all night before departing to increase my chances of falling asleep on the plane.”

— Sleep medication can be your friend. Dr. William Forgey, author of Traveler’s Medical Resource, recommends a mild prescription sleep aid like Ambien. “It’s short-acting, so there’s no hangover, which makes it excellent for travelers.”

— Try a melatonin supplement; it’s the same hormone that your body uses to adjust your circadian rhythm. “If you’re traveling from west to east, take half a milligram of melatonin the night before your flight to advance your body clock,” says Dr. Jian M. Ding, a neuroscience specialist at East Carolina University. “When traveling east to west, take it during the day.”

— Make the terminal your low-key gym by turning your wait into a gentle workout before you amble down the jetway. Stretch or walk, but don’t just sit there. That’s what the plane’s for.

IN-FLIGHT INSIGHT
Don’t be a passive passenger. Staying active and food-smart is just as important at 30,000 feet as it is at sea level.

— Recent concerns about the danger of deep-vein thrombosis (DVT)—potentially fatal blood clots that can form in the legs after prolonged sitting—underscore the importance of keeping limbs limber and blood flowing. Any kind of stretching and movement is fine, but customized yoga moves can be done right in your own cramped seat. Self-massage is another option. Doug Friman, a top-ranked U.S. triathlete, puts a bar with three wooden rollers in his carry-on. “I run it over my legs after napping,” he says.

— Everyone knows you should drink lots of water when airborne to counter the plane’s moisture-sapping environment, but not many realize that one key benefit is—pardon the expression—immunity-bolstering snot. According to Dr. David Martin, chairman of marathon development for USA Track & Field, “in that dry environment, you need H2O to produce mucus, which helps prevent viruses picked up from your hacking seatmate from making you sick.” And, of course, rich airline food is probably best avoided. Martin tells his runners to nibble on slices of apples and pears throughout flights lasting longer than a couple of hours. “Your stomach is used to a three-meals-per-day routine,” Martin says. “By eating every couple of hours, your body no longer knows that it’s missing a meal.”

BEYOND ARRIVAL
The first hours and days in-country are the most critical part of the rest of your journey; managing this transitional period is essential.

— Sweat first, snooze later. “After resetting your watch,” says former U.S. Olympic marathoner Keith Brantly, “commit to staying awake until bedtime.” To help you fight sleep and acclimatize faster, do some kind of light exercise on day one. As Martin explains, “a run will help return you to a normal lifestyle pattern and sync your body to local time.”

— When in doubt, don’t drink the water. “Just because the hotel is clean and modern doesn’t always mean the tap water is friendly,” says mountain guide Dave Hahn, who uses bottled water even to brush his teeth. Meanwhile, wash your hands more often than a doctor making rounds; and pack an antibacterial gel, like Purell.

— Finally, resume your exercise regimen as soon a possible, but dial it back and take it easy. Book hotels with pools or gyms and consider squeezing a jump rope into your duffel.

Stick to all of the above and you’ll be primed for job number one: having a certified kick-ass trip of a lifetime.

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Australia’s fabled surfie hangout emerges as a multisport playground Byron Bay may be the modern surfer’s idyll—Australia’s most consistent waves pound the white sands around Cape Byron, which rises like a giant snake’s head from the blue Pacific—but veterans of the sport still reminisce about the days preceding its discovery. Indeed, there was a time before the late sixties when the hippies, Buddhists, Hare Krishnas, and naturists of all stripes flocked to the easternmost point of Australia, 570 miles north of Sydney. This fabled era, when Byron Bay was a working-class town supported by logging, dairy farming, and whaling, evidently had its pluses and minuses.

Consider the salutary tale of Bob and Terry, a couple of Sydney beach bums who in 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, tossed their malibus onto a train and made their escape to Byron Bay. Picked up by a friendly passerby at the railway station (“G’day—did you come to find some waves?”), they spent a day riding the perfect swells at an empty beach called Watego’s. It seemed to them a reasonable approximation of paradise. Unfortunately, local cops roared into their campsite, grabbed them by the hair, gave them a short-back-and-sides trim, and then dropped them on a road out of town.

But 40 years is a long time in Aussie beach culture. Not long after Bob and Terry got rolled, redneck Byron Bay became Australia’s countercultural Shangri-La—a half-mythic place where surfers could park in their panel vans by the beach, sign on for the dole, and live on a diet of bananas, fish ‘n’ chips, and illicit local herbs. Today, surfing is not only respectable at Byron Bay; it’s downright establishment. In fact, while I was reading Bob and Terry’s Easy Rider tale—I was at the scene of the crime, Watego’s Beach, flipping through an ancient copy of Pacific Longboarder magazine—a svelte surfie couple dropped their boards outside the lone restaurant, where they chowed down on Thai prawn salad and Tasmanian champagne.

Yes, there are the occasional whiffs of a Hamptons Down Under, but Byron Bay has in fact blossomed in a uniquely Australian, democratic way, balancing its competing interests to keep a low-rise beach paradise intact. To get the lay of the land, newcomers should nurse a schooner of beer at the area’s most famous pub, the Beach Hotel. You can play at being a celebrity in hiding—Keith Richards had left just before I arrived in March—or join the international backpacker set on the beach at night, spinning fire sticks as if practicing for Cirque du Soleil. You can eat from sushi bars or vegan buffets, catch an art-house movie, or browse for local indie-rock CDs. And the Aquarian spirit is alive and well: Yoga classes are held at dawn on the beach, crystals are revered in souvenir shops, and radicals are given full voice. (I opened the official tourist guide and enjoyed a lurid essay on the Iraqi war.) Somehow it all seems right in the eclectic Byron Bay soup.

The good news for outdoor fans is that Byron Bay has branched out from surfing—reinventing itself as the Boulder of the South, Telluride on a warm beach. The wonder is that it has taken so long, given the setting: The offshore waters host some of the most fertile marine grounds in Australia, while the mountain hinterland of the Great Dividing Range is thick with subtropical rainforest. Right now, Byron Bay’s outfitters are making up for lost time. I strolled through the compact village one afternoon—the adventure companies are clustered together in rabid competition, with names like Wicked Travel and Cape Fear—and within an hour I had signed on for a decathlon of Aussie outdoor escapades, covering land and sea. Admittedly, I skipped the naked bushwalking for beginners, but I was up for everything else, on day trips led by itinerant Aussie guides, many of whom seemed to be on sabbatical from snowboarding in the Canadian Rockies.

For starters, Nightcap National Park, 25 miles inland, has miles of mountain-bike trails, from easy to hardcore. On a wet morning, a sunburned surfer named Lindsay led ten of us through the mist-filled rainforest, where eucalyptuses soared like Grecian columns. The 13 miles I covered felt more like 50, feathering down or grinding up, skidding over sinuous roots, taking in grandiose vistas and secret swimming holes.

With just as much zeal, the Zodiacs slip like sea iguanas off Clarks Beach every dawn. In November 2002, a stretch of the Coral Sea, along Byron Bay’s beaches from Brunswick Head to Lennox Head, was declared the Cape Byron Marine Park; a mile and a half offshore, an outcrop called Julian Rocks is rated one of Australia’s top ten diving spots, thanks to the thriving piscine community lured by the confluence of warm and cool currents. A dive master named Evan—crew-cut, tongue-pierced, tattooed like a Polynesian sailor—led the underwater trail past squadrons of butterfly fish and angels to the scene-stealers of the dive: moray eels, loggerhead turtles, eagle rays flapping batlike overhead, and ten-foot leopard sharks that drifted so close my fingers brushed their flanks, strangely rough as sandpaper. (In winter, gray nurse sharks pass through—keep your distance.)

Why stop there? I thought. The next morning came a ride on a microlite—Byron Bay’s latest craze, a motorized hang glider that soars above the activity—and, of course, I signed up for a surfing lesson. This is still the number-one breadwinner for Byron Bay’s outdoor operators, thanks to water temperatures that fluctuate between 65 and 81 degrees and strong year-round swells producing waves between three and six feet tall. Here, a surf scene materializes wherever there is a stretch of sand. The most coveted spots include Cosy Corner and Tallow’s, on the south side of Cape Byron, where bushland and the cornflower-blue sea collide. And picturesque Watego’s, the most easterly beach in Australia, still tops the charts for where to see and be seen.

Back home in New York, color-coded terrorist alerts were going from yellow to orange. Here in Byron, they also employ color coding. Like schools of fish, surfing students are grouped by the color of their wetsuits. As I proceeded to learn the difference between riding goofy and natural—hopping on my padded board, falling off, hopping on again—the rest of the world seemed very, very remote.

DETAILS:
Lodging: Experienced Byron hands stay at a beach called Belongil Spit—it’s away from the center of town, has great cafés, and you can walk along the sand for 15 minutes to reach the action. Belongil by the Sea has four cottages that sleep two to nine, with kitchens, on two acres of botanical gardens, starting at $63 a night (011-61-2-6685-8111, ). Film stars prefer Rae’s On Watego’s (rooms start at $145; 011-61-2-6685-5695, ).
Sports: There is good beginner surfing year-round in Byron Bay. For lessons, try Black Dog Surfing, a school that runs beginner classes several times a day ($30 per three-hour group lesson; 011-61-2-6680-9828, ). The more experienced can take private lessons from former U.S. surf champion, longtime Byron Bay resident, and local celeb Rusty Miller (a two-hour private lesson costs $56 for one person, $99 for two; 011-61-2-6684-7390, rustym@mullum.com.au). Besides surfing, the whole gamut of outdoor sports is on offer in Byron Bay—operators line Jonson Street and the competition keeps prices down. Rockhoppers (011-61-2-6680-8569, ) runs mountain-biking trips ($52 for a solid day), hikes to watch the sunrise from 3,800-foot Mount Warning ($39), and caving/rappelling trips ($79). Byron Bay Dive Centre (011-61-2-6685-8333, ) takes divers out every morning to Julian Rocks ($50 per single-tank dive). Hang-glide or microlite with Skylimit ($92 for a tandem flight; 011-61-2-6684-3711, ).

The Dish on Soup Bowl

In Barbados, Surf Kings Happily Serve Up Lessons for Plebes

Barbados sports a tight-knit surfing community and a refreshing lack of attitude

In stuffy Barbados, where islanders worship cricket and neckties flourish, the unlikely badass surf scene is a splash of hot pepper sauce on the otherwise bland national dish: flying fish with okra-and-cornmeal mash. The Caribbean’s most consistent waves roll in from the east, pounding the pear-shaped, 166-square-mile island, the easternmost outpost of the West Indies. And Bathsheba, an east coast village where a tumble of bright houses clings to a palm-studded hillside, is the nexus. Thirty yards off the beach lies the world-famous Soup Bowl, where a north and a south swell collide to create waves from 3 to 25 feet tall.

Soup Bowl attracts Kelly Slater and other elite surfers for the Independence Pro competition every November and provides locals—and visitors—with the perfect aquaturf for honing their moves. Mark Holder, 35, and Alan Burke, 33, reign as the surf kings of Barbados, competing in international tournaments and regularly carving the Soup Bowl waves. Both are natives; Holder, a laid-back rasta “soul-surfer,” and Burke, a sixth-generation descendant of water-loving Irish immigrants, have had a friendly rivalry for two decades, and there’s an ongoing debate among the island’s tight-knit surfing community over which of the two is supreme.

Best of all, each gives private lessons. Imagine showing up in Maui and calling Laird Hamilton for a few hours of one-on-one. In Barbados, you can do the equivalent, getting personal instruction from Holder and Burke on tamer waves, on the south end of the island, with the hope of working up to the Soup Bowl’s powerful right break. The lack of attitude here is reassuring for wobbly neophytes, who won’t find chiseled surf studs staring them down while they’re learning to stand on a board, as well as for seasoned old-timers, who return year after year.

The windsurfing and kiteboarding are also superb, especially along the southern coast near the resorts at Silver Sands and Silver Rock. It’s not unusual to see pro windsurfer and official island character Brian “Irie Man” Talma working his moves off Silver Rock Beach; he owns a rental shop there, and you can take lessons from him.

Or just find a comfortable spot in the sand and watch local youngsters rip it up. “There are little kids who will ride anything they can get their hands on,” says Holder, a surfer since age six. “There are guys riding plywood boards.” Holder describes the Barbados riding posture: “Local style is the most radical—flinging your hands, hanging down low to the board, and getting into the groove.”

My lesson, with Burke, takes place among perfect two-footers at Freights Bay, a mile from Long Beach on the south coast, where he runs a surf school. After learning to turn turtle (flip the board over myself in a wave) and other basic moves, we paddle out. I manage to catch a wave… for a few seconds. My moves, however, are an amusing parody of local style—flailing my arms, tripping off the board, and falling overboard.

DETAILS:
Lodging: Check out the Bajan Surf Bungalows (doubles from $54; 246-433-9920, ), owned by Melanie Pitcher, one of the country’s top surfers.
Sports: July to September is the best season to catch beginner waves. Contact the Barbados Surfing Association (246-429-6647, ) for details. For lessons, call Mark Holder (246-420-3611) or Alan Burke (246-228-5117). Holder charges $50 per hour for one-on-one lessons; Burke charges $40 for a two-hour lesson. For surfing, kitesurfing, and windsurfing gear, as well as rentals and lessons, head over to Brian Talma’s Irieman Action (246-428-2866, ), in the Silver Rock Hotel.

Surfing Lite

A Perfect Set in Costa Rica is One Part Mellow Paddling and Two Parts Extreme Leisure

So you want to learn to surf. You want to experience the good-vibrations, enlightened-oneness-with-Mother-Ocean thing, but you’ve outgrown the sleep-under-the-pier, suffer-for-your-wisdom technique. Besides, more than simply learning to hang ten, you’d like someone else to make breakfast, fold the towels, and dial you in to the local scene. For this you’ll need a guide—and the man to see in Costa Rica is Alvaro Solano.

HQ is Vista Guapa Surf Camp, which 28-year-old Solano opened in September 2002 above the Pacific coast town of Jacó. Three sunny duplex casitas cascade down a narrow ridge, pointed right at what may be Costa Rica’s most reliable surf break. Each air-conditioned surf shack is aligned to ensure unimpeded valley views and discreet distance from fellow guests. There are no more than a dozen surfers during each weeklong session, and though you’re only a ten-minute walk from Jacó’s main drag, it’s easy to forget there’s anyone else in the valley when you’re on your deck. From the beach below the lodge, Solano took his first rides on a broken plank as a kid and polished the moves that have made him Costa Rica’s four-time-consecutive national surf champion. He picked this spot for his camp because it offers a beginner-worthy break with waves that average three to four feet—yet advanced-rider hot spots like Boca Barranca, the world’s third-longest left, are nearby.

Though it’s not quite sink or surf, the Vista Guapa doctrine emphasizes learning by doing. Classes are taught by Solano or Lisbeth Vindas, a three-time national champion; I had just one fellow pupil for my first attempt at the sport. Solano showed us how to count wave sets and mark reference points for the likeliest takeoff spots—and then let the waves do the instructing. At first, I waited, watching the ocean and letting my mind wander before turning, taking a few strokes, and dropping in. Solano’s approach worked: I caught the first wave I pursued.

Soon I’d found my own rhythm, on and off the board. I slept in each morning, missing the 6:30 sunrise and the dawn asana session on the outdoor yoga deck but rising in time to shuffle over to the main lodge for the monstrous breakfast of beans and rice, omelets, and fruit, during which Solano ticked off tide times and entertainment options. Each day passed in a blur of watching and paddling, and soon enough we’d start debating the big question of the day—where to have dinner—wrestling between the pan-seared tuna at Playa Hermosa’s Jungle Surf Cafe and Juanita’s seafood platter over in Playa Herradura.

Surf’s up a maximum of four hours daily, which leaves ample time for the multisport cornucopia within an hour of town—Class III-IV whitewater rafting on the Naranjo River and zip-line tours of the forest canopy, for starters. Learning that extreme leisure is the necessary counterpoint to surfing, I started easy, hopping in Solano’s minivan for the tranquillo cruise south to Parque Nacional Manuel Antonio. There I met the surfer’s spirit animal: a three-toed sloth, slung like a sack of mangoes from a branch. But most afternoons were spent in my hammock, where I found myself able to spend hours meditating about which flip-flops to buy.

My big breakthrough came on the fourth morning. Straddling my board, watching the sets roll in, I experienced a moment of the transcendent clarity I’d always imagined would come from being one with the ocean. Suddenly it was all very clear: I could have the shrimp and the lobster for dinner.

DETAILS:
Lodging: The Vista Guapa Surf Camp (011-506-643-2830, ) charges $675 per person per week, $1,200 for two people, including twice-a-day surfing at one of 22 surf breaks, lodging, breakfast and dinner, rentals, and field trips to attractions.
Sports: The surfing around Jacó is consistent year-round. Green Tours (011-506-643-2773) offers a gamut of nearby outfitted adventures.

Liquid Samba

Surf to the Rhythm of Bahia, the Soul of Brazil

“Did you hear the big news?” my surf instructor, Adriano dos Santos Sarmento, asked when I arrived in the sleepy Brazilian fishing village of Itacaré. “The fishermen caught three massive tiger sharks—right where we’re taking you to surf tomorrow.” Then he added, “The price of shark meat went down 200 percent today.” This Peter Benchley info-moment got my attention, but because shark attacks are unheard of here, I was undeterred from my plan to enlist in surf boot camp.

I ventured to Itacaré, in the eastern coastal state of Bahia, 186 miles south of Salvador, because Brazilian friends told me it possesses the “soul” of Brazil and a legacy of African-influenced music, cuisine, dance, and religion. The Afro-Brazilian culture, they said, imbues Bahia with a mysticism that affects the spirit and the senses—and, I figured, maybe the surf.

The road to town was paved five years ago, not long enough to have made Itacaré a jaded tourist area. And having noted the dreamy look in the eyes of graduates lounging around EasyDrop, a six-year-old surf camp, I set my own goal as nothing short of spiritual deliverance. For the next two weeks, seven multilingual instructors—led by the owner, German ex-fencer and musician Hans-Benjamin Kromayer—would take me and five other recruits (two Brazilians, two Canadians, and a fellow American) to half a dozen of the best surf spots in a 20-mile radius.

I quickly fell into the routine. Classes began with jumping jacks on the white sand. “Choose your wave carefully and always pay attention. Abaixa mais,” Sarmento said, seamlessly mixing English and Portuguese. His suggestion to stay low came right before my surfboard jettisoned me, making me wish that I hadn’t skipped so many balance-building yoga sessions back home.

When I needed a break, I paddled out on my longboard and meditated on the warm, poochy swells that trundled in. May through July, the waves would be eight feet high, not the three feet they were in January, and ten times as intimidating. The mile-long beach, cupped by lush Atlantic rainforest, was deserted except for a little girl decapitating coconuts and selling them to surfers.

Every morning as I strapped on my leash, I swore that I would take the afternoon to raft the nearby Río de Contas or explore the mangrove swamps. But after four hours of surfing, I invariably collapsed into a lactic-acid-induced nap. Only when the heat lost its chokehold on the day did I rouse for the evening video screening—a ritual replete with a professional critique from Kromayer. Then we fueled up on moqueca (a whitefish drenched in a thick coconut and palm-oil broth and served over rice) at Tia Deth, a family-run restaurant with homemade oil paintings tacked to the walls.

“God, this is perfect,” a fellow surfie said at dinner, setting down his caipirinha, a Brazilian cocktail. I didn’t know if he meant the exquisite blend of sugarcane booze and lemon, the tropical breeze that tumbled over the bows of small wooden boats and onto our rickety table, or the delicious soreness of well-used muscles. It was all perfection.

DETAILS:
Lodging: EasyDrop (011-55-73-251-3065, ) offers a two-week package of instruction, lodging at a pousada, and breakfast for $817-$859, depending on the season.
Sports: Mid-September through December and March through April are the best times for beginning surfers to visit. Get surf gear at Pousada Hanalei (daily surfboard rentals, $7-$11; 011-55-73-251-2311). For rafting the Class III-IV Río de Contas, try AtivaRafting (011-55-73-251-2224, ). A 17-mile trip from the put-in at Taboquinhas, in the Itacaré district, costs $14 per person.

Hawaii 911

Who Better Than Firefighter Surf Gods to Initiate Novice Riders?

Neophyte surfers cowed by the Pacific’s powerful crush will find comfort in the collective résumé of the 25 teachers at Oahu’s Hawaiian Fire Surf School: They’re Honolulu firefighters certified in every conceivable lifesaving skill—from emergency medical treatment to open-water rescue. More important, they’re born-on-boards guys. They surf almost as frequently as they eat—catching waves before and after work and spending their days off teaching hodads like me. That the trio who coached me last fall were short on attitude, long on skills, and just happened to be built like surf-mag cover gods was a bonus, one certainly not lost on the female contingent of our six-member student body.

Firefighter John Pregil, 40, started Hawaiian Fire Surf School in 2000 with Garrett Vallez and Kevin Miller and two goals: to teach surfing with “aloha spirit” and to do it in an environment of safety. Today, their burgeoning practice has a full lineup of men and women instructors and draws clients from Waikiki hotels; the school runs a free van service out to the near-secret beach where they teach.

That would be Barbers Point, a two-mile strand of southwest-facing sugary-white sand about 25 miles west of Waikiki in Kalaeloa, on the site of the recently decommissioned Barbers Point Naval Air Station. Locals know it, but most surfers prefer bigger quarry than these undaunting one- to two-footers (albeit with nice shape and just enough power to drive a long ride in shallow, 80-degree water). The same conditions make it a great choice for bodysurfers and surf kayakers, and its length and seclusion mean it’s always uncrowded. As a bonus, the point is flanked by Kalaeloa Beach Park, a 13-site campground with picnic tables, showers, and barbecue pits shaded by ironwood trees. Though camping is allowed only on weekends, the area is open for day use during the week.

“The only way you can screw up is by not having fun,” Ken Waters said as he wrapped up our ground-school session. Waters and cohorts Glenn Parker and Mike Jones had given us a thorough briefing on how and when to spring to our feet on superbuoyant foam-padded boards. But to their credit, the teachers didn’t want us bogging down with too much technique. They wanted us to surf.

I had plenty of opportunities for long, smooth rides to shore. I emphasize: plenty of opportunities. I mainly specialized in “pearling” (diving off the surfboard for nonexistent underwater treasures when the nose gets caught in a wave). But, heck, I did get a few rides in and earned the nickname “Big Wave Bob” for my fussiness in wave selection. I also had time to watch the others founder and to surf-gab with my teachers: “You guys are all great surfers. Don’t you get bored with this?”

“Are you kidding?” Parker answered me. “You’re our daily entertainment! And if you get good, we get to surf. Really, we just love to get people stoked. If we’ve accomplished that, then we’ve had a great day.”

DETAILS:
Lodging: The Department of Parks and Recreation (808-523-4525, ) requires a free permit to camp at Kalaeloa Beach Park (Friday, Saturday, or Sunday only).
Sports: Catch the best beginner surf between April and October. Hawaiian Fire Surf School (888-955-7873, ) charges $79 for a half-day group lesson, $97 for a full day, including equipment, lunch (full day only), and transportation from Waikiki. To rent a board ($20 a day), try Blue Planet (808-922-5444, ). The island’s best surf-kayak shop is Go Bananas Kayaks ($30 per day for a single, $43 for a tandem; 808-737-9514, ).

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FROM THE HIGHWAY 1 BRIDGE a half-mile south of Mendocino on California’s North Coast, the Big River looks tantalizingly moody and gorgeous, its slinky coils meandering over grassy flats and vanishing into a deep gorge defined by the dark, towering presence of coastal redwoods. For the past 150 years this has been verboten terrain—private property, recently in the hands of Hawthorne Timber Company, a Fort Bragg, California-based logging operation. But in about two minutes, I’m going to sling my mountain bike onto a shoulder, hop over a locked gate, and slip into this landscape for a ride along the Big River’s northern banks. And no, I won’t be arrested, scolded, or even glared at. The once-doomed-to-be-logged (again) Big River is ours, and it’s the best news California’s northern coast has heard in a long time.

Inland empire: looking up the Big River

Spare those trees: second-growth forests line the far bank of the Big River.

The Mendocino connection: where big water meets the Big River

As soon as the ink dries on a few final documents, any time between now and November, a $25.7 million purchase will transfer the Big River from Hawthorne to the California state parks system. The exchange will be made through the Mendocino Land Trust, a local non-profit conservation organization, which raised the money in less than a year after the timber barons signed the purchase agreement. The Big River’s 7,344 prime acres of river, estuary, wetlands, and forest will fill in a long-coveted missing piece of a public-lands puzzle. The property is adjacent to 2,499-acre Van Damme State Park to the south and the mega 48,652 acres of Jackson State Forest to the north. Jackson in turn abuts Mendocino Woodlands and Russian Gulch State Parks and Jug Handle State Reserve, thereby linking 60,000 acres of parks, hundreds of miles of hiking, biking, and equestrian trails, and critical corridors for wildlife. That means protection for all sorts of stellar denizens, including river otters, black bears, beavers, mountain lions, and bobcats, plus 130 species of birds, including spotted owls, golden and bald eagles, herons, and ospreys. The Big River portion alone will leave intact a swath of fir and redwood forests, 50 miles of river and tributaries, 1,500 acres of wetlands, and the longest undeveloped and heretofore unprotected estuary in northern California. It promises an inland alternative for visitors who make the three-hour drive from San Francisco to behold the Mendocino area’s grand seaside scenery: magnificent cliffs, roaring surf, solitary beaches.
And it means I get to go for a ride—a sneak preview, actually, of this new playground that will soon be accessible to everyone. I hoist my mount over the gate and start up the Big River Haul Road, which loosely parallels the waterway to the end of its estuary, 8.3 river miles inland. The dirt doubletrack is now a nearly flat mountain-biking and hiking thruway into the new parkland, while four or five steep, technical spur trails lead uphill to the north like off-ramps. Some of these old roads will be decommissioned, but at least one of them will link the Big River with Jackson State Forest, where there’s a 300-mile feast of trails to ride and hike. But the Big River Haul Road itself is easy going, and riding it is a leisurely way to survey the new park. All the land I can see is part of it, the north-south boundary marked by steep 800-foot transverse ridges. Inland, the new acquisition extends a couple of miles beyond the end of the estuary. The river winds placidly toward the Pacific between the ridges as it leaves the eelgrass flats, widening to about 100 feet near its mouth. I spot three osprey nests in redwoods above the riverbank and notice one of their tenants doing some fishing for…what? Coho and steelhead both run in the river, but not in the large numbers of yore. Spared the impact of logging, though, they just might stage a comeback.

The haul road soon enters the woods, and I get only a few views of the river until the road runs right into it. This is the 8.3-mile mark that denotes the head of the Big River’s tidal range; to this point, ocean tides create its current. I ford the cool, shallow river and proceed on foot, again on an old logging road, about a mile into the deep woods that line 61-acre Big River Laguna, a marshy backwater where the mood shifts from scenic beauty to dark intrigue, with redwoods poking through the forest like gothic steeples. I scare up two wood ducks from their lily-pad refuge, bullfrogs start tuning for the evening, and fresh piles of bear scat hint at looming megafauna. I reach a grove of tall redwoods backlit by angled shafts of late light. This is the Fritz Wonder Plot, some of the tallest second-growth redwoods in the preserve—up to 300 feet—and to me, its beating heart. No, these aren’t thousand-year-old antiquarians—every acre of this forest has been logged—but now these 140-year-old trees will have their chance. The solitude is seductive; I have to pedal back in the last light and a brisk offshore headwind.

The next day I return along the same 8.3 miles of river, the easily navigable stretch, this time paddling a handcrafted redwood outrigger canoe with Rick Hemmings, who runs Catch a Canoe & Bicycles Too!, a rental shop on the grounds of the Stanford Inn, a 41-room B&B and my home base for a few days. The design of the custom 19-foot outrigger is brilliant—pontoons make it ultrastable, while the hull is light, sleek, and fast. The boats have been a Big River tradition for more than a decade. (Though the land surrounding the Big River was private and thus off-limits to visitors, California rivers are public property.) We glide with the tide along calm stretches through the eelgrass flats, and Rick shows me relics of logging days. An old flatboat is now scarcely an outline in the muck. Erstwhile dams are just orphan chunks of piling.
Paddling the Class I Big River estuary isn’t so much high adventure as a serene meditation—unless you time the tide wrong and try to return against it and a headwind. You can’t. We paddle unambitiously, a harbor seal escorting us most of the way. Rick and I stare up into the woods that begin to crowd the riverbanks, and Rick tells me about legendary singing fish that lured the curious here back around the turn of the 20th century. “No one knows what they really were, but people could hear them late at night,” he says. What did they sound like? “Uh, you know…a shrill, fishy sound.” Oh.

Our timing is perfect for the paddle back. The headwind’s going off at 25 knots, but the reflux of the tide and a smidgen of elbow grease win out. We coast into the dock. Tonight I’ll return to my room in the Stanford Inn, above the river, and sleep with the window open, listening for the mysterious music of fish once again floating above the Big River.

THE BIG RIVER is a half-mile south of Mendocino and a three-hour drive north of the San Francisco Bay Area. It will officially become a state park sometime between August and November. Until the park opens, call the Mendocino Land Trust (707-962-0470) for information; the new park will be administered by the California State Parks Mendocino District Headquarters office at 707-937-5804.

Catch a Canoe & Bicycles Too! (707-937-0273) rents single and tandem kayaks, canoes, and outriggers starting at $12 an hour. Gary Fisher, Cannondale, and Trek mountain bikes run $10 an hour for hardtails and hybrids, $15 for full-suspension. You can ride hundreds of miles of single- and doubletrack in Van Damme and Russian Gulch State Parks and in Jackson State Forest. I stayed in the Stanford Inn (800-331-8884; ), a 41-room B&B on the mouth of the Big River, a lovely place with terraced gardens and views of the river or ocean from every room. My room, featuring antique furnishings and a corner fireplace, was a carpentry showcase, with knotty-pine paneling and a vaulted ceiling. Room rates start at $245, and pets are welcome. For more information on area accommodations, contact theMendocino County Alliance at 866-466-3636, or visit .

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THE GLORY OF MENDOCINO and Humboldt County seacoast is the dazzling union of big surf, big cliffs, big trees, and big mountains. It’s so multifarious, there’s no single, signature way to experience it all. While the Big River serves up a dreamy paddle amid rugged inland terrain, you won’t want to travel that far north without savoring the bracing coastal hits as well. Take a bike, take your boots, take a kayak, take some car-camping indulgences and make a high time of it. Here are four ways I amused myself once I got my fill of the Big River.

Navigating the sea-arch maze near Elk

SEA KAYAKING
The Pacific Coast off Elk

IT’S GAME TIME and a 16-knot wind is vaporizing the crests of seven-foot swells beyond a daunting surf that’s crashing on Greenwood State Beach, across Highway 1 from the tiny village of Elk, 15 miles south of Mendocino. “She’s a little rough, but we’ll be fine,” says Aaron Stauffer, the manager of Force 10 Ocean Whitewater Tours, a kayaking operation based in Elk. A minute later we’re launching through the surf, and though I’m ptooeying saltwater, I’m also noticeably upright, beyond the breakers, and paddling toward an offshore rock. Aaron’s piloting our 24-foot custom fiberglass tandem from behind, and that’s the key to Force 10’s operation: By running tandems, they put a strong engine and a ton of experience in a superstable boat with you. In the course of our four-mile paddle north to Cuffey’s Cove and back, we shoot through arches into hidden coves, idle in dark caves, and arf back at stellar sea lions lollygagging on an offshore rock. Afterward, Stauffer admits that most summer days are quite calm. “But we can always find something intense,” he says, like tucking into one of the many low-clearance caves rendered unapproachable on my tour. Force 10 runs coastal kayak day tours from May to November for $95. For more information, call 707-877-3505 or visit .

Backpacking the Lost Coast Trail

Land of the lost: Usal Creek

LITTLE-KNOWN FACT: The world’s most ogled coastline in the nation’s most populous state is left to itself for 80 wild miles beginning about 50 miles north of Mendocino. In the 1920s, builders of California Highway 1 were thwarted by the awesome coastal mountains. They sent the highway over the hills to merge with U.S. 101 and left behind the Lost Coast. Dirt roads usher visitors to its north and south boundaries, and only one partially paved thoroughfare, the Briceland Road, touches its midpoint. Otherwise, the only way to see it is under your own power—most notably, via the 50-mile Lost Coast Trail.
I approached the Lost Coast from the south by turning off Highway 1 at mile marker 90.80 onto unsigned Usal Road (County Road 431), a narrow dirt track that leads six miles to Usal Camp, a primitive campground on the southern edge of 7,367-acre Sinkyone Wilderness State Park ($7 per night, bring or filter your own water). I set up camp on a sandy flat a couple hundred yards from the crashing surf and took off early the next morning to hike as much of the Lost Coast Trail as my legs would allow in one day. The trail rises 500 feet above Usal and then runs in and out of redwood groves and fir forests, up and down coastal canyons drained by streams, emerging to reveal shocking Lost Coast views—whitecapped ocean, crashing surf, sea stacks, and sheer cliffs—from meadowy bluffs. Each is a garden of green wild oats, California poppies, blue bush lupines, foxgloves, blackberry brambles, and wild purple lilies. By the time I switchbacked down to a trail camp at Little Jackass Creek, my turnaround point for the day, I’d gained and lost more than 4,000 feet in 7.5 miles. The trail continues north another 42.5 miles, a great through-hike that takes ten days. For more information, call Sinkyone Wilderness State Park at 707-986-7711 or the BLM at 707-986-5400.

Mountain Biking the Hotel Gulch Road

SINCE THE LOST COAST TRAIL isn’t two-wheel compatible, mountain bikers will want to head to the Hotel Gulch Road, a higher, parallel route about a half-mile inland. It delivers some of the same vistas, although much more of this trail is cloaked in deep forest. It follows an untended old logging road that climbs steeply out of Usal Camp to 1,500 feet before it drops toward Anderson Creek. A couple of downfalls and landslides require hike-a-bike, but it’s all ridable if you have gears and gumption. About a mile downhill from the first crest, where you’ll be hot no matter how brisk the day, a 30-foot waterfall tumbles into a shallow pool. After I cooled off there, I rode on, following undulating ridges that traverse rare old-growth redwood groves, dropping into the abandoned logging site of Wheeler, 12 miles from the trailhead. This is a good place to turn back, because you have to relive three long climbs before the bumpy descent back to camp. For more information, call Sinkyone Wilderness State Park at 707-986-7711.

Hiking King Peak

BEHOLD THE KING RANGE from the tiny clifftop town of Shelter Cove in the middle of the Lost Coast, 20 miles north of Usal as the gull flies, and you understand why Highway 1 gave up any notion of proceeding through here. The jagged range rises 2,000 feet to the north above the surf within the first mile. Above it all is 4,087-foot King Peak. On the eve of my King Peak climb I relocated to Shelter Cove where I found a room with a pilothouse view of the entire Lost Coast. My trailhead of choice was Saddle Mountain, a 10.5-mile-drive north on dirt from Shelter Cove Road. Much of the 5.5-mile King Crest Trail disappears into forests of tan oak, madrona, and Douglas fir. Still, after dropping 700 feet, it follows a ridgeline on a gradual 2,300-foot climb and serves up a peak at the summit’s vista grande. After a final steep push to the top I could see clear over to the snowy Trinity Alps, 90 miles to the northeast, Punta Gorda; ten miles to the northwest; and Point Arena, 100 miles to the south. What I didn’t see was another soul. I made the round-trip in five hours. For more information, call the BLM at 707-986-5400. Doubles at Shelter Cove Motor Inn start at $85 per night; call 888-570-9676.

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THE FOLKS WHO RUN THE BEST WILDERNESS LODGES are something like the best masseuses: They know exactly what you want and where you want it, and when they’re done…oh, my. Breakfast is too good and too abundant, but it doesn’t matter, because you’ll just burn it off. The kayaks and canoes are ready. The mountain bikes are tuned. The guides know exactly where to go, but you’ll feel like no one’s been there before.

Life on the edge: cabins bordering Lake O’Hara, BC, Canada

The lodges that get it really get it. Once, at one in the far north, I stole off alone (and, I thought, unnoticed) after an evening of stories and red wine, grabbed a fly rod from the shed, and cast for grayling till after midnight. When I returned, there was a chocolate cookie on my pillow and a note inviting me to tap on the kitchen door if I had any fish to be cleaned.


The ten places we’ve featured below, from a Utah desert oasis to a Quebec salmon-fishing outpost, know the formula without being formulaic. Plus, by definition, they’re in or on the edge of wilderness. Which leads us to an inspired suggestion that each of our top ten can facilitate: After a tenure in their graces, step right off the porch or push off the dock and launch your own foray into the wilds, by foot, kayak, canoe, or llama. Revel deep in the setting you’ve been nibbling at. When you return a few or many days later, leave your boots on the stoop and enjoy full-on ambience, where you’ll find strong coffee wafting (and stronger beverages chilling) and leather armchairs pulled up close to a crackling fire, inviting unclocked repose. Great day. Great life. What’s for dinner?
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Elk Lake Lodge

Nightly loon concertos included: the view from Elk Lake Lodge

NOW MORE THAN EVER, New Yorkers, or anyone else needing space and distance from a city, will appreciate Elk Lake Lodge. This 1903 Adirondack hideaway commands a stunning view, indeed the only view from a manmade structure, of a private wilderness comprising a 12,000-acre boreal forest and 600-acre emerald lake. The isolated retreat, 240 miles north of New York City (100 miles south of Montreal), anchors a 40-mile network of half a dozen mountain trails that visitors share with patrolling deer and black bears. With all this pristine privacy, you’ll be longing for the claustrophobia of New York City’s No. 6 subway line by week’s end.
AT THE LODGE Eight wood-framed cottages are scattered along the lake’s eastern shore, their knotty-pine interiors filled with comfortably rustic furnishings—sorry, no Jacuzzis or wet bars. If it’s available, reserve Windfall, a cabin whose terrace faces the sunrise, or ask for Little Tom, the cottage closest to the lake and thus the best from which to hear a nocturnal loon concerto. Just a couple hundred yards away, in the lodge’s timbered dining room, guests warm their hands by the fieldstone fireplace and their bellies by dining on pork chops, shrimp scampi, and other great American comfort foods, while overlooking the ramparts of New York’s other dramatic skyline, the Adirondacks.
THE SPORTS In mid-May, the islands on Elk Lake are covered with witch hobble and star flowers, making them picnic-perfect. Thanks to a lakewide ban on speedboats, the noontime stillness can be deafening. Grab a pack lunch and one of the lodge’s canoes, and try to catch dinner en route. Fishermen, like the squadrons of native ospreys, don’t need much patience to catch lake trout and landlocked salmon. Miles of easy lowland trails, edged by mushrooms, fiddleheads, and carpets of lady slippers, weave along the shore and across little bridges: Try the Sunrise Trail, a six-mile out-and-back hike.
BACKCOUNTRY FORAY Aim for 4,857-foot Dix Summit, a dramatically poised peakaccessible from a lodgeside trail. Backtrack down the five-mile-long driveway, and at the top of the hill on Elk Lake Road follow the Dix Trail 3.5 miles to the Lillian Brook Lean-to, an opportune place to overnight. The next morning, pass Dix Pond and climb 1.9 miles and 2,000 feet toward Hunters Pass. Approaching the windswept ridgeline, the trail crosses a narrow arETe and tackles a series of cirques where stunted trees sprout improbably from nearly vertical faces. At the summit, a kingdom of peaks lies before you and 5,344-foot Mount Marcy frames tiny, sparkling Elk Lake.

Brooks Lake Lodge

Over the hills and far away: trail riding on mountain-bred horses

A STAY AT THIS 13,500-square-foot post-and-beam ranch in the northwestern part of the Wind River Range will make it evident why Wyomingites escape to the Winds. Relaxing on the flagstone porch, you’re dwarfed by the Pinnacles, a jagged mile-long cliff band towering nearly half a vertical mile above. There’s a nearby stable with real horsepower, a stocked lake (just 400 feet away), and a guide waiting to show you a sliver of the 5,000 square miles of surrounding wilderness.
AT THE LODGE Enjoying high tea in their Western-style sitting room, it’s not difficult to see why Brooks Lake Lodge is 95 percent full throughout the summer. Wild game, fish, and fruit are trucked in daily from as far away as California to ensure fresh meals. The lodge’s six cabins, six rooms, and presidential suite are all themed. Lamps carved to resemble trophy animals flank beds piled high with down comforters. In 2003, the lodge will open a 4,000-square-foot spa with a Jacuzzi, steam room, and exercise room—as if the spectacular terrain weren’t enough.

THE SPORTS Unbelievable but true: You can tickle fish. Follow a local to a stream where unthinned throngs of rainbow, brook, and cutthroat trout feast, and grab one…with your bare hands. Or just amble to Lower Brooks Lake, where you can cast from your canoe. For more exercise, pick up a hearty bag lunch and hike or mountain bike the five-mile Kisinger Lakes Trail. Ascend switchbacks to a 10,100-foot-high open ridge before descending to the four Kisinger Lakes, glowing green and blue from sediment and algae.
BACKCOUNTRY FORAY Take a one- or two-night guided horsepacking trip, perhaps to Cub Creek in the Teton Wilderness. Two hundred feet from the water, lodge staff will set up a plush camp, with deluxe cots, washrooms, and down pillows. The lodge discourages overnight backpacking because of the resident grizzlies; about 400 make their homes within a 100-mile radius.

King Pacific Lodge

586,000 acres and not a soul in sight: at the footsteps of the Great Bear Rainforest

YOU’RE IN A LUXURY floating lodge moored to uninhabited, 568,000-acre Princess Royal Island in the heart of northern British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest: a realm of deep fjords, islands thick with old-growth red cedars, and astounding vertical relief. Stand at the edge of the craggy, exposed rock of the ridgelines and you feel like you’re on top of the world—at sea level. The channels below teem with salmon, halibut, and killer and humpback whales, and the forest behind you is home to the rare white kermode (“spirit”) bear.
AT THE LODGE It doesn’t seem possible, but this 17-room, 20,000-square-foot structure, with its soaring atrium, is built on a barge that gets hauled 90 miles back to Prince Rupert in the fall. Despite the lodge’s portability, which has kept development off the island, no detail has been spared—from the edge-grain fir tables and forged-iron chandeliers to the slate floors, red cedar walls, massive pine columns, and quarter-sawn fir beams. Rooms are big enough for a king-size bed plus a couple of cushy chairs positioned for gazing out over Barnard Harbor. Alex Rolland, a young chef from Quebec, astounds with his fresh fish and shellfish creations—yet uses a light touch, going easy on the beurre.
THE SPORTS Most guests—typically cost-is-no-object fly-fishing gentry and splurging honeymooners—come for the summerlong parade of salmon or for catch-and-release fly-casting (rainbow, cutthroat, and steelhead) in streams on Princess Royal and neighboring islands. Or you can join Norm or Chris, the resident naturalists, and head off on a different hike or sea-kayak paddle every day, or just motor out to watch the spectacle of 45-foot humpbacks breaching and feeding.
BACKCOUNTRY FORAY The lodge can set you up for, say, a three-day paddle out the door and up through the tide-induced reversing rapids of Princess Royal’s Cornwall Inlet and past a Gitga’at longhouse. Set up beach camps and hike up the Cornwall Creek for the off chance of a kermode sighting. Or have a guide motor you to the east side of Campania Island, which you can traverse the easy way (through meadows and stunted forests) or the hard way (up 2,398-foot Mount Pender, along the ridges) and end up camping on the west side of Wolf Track Beach. A lodge boat will meet you there a few days later.

Kachemak Bay Winderness Lodge

Children at play: bears frollicking in McNeil River Brown Bear Sanctuary

THE SINUOUS CHANNEL in front of Kachemak Bay Wilderness Lodge, just southwest of Kenai Fjords National Park, evolves with the tide into broad, salmon-rich China Poot Bay, reflecting the southern light and the colors of the forest and unnamed peaks beyond. And it all seems to belong to you. A guide grabs you after breakfast like your best pal on the first morning of a long school vacation. “What do you want to do today?” he asks. “Kayak, hike, fish?” For five days, you’ve got Eden to explore together.
AT THE LODGE Weathered docks, decks, and fanciful little buildings blend with big Sitka spruces, gray churt, and beach grass, giving it the feel of an old fishing camp. But inside a cabin where you’d expect to find a rusted cot and a coffee can of nails there appears instead fine art, antiques, and a tile-and-cedar bathroom. Each cabin is only a short jaunt down a forest walk paved with rounded beach stones to the sauna or hot tub. The ceilings of the main lodge are low-slung, the dark wood walls worn smooth by years of polishing. Instead of a grand entryway, there’s a rubber-boot collection. After sushi on the deck, guests gather inside to feast on seafood, garden produce, and carefully selected wines.

THE SPORTS Paddle sports are supreme; on one day’s journey you can kayak up China Poot Bay, hike an hour to China Poot Lake, and then paddle a cached lodge canoe, feeling Lilliputian amid the high peaks surrounding the placid waters. But the lodge’s specialty is natural history: You can go tidepooling or birding, take a forest walk, or explore ruins left by predecessors of the Tanaina Indians. The staff recently included two biologists, an archaeologist, and a forest ecologist. Guest-to-guide ratios are four-to-one or lower.
BACKCOUNTRY FORAY Mako’s Water Taxi (907-235-9055, ) rents and delivers kayaks. The first day, paddle up China Poot Bay to a natural waterway that connects China Poot to Peterson Bay; then go east through the roadless artists’ colony of Halibut Cove (stop for a bite at the Saltry Restaurant) to Halibut Cove Lagoon, which you can enter only at slack tide. Camp there, or stay in a Kachemak Bay State Park rental cabin. Next day, climb 2,600-foot Poot Peak. Start early the following morning to miss the day breeze, paddling out of the lagoon and along the shore to the state park campsite at Humpy Creek, a base for hikes to Grewingk Glacier or fishing in the creek. Arrange for Mako to pick you there.

Telemark Inn

Northeast of Eden: a horse-drawn sleigh ride through the Caribou Speckled Wilderness Area

THE AREA AROUND the Telemark Inn, ten miles southwest of Bethel, Maine, is proof that “East Coast wilderness” is not an oxymoron. The pastoral New England lodge is surrounded by 780,000-acre White Mountain National Forest—prime habitat for moose and black bear. Add to that owner Steve Crone’s domesticated llamas, sled dogs, and horses, and you’ll be surprised at how wild it gets just four hours north of Boston.
AT THE LODGE The cedar-shake inn, built as a hunting lodge in the late 1800s, can sleep up to 17 people in five rustic pine-paneled bedrooms. Just off a living room with creaky hardwood floors, a capacious front porch overlooks the birch forest. The inn is so far off the grid that it runs on battery power, making kerosene lamps the primary light source at the dining-room table, where guests eat family-style meals, such as grilled salmon accompanied by veggies plucked from the garden out back.
THE SPORTS Heat up on a thousand-foot scramble over massive boulders for a mile and a half to the top of Table Rock in Grafton Notch State Park. Then work your way down to several creeks feeding Bear River, where you can cool off exploring the smooth granite channels that link a chain of six-foot-deep emerald pools. Launch one of the lodge’s canoes on Umbagog Lake, a 15,000-acre national wildlife refuge surrounded by forest, to spot bald eagles, ospreys, and loons. Or rent a mountain bike and spin seven miles up a dirt road to Crocker Pond or grind out a 20-mile round-trip loop to Round Pond.
BACKCOUNTRY FORAY Crone pioneered the llama-trekking business in Maine, and often loads up the woolly beasts with tents, food, and clothes for three-day trips into White Mountain National Forest. You’ll trek four miles on Haystack Notch Trail to the west branch of the Pleasant River, where you’ll camp under balsam firs and red spruces. The next day, hike about 3.5 miles to the top of 2,100-foot Red Rock Mountain for views of the Presidential Range to the west. Return to the lodge the next morning via trails along the Pleasant River.

Camelot ���ϳԹ��� Lodge

King of the desert: Camelot ���ϳԹ��� Lodge

YOU’RE ONLY SIX MILES from Moab as the crow flies, but traveling to Camelot from town on a 12.5-mile dirt road through a mad jumble of slot canyons, mesas, and buttes is excruciatingly slow and difficult, making you feel like a character out of a Paul Bowles novel. This suits owners Terry and Marcee Moore just fine. Formerly managers of a lodge in Alaska, they wanted a Lower 48 spot that replicated Alaska’s feeling of utter remoteness, except with warmer weather. Bare but for sunlight, shadows, and Anazasi petroglyphs, the sculpted stone surrounding the lodge inspires guests with a variety of visions: “It’s a vulture pulling a covered wagon.” “No, it’s three hillbillies in a bathtub.”
AT THE LODGE The solar-powered, 3,000-square-foot lodge, which opened in 1999, sits on 49 private acres just 200 yards from the Colorado River. The post-and-beam, pitch-roofed building has five guest rooms, each with a private bathroom, shower, and entrance from the deck. The views are modest, but there’s a reason: The small windows are meant to minimize solar exposure in the blistering summer. One big space encompasses the living and dining rooms, with welcoming couches and recliners. Through an archway, Marcee rules the kitchen, serving up salt-crusted prime rib and pasta with homemade pesto. For the morning frittatas, she collects fresh eggs.

THE SPORTS Leave the river’s thin ribbon of willows, grass, and tamarisk, and hike formiles in any direction up washes, over sandstone shelves, and down slot canyons. Or survey the desert like a sheik from a camel’s back. Terry, a former Hollywood trainer, has tamed five dromedaries for guests to ride. If you’D rather carry your own weight, mountain bike the Amasa Back Loop, 23 miles of road and singletrack starting from the lodge. Bring your own bike or rent one in Moab. The lodge can also arrange single- or multiday raft trips on Class III-IV+ sections of the Colorado.
BACKCOUNTRY FORAY Step off the porch, shoulder a backpack, and head for Dripping Springs Canyon, about four miles from the lodge. Set up a base camp in this parabolic canyon and explore the caves that radiate into Catacomb Rock, hike the myriad unnamed drainages, and taste fresh water from a spring on the canyon’s eastern slope. The lodge also arranges three-day camel treks out to Chicken Corners, a skinny, vertigo-inducing ledge nine miles south of the lodge along a trail leading up to the mesa.

Triple Creek Ranch

Two hands deep: off-ranch horseback riding through the Bitterroot Valley

FIRST, THERE’S THE WELCOME basket full of warm oatmeal-raisin cookies. Then, you look out the window of your log cabin at the surrounding millions of acres of national forest in the foothills of Montana’s Bitterroot Range, and you realize that you’ve just passed on to sublime mountain paradise. General managers Wayne and Judy Kilpatrick and their staff of 50 (who serve 46 guests, max) will spare no effort to make your stay worthwhile: They’ll arrange a day on the Big Hole River with legendary fly-fisherman John Foust, send a masseuse to your cabin, or take a run into Darby, the nearest town, to satisfy your craving for a pint of B&J’s Wavy Gravy.
AT THE LODGE Nineteen pine-log cabins surround a main lodge with three-story-high windows. All boast special accoutrements, some coming with stocked wet bars, others with double-headed steam showers. Sit on your private deck for a morning with your favorite book or spend an afternoon by the lodge pool with a drop-dead-gorgeous view of the Bitterroots. Then slothfully move to the firelit dining room for filet mignon.

THE SPORTS Tease the browns into rising for the spring squala hatch on the Bitterroot River. Later in the summer, get in a little “rowing and throwing” during the salmon-fly hatch on the river’s west fork. Both stretches are only a few miles from the lodge. Be sure to set aside at least one afternoon for a horseback ride over brooks and through alpine meadows with Lady, one of the ranch’s 40 immaculately trained quarter horses. Or, from the Sam Billings Memorial Campground trailhead, five miles west of the lodge, hike a mellow four miles to a waterfall for a dip in a deep pool.
BACKCOUNTRY FORAY With more than 19 million acres of national forest in the area, almost any trail can become a backpacking adventure. A local favorite: Drive about 23 miles east on the Skalkaho Highway, and park at the Skalkaho Pass turnoff. Hike five miles north on the Easthouse National Recreation Trail and then set up a camp with your tent flap facing 8,656-foot Dome Shaped Mountain. The next day, head four miles up to the 8,463-foot summit of Palisade Mountain, take in the views, and then continue down Trail 86 about 1.5 miles toward Skalkaho Mountain. Camp at an unnamed lake just north of the trail. On your final day, hike the two miles to Skalkaho Peak or take the south loop of Trail 86 to return to your car via the Easthouse Trail. For more details, call the Stevensville Ranger District at 406-777-5461.

Irwin Lodge

Emerson, eat your heart out: the front porch of Irwin Lodge

COMPARED WITH THE QUAINT, Victorian B&Bs in nearby Crested Butte, Irwin Lodge more closely resembles a barn. But you forgive the lack of cutesy wainscoting when sipping a gin and tonic on the 10,700-foot-high veranda, watching meadows brimming with wildflowers, and basking in the glory of the West Elk, Raggeds, and Maroon Bells-Snowmass high-alpine wilderness areas. Guests at this weathered, unpretentious lodge spend most of the day outdoors, exploring 13,058-foot Mount Owen and slightly shorter mates Ruby Peak, Purple Peak, and Afley Peak (shaped like a Hershey’s Kiss). At day’s end, they return for fine dining and the evening show: sunset and mountains alight with alpenglow.
AT THE LODGE Built in 1977 and refurbished in 1997, Irwin sports a massive fieldstone fireplace surrounded by 8,000 square feet of common area (couches, board games, pool tables, books, and two hot tubs). Kitschy paintings of rams and bears adorn the walls, as do antique skis and snowshoes. Old West memorabilia are scattered throughout, helping distinguish the eminently casual lodge from a high-altitude frat house. (The 22 guest rooms, however, part ways with the Old West, offering up their own themes: Sunflower, Birch, Snowflake, and African, to name a few.) Irwin wisely pours its upscale energies into the kitchen, whose dinner specialties include elk medallions in shiitake-mushroom sauce.

THE SPORTS Mountain biking is spectacular here, for Irwin sits just 12 unpaved miles from Crested Butte and its world-famous trails. But you don’t need to go that far: The Dyke Trail starts right out Irwin’s front door, with 16 glorious miles of serpentine turns. Anglers fish for trout in Lake Irwin, just a few hundred yards below the lodge. Horseback riders hoof up to clear, glacier-fed Green Lake on lodge-supplied mounts. Hikers either stroll among the columbines and Indian paintbrushes or bag an alpine peak via the dramatic granitic rock of nearby Scarp Ridge.
BACKCOUNTRY FORAY With trails spidering off in every direction, Irwin can launch any number of backpacking trips, including the historic three-day favorite: hiking through the Maroon Bells to Aspen. Less trodden is a multiday trail through the West Elk Wilderness to the Castles of Breccia—startling pinnacles of volcanic fragments about 26 miles from the lodge. Follow the Dyke Trail to Trail 840 over Beckwith Pass, and then take Trail 438 southeast over Swampy Pass to Trail 450. From the Castles, either return the same way to Irwin or do a clockwise loop around the heart of the Elk Mountains, via Storm Pass.

Pavillon du St. Jean

It can be easy bein’ green: the emerald waters of the St. Jean River

QUEBEC’S GASPE Peninsula is known primarily for its coastline, where the Appalachian Mountains drop dramatically into the sea. But a 45-minute drive from the coastal town of Gaspe reveals the peninsula’s hidden heart—its mountainous interior of old-growth spruce, cedar, and poplar that’s the Pavillon du St. Jean’s backyard. The handsome, no-frills lodge is located on perhaps the best dry-fly salmon river in the world, the St. Jean, whose pools are so brilliantly emerald you’d think the water should taste like mint. Fifteen-pound Atlantic salmon make heart-stopping rises to your fly on the 25 miles of river, on which only eight rods are allowed daily. Head guide Austin Clark, a 54-year-old with a disobedient wisp of white hair, will dance a jig when you catch your first one.
AT THE LODGE Founded in 1958, the Pavillon comprises a main lodge and four cabins; each cabin has two bedrooms, a living room with a wood stove, a private bathroom, and a porch perfect for listening to the gurgle of the river while sipping the local (9 percent) beer, Le Fin du Monde. There’s a convivial main room in the lodge, with reading chairs, a grand stone fireplace, a pool table, and a dining table for 14. Dinner is a four-course affair that might include Gaspesie favorites like ginger-and-carrot consomme, lamb, and lobster, all specialties of the lodge’s renowned Quebecois chefs.
THE SPORTS In addition to fishing, there is excellent hiking in the nearby Chic-Choc Mountains. A short drive from the town of Gaspe will take you to Forillon National Park, where you can hike six miles along the Mont Saint-Alban trail, which provides spectacular views of cliffs that drop vertiginously into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Try sea kayaking along the park’s jagged coastline in Gaspe Bay (for park information, call 800-463-6769; for kayak rentals, call Cap-Aventure at 418-892-5055), or take a whale-watching cruise to see blues, humpbacks, and minkes (Croisieres Baie de Gaspe, 418-892-5500).
BACKCOUNTRY FOREY Drive 140 miles to Le Pluvier L’Hirondelle, in the center of the Chic-Choc Mountains. There you can access the newly christened International Appalachian Trail and hike south for five days and 60 miles. Along the way, you’ll ascend 3,770-foot Mount Logan, home to the last caribou herd south of the St. Lawrence River. Then descend to the Cap-Chat River and take a prearranged shuttle back to civilization. (For shelter reservations in Parc de la GaspEsie, call 866-727-2427; for shuttle information, call IAT Quebec at 418-562-1240, ext. 2299.)

Sentry Mountain Lodge

In the back of the backcountry: ski touring near Glacier National Park

YOUR JOURNAL MIGHT READ LIKE THIS: “We flew in by helicopter, dazzled by Kinbasket Lake, Mount Bryce, the Columbia Icefields, and high points of the Canadian Rockies. The bird dropped us at a cedar hut, on a 7,128-foot col cradled by the Selkirk Mountains. Before settling in, we explored some of the lodge’s 13 square miles of alpine meadows, heather-swathed valleys, and interlaced ridges. A herd of caribou crossed our path, but otherwise we didn’t see a soul. Afterward, we sipped Big Rock Ales, basked in the alpenglow rosying up the surrounding granite peaks, and waited for Venus to pop out, which would later guide us on a midnight hike.” Of course, that would be just the first entry.
AT THE LODGE This just-built hideaway feels like a European-style mountain home, one that you share with only seven other guests: a red tin pitched roof, soaring vaulted ceilings, mural-size windows, a gray-pebble hearth, and handcrafted bookshelves overflowing with maps, fraying paperbacks, and the best local reads, like Chic Scott’s The Story of Canadian Mountaineering. The kitchen, festooned with garlic braids and lined on one side by a pine bar, is where your hosts rustle up items like cheese fondue and coq au vin from the French-inspired menu. Each of the four airy bedrooms is outfitted with a custom-made mattress, downy duvets, and fluffy bathrobes for trekking to the sauna hut.

THE SPORTS There are countless hiking and mountaineering options, and best of all, the terrain connects effortlessly, with gentle meandering accesses to most ridge tops. One morning you might walk down a half-mile to spring-fed Tetras Lake, with its east-end waterfall, and then wrap back up through stands of subalpine fir into Secret Valley, where pine marten pop up like animatronic jack-in-the-boxes. Or follow mountain-goat tracks up a 1,200-foot climb to the crest of 8,344-foot Sentry Mountain. Come winter, the snowshoe, heli-ski, telemark, and ski-touring options are bountiful.
BACKCOUNTRY FORAY SML’s guides can help fashion multiday backpacking excursions, set up heli-hiking jaunts to the celebrated glaciers of the Selkirks, or arrange a hut-to-hut itinerary. The “Esplanade Haute Route,” an eight-mile south-to-north traverse over the Esplanade Range, leads to Vista Lodge, the first in Golden Alpine Holiday’s chain of three rustic huts. From here carry on to Meadow and Sunrise, each an alpine scramble and a day’s hike away.

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When outfitting yourself for desert or tropics, you no longer need to choose between protecting your epidermis and sweltering or going skimpy and inviting melanoma. New togs of tightly woven, highly sun-protective fabrics combined with built-in screen doors now reconcile coverage and comfort.

RailRider’s Eco-Mesh Shirt Pants, and Patagonia’s Tropical Flat Shorts

Ex Officio Long-Sleev AirStrip Shirt and Mountain Hardwear’s Mountain Kilt (his), The North Face’s Backwater (hers)

Five Ten’s Cesium

Clothing

Many an adventure racer has slogged through Borneo swamps and similar hellholes wearing the Eco-Mesh Shirt and Eco-Mesh Pants from RailRiders. The shirt, which also comes in a new Leaf Print style ($59), is made of fast-drying Supplex nylon and places flow-through mesh all the way down the arms, sides, chest pocket, and back. The pants ($69) use thigh-to-ankle mesh down the outside of each leg that can be zipped open or closed as conditions dictate—the airiest full-leg sun protection available. Just seal them up if the bugs get bad. L.L. Bean’s Ripstop Convertible Pant ($79) is my hot-weather convertible of choice. The SPF-30 Cordura fabric is stronger than the usual Supplex, and the shorts have an au-courant knee-length cut, versus the shorter, so-1998, hemline of other convertibles. The naturist in you will love Patagonia’s Tropical Flats Shorts ($50), made of a nylon-poly blend so fine it scarcely feels present—nice and baggy, too, with mesh strips in the pocket that cool your nether bits. Of course, if airflow en bas is really a priority, try Mountain Hardwear’s Mountain Kilt ($85)—aye, a Scottish skirt for lads and lasses, techified with Supplex fabric, microchamois waist lining, and security pockets. Switching cultures, the company’s Guayabera Shirt ($75), styled after Mexican wedding shirts, runs a pair of vents down both chest and back. The fabric is rated to SPF 30 (compared to the SPF 5 of wet cotton T-shirts), and the collar extends to protect the neck. But the real standard for sun protection and airflow is the SPF-30 Ex Officio Long-Sleeve AirStrip Shirt ($78), with a protective collar, a large back cape, and side vents. Finally, for just kicking around sultry climes, I like the loosely woven (no SPF claims here), with unbelievably quick-drying Powerdry fabric used to stylish effect in Prana’s Dri Force Crew ($40).


On Your Feet

You can’t forgo foot support and cushioning in hot weather; in fact, thin soles and socks invite trip-ruining blisters. Oakley’s Chainsaw ($95) and Five Ten’s Cesium ($95) both cool your tootsies with strategic use of mesh, while sturdy treaded outsoles insulate against hotfoot. The midcut Chainsaw has the coolest open-mesh tongue in the business, and it’s superbly engineered for a comfortable and stable stride. The Cesium features Five Ten’s sticky Stealth rubber and a half-dozen mesh panels around the perimeter, ideal for commuting between top-rope stints in J-Tree. As for socks, believe it or not, wool’s the best stuff for heat. Whether humid or dry, its natural wicking and insulating properties really kick in when it’s warm. I like SmartWool’s Trail Runner II socks ($13) for their low cut and insulative padding.

Lips, Shades, Screens, and Packs

Watership Trading Co.’s Vineyard Haven Hat, Camelbak Sherpa, and Prana’s Dri Force Crew

Oakely's Chainsaw and Eco-Mesh Pants

Lids, Shades, Screens

TravelSmith’s mesh-sided, SPF-30 Sunblock Cap ($30) lets you affect the Larry of Arabia look; just detach (via Velcro) the dweeby cape when the sun lets up. Watership Trading Co.’s Vineyard Haven Hat ($50) is shady as a deck awning thanks to a broad foam brim that not only retains its shape after serious hat abuse, but floats, should you forget to snug its retention cord. The pliable nylon crown is treated to reject UV rays, and screened grommets let your noggin respire. Look like a rock star and protect your eyes while you’re at it—the Spy Scoop HS ($80) is notably friendly in hot weather, with little anti-fog vents at the outside edges of the lenses and no-slip rubbery temples that cling to sweaty skulls. When you can’t cover your skin, you need sunscreen; the American Academy of Dermatology recommends a minimum SPF of 15. UVB rays do the obvious damage (tanning and burning), but insidious UVA rays are equally dangerous, are present year-round, and require a broad-spectrum sunscreen. The most effective ingredient against UVA rays is Parsol 1789—approved by the FDA a few years ago and just now showing up in brand-name sunscreens. Good examples are Coppertone’s waterproof SPF 30 Gel (6 ounces, $10) and Ocean Potion’s Sport Potion SPF 30+ cream (6 ounces, $6).




Packs

I spent a summer week two years ago doing Death Valley day hikes in 120-plus temps. I just kept a constant draw on a 100-ounce CamelBak reservoir. Now they’ve introduced the CamelBak Sherpa ($130), a 1,740-cubic-inch daypack with a compression-molded-foam back panel that permits cooling airflow down the spine and insulates the reservoir. Another new touch: A shut-off prevents dreaded bite-valve dribbles between draws. Stay even cooler by going backless with the True North Load Monster ($89)—essentially an overgrown (1,340-cubic-inch) lumbar pack with shoulder straps for extra support. It’ll hold a 70-ounce reservoir and two 1.5-quart water bottles. For shorter hikes or trail runs, The North Face’s Backwater backless bag ($90) stows 500 cubic inches of miscellany and a 60-ounce reservoir. Tucked inside any hydration pack or daypack, the combo of a foam-covered Platypus Hydration Insulator 2 ($17) and Big Zip 2 Reservoir ($23) from Cascade Designs gives cold water a fighting chance: The reservoir’s big Ziploc-style opening makes it easy to clean or clink in a tray of ice cubes.

The Well-Outfitted Snow Rider

Backcountry Access Companion, the Giro Nine.9 helmet, Oakley’s Straight Jacket, Smith Triad goggles, and Mountain Hardwear’s Monkey Phur Vest

Salomon’s STL-550 jacket (his) and the STL-551 jacket (hers)

Mountain Hardwear’s eXtend base layer, Cloudveil IceFlow bibs, and the aluminum, three-section Life-Link Odyssey III poles

Ski and snowboard equipment continues to speciate for riding style and ability. Lucky for us, we like to hike for turns, stay out all day,and perfect the carve. The gear we picked—like Schoeller stretch-woven jackets and Salomon side-mounted bindings—is technical but, worry not, it’s comfy too.


Apparel

Gore-Tex works great, but how often do you really ski in the rain? The new generation of soft, form-fitting snow wear, like Salomon’s STL-550 jacket ($549) with removable liner and the women’s STL-551 ($279), replaces the crinkly-sounding nylon- and Gore-Tex-lined shells with quiet, stretch-woven fabrics that improve breathability and durability while retaining water-resistance.
Matching hot pants? The Patagonia stretch-woven Salopette ($245) and Cloudveil IceFloe bibs ($325) are not skintight, but they don’t droop like garbage bags either. If you keep moving and maintain your core temperature, stretch-woven fabrics obviate traditional layering, but you’ll need a moisture-managing base layer like Mountain Hardwear’s eXtend ($52 crew top, $45 bottoms). For extreme cold or sitting on a ski lift, midweight layers like The North Face Aurora Zip Neck ($75) or Mountain Hardwear’s Monkey Phur Vest ($80) are light and breathable. Wrap your feet in the SmartWool Snowrider socks ($17), which outperform all synthetics in transporting moisture away from the skin. When it comes to brain buckets, vents are crucial, and the new Giro Nine.9 ($125) features a dozen you can open and close at will. Fresh powder, however, demands an insulating and wind-blocking fleece lid from Shred Alert ($24). For your hands there’s the Marmot Ultimate Ski Glove ($149), or get a grip with the goatskin palm of the new breathable and waterproof SmartWool Backcountry Mitten ($95). After a day of skiing, only slipping into a hot tub comes close to donning the new omon Powderslide s ($65). The ley Straight Jacket’s ($95) iridium lenses ensure clarity and contrast on snow and that je ne sais quoi for the sundeck. But up on the mountain, off the groomers, goggles perform better. The lenses on the helmet-friendly Smith Triad ($90) mimic the curve of the eye for more precise vision, plus unsurpassed airflow eliminates fogging.

The Well-Outfitted Snow Rider

Toys

DaKine Blade back pack, the Arbor S-Series snowboard, the K2 Eclipse boot (his), the the Atomic Beta Ride 10,50 Carbon ski boot (hers), and Salomon’s Crossmax 9 Pilot (hers)

The G3 Targa T-9 telly binding and Work Stinx telemark ski

The Burton Cascade SPLT 70 snowboard, the DaKine Dually, and waterproof Smartwool Bacountry Mittens

The Arbor S-Series snowboard ($470) is an all-terrain pleasure monster, thanks to a performance-enhancing wooden topsheet and internal carbon-fiber torsion rods. The K2 Eclipse boot ($200) uses triple-density foam to create a custom fit the first time you wear ’em. On deck, the K2 V-12 Magma binding ($230) instantly translates steering from boot to board to edge via magnesium-injected base plates and anatomical carbon highbacks. Backcountry riders who earn their turns have learned that when it comes to ascending, snowshoes and approach skis simply can’t match the speed and efficiency of a splitboard. The 170 centimeters of the Burton Cascade SPLT 70 ($900 board, $130 climbing skins, $50 crampons) float and shred so smoothly, you’ll never believe they were sliced down the middle. If you ski mostly in-bounds with a yen for carving high-speed turns and floating in powder, the Salomon Crossmax 9 Pilot ($975, skis and bindings) is your one-ski-fits-all. The Pilot system uses laterally mounted bindings and reduces the distance between the toe and heel mounts, eliminating the nonflexing dead spot underfoot (read: They turn on a dime). But if you do occasionally duck out-of-bounds, the cuff of the new Atomic Beta Ride 10.50 Carbon ski boot ($595) holds the Recco, a battery-free avalanche-beacon reflector that’s been used in Europe for over 15 years. Plus, its shell design is like an Atomic World Cup race boot tweaked with softer and more comfortable plastic in the toe, ankle, instep, and shin. Classic bumper sticker: “Free your heel, your mind will follow.” Built in the same mold as K2’s AK Launcher alpine ski, the ultrafat Work Stinx ($499) telemark ski set the standard for off-piste powder, measuring 118 millimeters at the tip, 88 at the waist, and 105 at the tail. The asymmetric flex bellow—not to mention the new three-buckle closure and higher, stiffer cuffs—of the Scarpa T2 boot ($459) matches the natural curve of your toes for comfort and power steering off the back foot. The reengineered G3 Targa T-9 ($195) telly binding is steel-reinforced and battle-tested, good qualities when you’re miles from any road. Add tasty extras like G3’s new 15-millimeter Shim Extenders ($25) and the High-Performance Heel Kit ($25), and you’ve got quicker turning edge-to-edge as well. Thanks to a proprietary glue mixture and a clip at the tail, Black Diamond’s 110-millimeter Ascension Nylon Clipfix Climbing Skins ($131) are good for yo-yoing your favorite hill. Lightweight, adjustable poles are key for all hiking snow sliders. The aluminum, three-section Life-Link Odyssey III ($100) offers a backpack-friendly 30-inch range of adjustment and composite lower sections for shatter-proof flexibility. With its easy-to-understand digital readout showing direction and distance to your lost companion, the Backcountry Access Tracker DTS ($300) is the quickest way to find someone buried alive. Period. In a time-sensitive search for a buried partner, don’t fumble to connect your ski poles; rely instead on a dedicated probe pole like the collapsing one that nestles inside the shovel handle in the Backcountry Access Companion shovel/probe ($90). Haul everything in the DaKine Blade pack ($100), which carries skis and snowboards horizontally so they don’t bang against your legs. The harnesses on the larger, snowboard-specific Arc’Teryx M40 ($225) render flapping boards immobile. When you’re going for really big air (as in “airline”), luggage with wheels makes life sooo much easier. The taco-style DaKine Dually ($140)—with heavy webbing, cinch-shut closures, and a big inside pocket—uses a pair of in-line skating wheels to convey a veritable quiver: a pair of skis, a pair of boards, or a pair of each.

The Well-Outfitted Trekker

Low Arko GTX boots, Prospector Pant, and Kavu’s mesh-vented Trailrunner

Timberland’s Mountain Athletic Zone pack

Outdoor Research Flex Tex Low Gaiters

Traveling light is the only way to trek, particularly when teahouses are providing your food and shelter. When shopping for gear, think versatility; temperature extremes will demand layering, packability, and durability.


Apparel A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step…in a supportive pair of waterproof, lightweight hiking boots. Gore-Tex liners and beefy soles bolster the Lowa Arko GTX ($185) and the Scarpa Vento Mid GTX ($150). Both feel cozy right out of the box, but break them in for at least a month, and treat yourself to the extra stability and cushioning of Superfeet’s Trim-to-Fit Synergizer foot beds ($30) to minimize blisters on the trail. Pair Bridgedale’s A.T. CoolMax Liner ($8)—an easy-to-clean lightweight liner for fighting friction—with the Bridgedale Trekker sock ($16)—a soft, reinforced blend of wool, nylon, and polypro, with a touch of Lycra to keep the high-density padding under the heel and toe from slipping. But get a pebble in there and you’re doomed. The featherweight (4-ounce) and stretchy Outdoor Research Flex Tex Low Gaiters ($33) seal your boot-tops and laces against mud, puddles, and yes, pebbles. For morning jogs don Kavu’s mesh-vented Trailrunner hat ($22), but on the passes in the wind, swap that sun lid for the insulating fleece of Mountain Hardwear’s Phillips Head ($20). The wind-resistant, water-repellent nylon and 700-fill of The North Face’s Nuptse down jacket ($199) weighs just 23 ounces and compresses into a tiny pocket. But for temperature control and sweat removal on the way up, layer wisely. The SmartWool Next to Skin Wear (zip-neck top, $74; bottoms, $60) wicks moisture faster than any other base layer, keeping you dry and insulated against cold and heat. Mountain Hardwear’s Monkey Man or Monkey Woman Jacket ($110) makes an ideal second layer: breathable, durable, water-repellent, and quick-drying, with the highest warmth-to-weight ratio of any Polartec fleece. Or try Patagonia’s R2 Jacket ($145), with stretch panels at the elbows, cuffs, and torso sides. With or without long underwear, the Cloudveil Maverick ($140) serves as a rugged do-anything mountain pant, spun from Schoeller Dynamic Micro for moisture and temperature management, wind stopping, and abrasion protection. Or go with Cloudveil’s slightly heavier Prospector Pant ($135). For the mist and rain, bring Marmot’s lightweight, nylon-coated, and seam-taped PreCip Jacket ($99) and Pant ($69). Protect your hands from sunburn and wind with the lightweight fleece and reinforced palms of The North Face’s Pamir WindStopper Glove ($50).

The Well-Outfitted Trekker

Gear

SmartWool Next to Skin Wear base layer (his), Nalgene Go Mug, the ���ϳԹ��� Medical Kits’ Savvy Traveler, and The North Face’s Nuptse down jacket.

Rite in the Rain notebook

Patagonia’s R2 Jacket, Cloudveil Maverick mountain pant, and Black Diamond’s collapsible, three-section Ascent trekking poles

Most likely, porters will haul your baggage, but you’ll need a comfy daypack to carry on-trail necessities. The Timberland Mountain Athletics Zone ($55) divides 2,700 cubic inches three ways, but for more technical features like water-bottle pockets and front-panel access, try the 2,500-cubic-inch Gregory Fury ($125). Trekking poles are nice for redistributing weight, and the grip-mounted shock absorbers of Black Diamond’s collapsible, three-section Ascent ($100) soften the trail even more. Yes, the views are unreal, but don’t fry your eyes! Wraparound Smith Pivot Sliders ($99) provide 100 percent UV protection and come with three sets of polycarbonate lenses. If one gets scratched or broken on the rocky terrain, you’ve got two spare pairs of lightweight, shatterproof glasses. Bring those distant peaks into focus with Brunton’s Eterna compact 8×25 binoculars ($259). The rubber armor protects against trail knocks. For capturing the spectacle on film, the new 6.7-ounce Canon Elph LT270 ($230) offers an expanded viewfinder to help squeeze in all those mountains and the option to shoot in panoramic format. Protect your APS memory bank with the crush-resistant AccuCase Camera Case ($22). And for traditional memories, the waterproof paper of Rite in the Rain’s notebooks ($3-$12) matches its All-Weather Pen ($7), which writes underwater, upside down, and in deathly temps from minus 50 to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The ubiquitous dirt, road apples, and cramped kitchens encountered trekking abroad quickly sully hard-to-clean hose-and-bladder hydration systems. Solution: the classic 32-ounce, wide-mouth, puncture-proof Nalgene water bottles ($9), which are are easy to wash and available in fresh new colors like yellow and pink. Plus they screw right onto MSR’s small, light, and field-maintainable Water Works II water filter ($130), featuring a ceramic element and carbon core. The insulated, two-in-one Nalgene Go Mug ($18)—good for keeping yak-butter tea piping hot—comes with a pop-out spare cup and an attached carabiner for clip-on convenience. At night, the 600-fill, 15-degree Big Agnes Lost Ranger sleeping bag ($199) will keep you plenty warm, and during the day its light weight (2 pounds, 12 ounces) and compressibility will keep you unencumbered. It also sports an innovative sleeve for slipping in your sleeping pad; no more sliding around and waking up on top of your boots. It holds most sleeping pads, though the 1.5-inch-thick, 20-inch wide, self-inflating Big Agnes REM Pad ($70) is a natural fit. Light your way to the outhouse with the 90-gram Black Diamond Moonlight ($35). On three AAA batteries, it burns an amazing 140 hours. The lemon-flavored oral rehydration salts and diarrhea-relief pills in ���ϳԹ��� Medical Kits’ Savvy Traveler ($55) are vital for obvious reasons but so are the sutures, syringes, needles, bandages, and medications. You can turn a visit to a slimy hospital into a sterile, well-stocked experience. You’ll even have enough to donate extra supplies to Medicines for Nepal (310-556-0809; )—a program whereby trekkers help stock medical outposts along their routes.

The Well-Outfitted Beachgoer

Men’s Hawaiian Shorts and Woman’s Skirt from Immersion Research, the Flip Snorkel and Fino Mask, and Twin Jen Full Foot fins

Oakley’s Big Smoke Sandal, Mountain Hardwear’s long-sleeve Canyon Shirt, Sportif’s Convertible Pant, the Rip Curl Aerial watch, Ortlieb Big Zip, Patagonia’s Puckerware Shirt, and Merrill’s Shoreline Stretch water shoes

Whether your locus is marine or riverine, water is the star of the show, and like any celebrity, it makes particular demands. Whether you’re bonefishing Bahamian flats, longboarding in Baja, or sailing in Mission Bay, you need airy, quick-dry garb, waterproof paraphernalia, and some cutting-edge toys.


Clothing

Safely crash yacht-club luncheons wearing Sportif’s Teton Polo ($48); it has the Republican looks of a classic cotton polo but incorporates 45 percent CoolMax for quick-dryability, while a loose weave lets sea breezes blow through. The organic cotton/polyester blend of Patagonia’s Puckerware Shirt ($58) is crinkled for a slightly rumpled look and a cool, loose feel. The Mountain Hardwear long-sleeve, two-ply supplex Canyon Shirt ($82) has more technical cachet—it was designed for canyoneering, when you need sun protection, ventilation, and instant dry-out. Nice touch: uncrackable rubber buttons. The Prana Congo Short ($49) is made from a sensual sueded nylon, has a neoprene waistband (comfy wet or dry), and a big pleated cargo pocket that’s zippered and Velcroed for security and mesh-sided for draining. Carabiner grommets on the legs are a cool touch even if you haven’t a clue what they’re for. Immersion Research’s nylon Surf Pants with draining pocket ($62) look like the offspring of board shorts and blue jeans—wear them for long days of sunny wet stuff (rafting, sailing) or as an apres-surf cover. Sportif’s almost-dressy Matecumbe Convertible Pant ($70) mates the zip-off leg thing with a built-in CoolMax brief; ergo the rugged, multipocketed, sanded-nylon trousers are also worthy swim trunks. The long-cut Men’s Hawaiian Shorts ($55) and Women’s Skirt ($44) from Immersion Research utilize a supple microfiber that’s amazingly soft, yet immune to sogginess. You wanna touch ’em as well as wear ’em. For women, Tyr’s Reversible Tankini ($75) is at once sexy and jocky; the long-cut top and bottom stay put even in Ho’okipa waves. Reversing either half of the Lycra/Antron blend suit gives you four different combos.
Head and Toes

Kavu’s Chillba hat ($29): A broad-brimmed, conical foam upper is shaped like those of rice farmers, and it barely touches your noggin, which is coolly swathed in adjustable, wide-open-mesh webbing. Bonus: It floats. Hats are helpless in the face of glare, though. The polarized, blue-mirrored lenses of Costa Del Mar’s Fathom sunglasses ($149) eliminate glare and deliver a crisp, better-than-reality view while nonslip temples keep them where you want them. But if you’re spending time in the water rather than looking at it, strap on Oakley’s Water Jacket ($190)—a great surf or windsurf shade; with its boldly wrapped and vented frame, head strap, lanyard, and polycarbonate lenses, it borders on a goggle. The Teva Spitfire Deck Sandals ($79) combine Teva’s most tenacious retention system (buckled straps rather than Velcro; your foot will come off before the sandals do) with grippy soles that won’t mark the deck of the yacht you’re staring at from behind the marina gate. Or go casual with Gravis’s leather Low Tide flip-flops ($40). Oakley’s Big Smoke Sandal ($70) is a roomy neoprene-lined slip-in that snugs with one yank of a toggled cord; an ample carbon-rubber outsole, injection-molded EVA midsole, and urethane-padded footbed combine to create outstanding foot support. Merrell’s Shoreline Stretch water shoes ($70) aren’t quite so supportive—but they’re still more so than most ventilated water shoes, and they provide full-foot protection with a neoprene-and-mesh upper.

The Well-Outfitted Beachgoer

Tools and Bags

Teva Spitfire Deck Sandals and Patagonia’s Wet/Dry Divider

Gravis's leather Low Tide sandal

Tools

I prefer to carry my own snorkeling gear rather than rely on ratty rental stuff that someone else recently slobbered into for an hour or two. This Scubapro outfit is lock for tropical travels: The Flip Snorkel ($42) folds neatly in half for easy packing and quick-clips to the Fino Mask ($68), a low-profile mask whose twin lenses can accommodate a corrective prescription. Add the Twin Jet Full Foot fins ($159)—the split-fin design works like a propeller for easy propulsion. Surf’s up! Or is it? Where are those tide tables? Oh, yeah: on my wrist. The Rip Curl Aerial watch with Automatic Tide System ($220) has dials that graphically show the moon phase, tide height, and tide range for any area, on an elegant analog face (dig the metallic red) that’s waterproof to a deeper-than-you’ll-ever-go 1,000 feet. Record your undersea excursions at less body-crushing depths like 33 feet with the Minolta Vectis Weathermatic ($473), an Advanced Photo System (APS) camera with a sure grip, built-in flash, and short zoom. I’ve dumb-lucked my way to Norbert Wu-quality shots. Well, almost.


Bags

Whatever needs to stay dry stays dry in the Ortlieb Big Zip ($150), which combines the absolute waterproofness of a drybag with the convenience of an 8,500-cubic-inch duffel by way of a waterproof zipper. For a hands-free goat-path commute down to and back from your secret snorkeling venue, secure your stuff in Patagonia’s flipper-size Wet/Dry Divider ($58). Wet stuff stays in the outer mesh pouch, your change of clothes in a waterproof slot, and your precious items in two smaller pouches. Stash your most precious possession (cell phone, of course) in a Voyageur Waterproof Phone/GPS Case ($22), a mini drybag for electronics, with a clear vinyl face. As for your second-most precious possession, toilet paper, the new Ortlieb T-Pack ($40) keeps a roll of TP just the way you like it: bone dry. Paper included.

The Well-Outfitted ���ϳԹ���r

Osprey’s Transporter duffel-to-backpack convertible (on his back), Ex Officio’s Double Haul Shorts (his), Nike’s ACG Air Trigo (his), Timberland’s Trek Compactor 30 (wheeled behind him), and Victorinox Swiss Arm E-Motion 360-Degree Trek Pack Plus

Timberland Comrade II Shoulder Bag

Gravis Checkpoint pack and the A/T Ventilation Shirt

Here’s my tripartite schlepping strategy for virtually any adventure journey: Pack one primary duffel, rolling bag, or convertible pack and check it. Pack a daypack with in-flight paraphernalia like books and spillover from the big bag, and wear it. Inside it, or dangling from a shoulder, is my nerve-center bag containing tickets, passport, camera, and notebook.


Luggage

Wheeled bags make packing decisions easy: If you think you need it, bring it. At 7,100 cubic inches, the Gravis Convoy Roller ($299) is a beast of a duffel. The top flap peels away lengthwise to reveal the main compartment without any annoying flaps to hinder the search for your duds. Inside are niches for a toiletry kit and laundry bag (both included), while a separate lower compartment stashes two pairs of hiking boots with room to spare. JanSport’s 28-inch Wheeled Footlocker Duffel (6,000 cubic inches, $180) utilizes a new cushy gel-filled shoulder pad and a different two-story configuration; beneath a midfloor is a full-length basement that isolates damp and smelly snorkeling gear from the upper tier, where your linen shirts store nicely. If you prefer one giant compartment, just zip away the divider. Timberland’s Trek Compactor 30 (5,600 cubic inches, $200) has an inner structure that lends the bag rigidity when open, yet collapses flat for storage. No surprise that the Victorinox Swiss Army E-Motion 360-Degree 20-inch Trek Pack Plus (4,050 cubic inches, $325) has multiple “blades.” It’s a roller that converts to a backpack with sculpted, padded waist straps and an internal frame that follows the curve of the spine. Torso length is nonadjustable, but the bag comes in three sizes. Three docking bags—daypack, lumbar pack, and shoulder bag—attach to the mother ship. Osprey’s Transporter (5,400 cubic inches, $134) duffel-to-backpack convertible is refreshingly simple. It uses foam-padded sidewalls to envelop one big compartment, and the harness is equally simple—maybe too simple, since it lacks waist-belt padding—but it’s easily adjustable for torso length. As for nerve-center bags, opt for one of these three. The Timberland Comrade II Shoulder Bag ($45) is just big (and padded) enough for a point-and-shoot and the usual travel ephemera, and it converts to a lumbar pack. The Gravis Checkpoint ($50) is bigger, and the “peat” color looks pleasingly like fish scales but is urbanized with pouches for cell phone, PDA, and minidisc. Patagonia’s Atom ($70) raises the style bar for shoulder bags. It amounts to a teardrop-shaped half-daypack that you sling snugly over one shoulder a la bota bag.
Clothing

Pack a quick-drying synthetic long-sleeve shirt and a pair of convertible trousers that zip down to shorts, and you’ve got yourself a full travel wardrobe. A good start: The North Face’s T-Cargo Pant ($69) and A/T Ventilation Shirt ($79). The soft nylon pant features huge side cargo pockets and a zippered interior pocket that functions as a built-in passport pouch. The stretch-woven shirt has a smidgen of give and breathability, extra ventilation by way of armpit zips and a mesh back yoke, and a pass-for-dress-shirt look. Alternatives: The Sportif Wind Knot Shirt ($62) also has underarm zips and back yoke, with added utility in the form of roomy pleated pockets, roll-up sleeve tabs, and a sun-protective collar. The L.L. Bean Stretch Guide Pant ($125) lacks zip-off leggings, but its Schoeller Dryskin stretch-woven nylon (with CoolMax lining against the skin) is the ultimate travel-pant confection: light, breathable, and quick-drying. Or go with shorts like Ex Officio’s peach-fuzz-soft, six-pocketed Double Haul Short ($48). For women, the svelte nylon Nike ACG Girl Convertible Skirt ($60) transfers the zip-off concept to a more feminine form. Whether you go ankle-length modest or short and gammy, you get pockets and a hidden security pouch. In the undergarment department, Ex Officio is reigning king: The ExO Active Tee ($38) is amazingly light and dressy, and the new ExO Give ‘n Go Stretch Briefs for men and women ($18, $16) are the quickest-drying undertrou out there.

The Well-Outfitted ���ϳԹ���r

On Your Feet and Extra Essentials

Sportiff Wind Knot Shirt and Patagonia’s Atom shoulder bag

Petzl Zipka Headlamp, Nikon Sportstar III 8×25, Eagle Creek’s Pack-It System, and Victorinox Swiss Army Altimeter Knife

On Your Feet

Low-cut hiking shoes with sturdy soles are perfect everyday cloppers. Nike’s ACG Air Trigo ($65) has moderate lugs, ample EVA cush, and an athletic feel. Montrail’s Ultra II All-Terrain Shoe ($90) doesn’t have the fast feel, but its ample volume, airy mesh sides, and long-lasting polyurethane midsole coddle travel-abused dogs. In either case, you need low-volume socks that wick away moisture and pad potential trouble spots.
Dahlgren’s Dri-Stride Hiking LV socks ($15) are a perfect fit, with a blend of wool, sensual alpaca, and synthetics that keep feet protected and dry.


Extra Essentials

If you don’t pack binoculars, you’re sure to regret it. The new Nikon Sportstar III 8×25 ($89) fits in a chest pocket, weighs 10.4 ounces, and delivers screamingly crisp optics, though eyeglass wearers should look elsewhere. Speaking of regrets, most plastic shampoo bottles are guaranteed to leak; the eight various-size containers in the Nalgene Travel Set ($9), available through L.L. Bean, are guaranteed not to. Eagle Creek’s Pack-It System 300-cubic-inch 2-Sided Cube ($22), with divider and mesh top and bottom, obviates organizational chaos. You need the blades, you need the corkscrew; might as well know the altitude and temperature, too—a subtle digital readout graces the usual-size Victorinox Swiss Army Altimeter Knife ($97). Headlamps make the handiest travel lights, and the new Petzl Zipka Headlamp ($45, Tecate not included) is the handiest of the genre; the head strap retracts, so it’s clean and compact.

The Well-Outfitted Techno Geek

JVC’s GR-DVP3 (left), and Panasonic’s Toughbook 34

Garmin’s eTrek Vista, Magellan MAP 330, and Qualcomm GSP1600 (left to right)

Olympus’s D-370 digital camera, and the Palm105 with the Palm Portable Keyboard

Postcards? Sweet, but how 20th-century, especially when you can zap home daily dispatches via e-mail—or better yet, via e-journals, digital pix, and videos you upload to your Web site. Today’s selection of on-the-go wizmongery, with neato features like instant global communication capabilities and onscreen editing, allows you to tote a traveling studio and virtual darkroom. All products are PC and Mac compatible, unless otherwise noted.


Stills and Thrills

Capture digital still images by the dozens on tiny reusable memory cards, but be sure to bring several for your camera as Norma’s General Store outside Manila probably doesn’t sell them. Upon your return, just download the winning pix to your PC or Mac; then pump out glossies from Epson’s Stylus Photo 780 ($99). Similarly, the matchbox-miniature MiniDV tape has revolutionized moviemaking, bringing us diminutive digital camcorders that capture up to 90 minutes of Hollywood-quality video and CD-quality sound—or more than 500 snapshot-quality stills—per tape. The 1.3-megapixel resolution of Olympus’s D-370 ($249) is perfect for 4×6 prints. But while many digital still cameras poop out after a hundred or so shots, the D-370 will squeeze off up to 5,000 (with minimum use of the flash and LCD monitor) before its four AAs give up the ghost. The easily pocketable Nikon Coolpix 775 ($450) is the best compromise we’ve seen between size, performance, and price. Its Nikkor 3x zoom lens and 2.1-megapixel resolution deliver 4×6 prints indistinguishable from film. A one-touch button magically uploads pictures (via your USB laptop or an Internet-cafe computer) to your free NikonNet.com Web site. Pro shooters demand 3.3-megapixel performance for no-compromise 8×10 (or larger) prints. But such high-res images can be memory hogs—in some cases requiring an entire $35, 16MB memory card for just one shot. Enter the Sony MVC-CD300 ($1,000). Its built-in CD recorder burns images (over 1,000 of ’em with a low-res setting) on tiny $5 discs that hold 156MB. True, it’s a bit bulky—about the size of a brick—but that’s a small price for its performance and capacity. With image stabilization, a swing-out LCD monitor, a FireWire port (for editing on your computer), and a sharp 10x optical zoom lens, Canon’s ZR20 ($700) digital camcorder delivers the performance needed for your yeti documentary. JVC’s GR-DVP3 ($1,700) is gear lust defined. Not only is it the tiniest camcorder on the market—stashing spylike into a pocket at a feathery three-quarters of a pound—it also captures Web site-ready MPEG4 video clips and stores stills on either tape or removable memory cards.


Just Try to Get Lost

Now thanks to Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) technology, most receivers are accurate in North America to within a couple of yards (compared to the 30-foot GPS standard of yore); most also have 12-channel reception for finding satellites quickly. The Magellan MAP 330 ($269) is WAAS-equipped, thrashing-tough, and buoyant. Built-in maps display major U.S. roads, parks, and other points of interest. The GeoDiscovery Geode ($289), also WAAS-equipped, turns any Handspring PDA (see below) into a full-fledged GPS. Bonus: GeoDiscovery.com has downloadable maps (free), city guides ($10), and national-park guides ($5); plus it hosts a bustling online community for swapping data files on other cool destinations. You won’t find Florence’s Ristorante Acqua Al Due on a map. But with Garmin’s WAAS-capable eTrex Vista ($349) and MapSource MetroGuide Italy CD-ROM ($100; other guides also available), you can download the restaurant’s coordinates from your Windows PC to your Vista, then march precisely to your plate of assaggio di primi. The Vista also has an electronic compass and altimeter: That’s amore. Took a wrong turn in the Amazon? Just phone for help with the Qualcomm GSP1600 ($899) combo satellite/cell phone with Globalstar service (plans start at 79 cents per minute). If you’d prefer to e-mail your SOS, the phone doubles as a slow (96 baud) but useful wireless modem for most computers and PDAs.

The Well-Outfitted Techno Geek

Think Globally, Act Locally

Canon's ZR20, Sangean ATS606AP radio, and Handspring's Visor Edge

Apple’s iBook

Lest you consider them glorified address books, please note that today’s Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs)—with a healthy 8MB of memory for itineraries, journal entries, and software—link up with great add-ons like Lonely Planet’s CitySync travel guides (starting at $20). Handspring’s Visor Edge ($399) and Palm’s color m505 ($449) run Palm software and offer sleek metal casings, speedy processors, and rechargeable batteries good for at least 12 hours of uninterrupted use. Both support add-on accessories and modules such as wireless modems and GPS receivers (like the Geode). Palm’s m105 ($199) is more affordable and connects to the 7.9-ounce Palm Portable Keyboard ($99). We also dig InnoGear’s MiniJam—a Visor-compatible MP3 music-player module. Choose between a 32MB model ($199) or a meaty 96MB unit ($299), which can store roughly 90 minutes of nonstop Dylan. Can’t decide between Peter Gabriel and Peter Tosh? Bring them both with the sturdy Walkman-size Archos Jukebox Recorder ($349). The 6GB hard drive holds well over 1,500 tunes; the built-in mike lets it double as a portable audio recorder, and it’s compatible with any USB-port-equipped PC or Mac. Apple’s 4.9-pound iBook (starting at $1,299) is the bee’s knees for laptop geekery. Upload scenes from your digital camcorder via the FireWire port and edit on the road with the bundled iMovie video software. If Windows is your choice and weight your bane, check out Panasonic’s 3.8-pound, magnesium-clad Toughbook 34 (starting at $2,699). Dust- and water-resistant, one reportedly survived being run over by a Humvee. Slip in an Orange Micro FireWire PC Card ($99, including video-editing software), and you’re ready for mobile moviemaking even in Mongolia. The paperback-size and digitally programmable Sangean ATS606AP ($150) keeps it simple: The world-band radio tunes in AM, FM, longwave and shortwave stations—which were delivering information instantly, anywhere, long before the Internet was a glimmer in some nerd’s eye.

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Water From A Stone

The Desert Always Provides

America’s Sandbox: the dunes of California’s Death Valley

There is nothing I desire more than this. I am moving through the desert, walking the barrens of southwest Arizona to the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge. The thought of water is potent, almost obscene—and when I find it, it is never passed with a casual glance. It is stared at. Admired. It becomes as powerful as fire.
My hat brim leaves a curve of midday shade across my face; from under it I watch the plain open in front of me. With my friend Irvin Fernandez, the manager of a wildlife refuge in California, I am taking three weeks to cross a couple hundred miles of daylong basins and volcanic peaks that stand as sheer as icebergs. I am careful about who I travel with out here. Irvin is a person to trust, a man who knows how to set a broken bone and care for the swell of a rattlesnake bite. Our eyes follow the terrain in the same way, trained to find any sign of water. We each carry only what we need for the day, so if we don’t find water now, we can last three, maybe five days until hallucinatory thirst overwhelms our bodies, until our tongues swell and our minds shrink and we collapse on the ground. But that won’t happen. Irvin is already a half-day’s walk ahead of me, scouting for a new source.


Every time we leave a water hole, there’s a feeling of free fall as we stretch across the desert in search of the next. These holes are not marked on any maps. They are sequestered up in the peaks, perched among capsized boulders and the stern postures of saguaro cacti. I figure I have ten miles to go before catching up with Irvin. My boots in the gravel make the sound of cracking walnuts as I head toward a thumb of rock a thousand feet tall where I will meet him by dark. I abandon the thought of his failure or success. There will be water. The desert always provides, even if a few days late.


I was born in the desert, as were my parents, and most of my grandparents. I grew up in love with its lethal desolation. The silence and starkness always seemed impenetrable, yet I could somehow walk out into it. I could pause in a dry, sandy wash, smelling the heat, absolutely still. Every venture felt like a miracle.


The deserts of North America—the Mojave, Chihuahuan, Sonoran, and Great Basin—range from apricot to garlic, spanning a total of more than 500,000 square miles. The Sonoran is rich with tiny-leaved trees and giant, columnar cacti, while the sparse and open Mojave is home to strange and twisted Joshua trees with grass-skirt trunks. Rugged shrubland of agaves and yuccas marks the Chihuahuan, and the wildly diverse Great Basin is sagebrush basins in one spot, a hive of bare canyons and cliffs in another.


These places are where you come to see what the inside of your planet looks like—the ribs, scapulas, and tender membranes brought to the surface. I’ve spent decades piecing together a Gray’s Anatomy of the desert, filling notebooks: 120 consecutive days in the Grand Canyon, an entire winter on foot in the canyonlands of southern Utah, 37 days across the Cabeza Prieta of southwest Arizona, and thousands of other miles walking here and there.


I have found in all of this travel that common definitions don’t work for the desert. When you return and say the word “creek,” you have to explain that it is not the pastoral creek that we have in our minds. The rare creeks of the Chihuahuan Desert in southeast Arizona flow only at night in the high heat of summer. During the day their gravel beds are fruitlessly passed over, mistaken for dry washes. Somehow, at night, there are fish.


The desert guards every one of its oddities. Near roads I frequently find abandoned couches unraveling under the sun, and hulks of washing machines as ancient and pitted as Sputnik. I have to smile at these. People come to dump their sins, but nothing washes away.


I arrive at our landmark just before sunset. My partner sits atop his pack as if floating on it, lost at sea. I know instantly that he has found water ahead. Otherwise, he would have unloaded his gear for a camp. “About a mile from here” is his greeting.


We reach the water hole, a depression in the canyon floor, in the blue of dusk. Dragonflies are dabbing invisible eggs into the pool. So primed for this ritual are desert dragonflies that they will drop their eggs onto the reflective hoods of cars if there is no true water source nearby. About 800 gallons, this is rainwater four months old. We do not cool our foreheads with it. We take only what we need and then back away, as if bowing out of a church.


The next morning we explore above the water hole, working up into the narrow canyon. On the ground we find something completely unexpected, the dead fan of a palm tree. Picking it up as if it were the wing of some great bird, we study it carefully. Palms are mythological in this part of the desert, as strange as gnomes.


Rounding the next bend is like discovering a forest of candelabras. Two dozen palm trees are crowded back here, and I feel the familiar cold flush of adrenaline in my body, the one that tells me to pay attention, that I may never see such a thing again. Tall and seductively thin, the palms soar 40 feet up against the rhyolite walls. There are places in this desert that have not seen rain in seven years. Yet here is a tropical holdout, leftovers from 10,000 years ago.


A breeze comes through and the canyon erupts into the sound of a waterfall. The leaves splash and shudder against each other, a sound that I never dared imagine in this desert. I close my eyes and stand as still as possible, because suddenly this will end, and the desert will again be dry.

Rattle & Roll

When mountain biking this swath of border country, you hope that all the snake bites is your derailleur

SONORAN > IN BRIEF Classic desert full of 50-foot-tall saguaro cacti and endless small mesquite, paloverde, and ironwood trees. Its seven subdivisions, including California’s Colorado Desert, cover 120,000 square miles that are the hottest and driest in North America.

Dodging rattlesnakes on a mountain bike is easy. Here’s the scene: It’s just after daybreak on Puerto Blanco Drive, a 53-mile dirt road that loops through Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in southwestern Arizona. Cacti and ocotillos throw confusing shadows across the track. I’m cranking along at good speed when a strip of shade suddenly turns three-dimensional. A microsecond for the brain to register yup, snake; a fraction more for yikes, rattlesnake! It recoils into a defensive loop, and as I skim past I lift both legs high. Nine times out of ten the snake just rattles, and if it strikes, all it usually gets is a mouthful of Shimano. This one just glares.

If Puerto Blanco Drive were a video game, it would be called something like “Bike or Die.” The loop is doable in a day, but on this April trip I stop halfway. Camping is allowed anywhere except within a half-mile of the road, so I hide the bike and lug the panniers between two volcanic outcroppings, where I lay out a pad and sleeping bag. The view makes one wonder why we call it desert: It’s a tawny jungle of ironwood and paloverde trees, bur sage, the park’s eponymous cacti, and brittlebush.
For the last dozen miles of Puerto Blanco Drive, the road parallels a sagging barbed-wire fence and a highway sprinkled with tire-repair shops and taquerias that mark the border. A platoon of Mexican army troops on patrol waves. A mile farther on I risk dire punishment by hopping the fence to buy an orange Fanta. At last there’s but one hazard left en route to my truck: the four miles of Arizona 85, where hordes of motor homes careen southward. I feel like a spawning salmon in grizzly country, but there’s cold beer in the truck. Bike or Die.

Details: Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument [520-387-6849; ] is about 150 miles west of Tucson. There’s no water on Puerto Blanco Drive, which starts about a quarter-mile from the visitor center.

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Backpacking the Superstition Mountains
Countless treasure seekers have failed to find the fabled Lost Dutchman Gold Mine in this wilderness 40 miles east of Phoenix, and it’s unlikely you’ll do better. So skip the crowds near Weaver’s Needle and enjoy the less-traveled nine-mile Reavis Ranch Trail, which winds from desert into oak woodland. Near the abandoned ranch house at trail’s end, set up camp alongside Reavis Creek and explore the side canyons. Season: Spring and fall. Distance: 18 miles round-trip. Do-It-Yourself: From Phoenix, head east on U.S. 60 and then north on Arizona 88 about 30 miles to Forest Service Road 212. Guided Trips: Apache Trail Tours runs customized backpacking trips into the Superstitions (all-inclusive three-day trips, $499 per person; 480-982-7661).

Sea Kayaking Isla del Tiburón
Two miles off mainland Mexico in the Gulf of California, Tiburón is a pristine, 435-square-mile desert refugio—with beaches. The island’s interior harbors bighorn sheep and coyotes, while dolphins and sea lions frolic offshore. From Punta Chueca, a Seri Indian village, paddle the channel and then head south to explore the island’s cliffs and rock islets. Season: Fall, winter, and spring. Distance: 30 miles round-trip. Do-It-Yourself: Punta Chueca is about 315 miles south of Tucson. Ask in the village for naturalist Ernesto Molina, who will collect a camping fee (about $5 per night). Guided Trips: Maine Island Kayaks leads trips to Tiburón in February and March ($1,200-$1,500 per person; 800-796-2373; ).

Backpacking Aravaipa Canyon
The 11-mile hike up Arizona’s Aravaipa Canyon is one long bushwhack. You’ll wade through the creek (a lot), hop boulders, and push through mesquite. Watch for bighorn sheep and mountain lions on the 1,000-foot canyon walls. A strong hiker can make it in a day, but it’s better to backpack in for two or three—camp halfway up at Horse Camp Canyon—and explore some of the nine side canyons. Season: Fall, winter, and spring. Distance: 11 miles one way. Do-It-Yourself: The West Trailhead is 70 miles northeast of Tucson; exit at the East Trailhead or do the 22-mile out-and-back hike. Permits cost $5 per day; call for reservations (928-348-4400). Information: . There’s car camping at both trailheads.

The Phantom Stampede

Coyote howls and other high-desert chills in Joshua Tree National Park

MOJAVE > IN BRIEF The smallest desert in North America, the Mojave is a transition zone between the Sonoran and Great Basin covering 25,000 square miles, where distinctive Joshua trees and creosote bushes dominate the landscape.

They always wait to tear through camp until after you’ve stargazed yourself into bleary slumber. Then the frenzied desperation of blood-lusting coyotes sends you leaping from your epidermis and burrowing deeper into your down cocoon. It lasts as long as a buffalo stampede, although you never hear footfall, only sixteenth-note yips and whole-note howls, followed by the unearthly frequencies of rabbits in the grip of death.

The aural horror of this nighttime pageant is my dark lure to the Joshua Tree wilderness. It’s a chill you don’t get in the car campgrounds, where you hear the coyotes, but mingled with the climbers’ campfire stories and the truck radios of Marines patrolling for Twentynine Palms girls.

Before I discovered a wilder, lonelier alternative, I spent many nights in just such a car camp—Indian Cove, in the northern part of the park. I’d hole up there with groups of friends to try out the guidebook climbs in a vast jumble of boulders called the Wonderland of Rocks. But I’d always noticed, off the Indian Cove approach road, a strange, semidistinct track that headed west across flat sand before it disappeared—where? I resolved to find out. I loaded my pack with a couple of collapsible gallon jugs of water and set off alone toward the horizon, only slightly put off by the name, Boy Scout Trail. To my delight, it loped southwest into a wash that cleaved a northern extension of the Wonderland, and soon I was in a solitary defile surrounded by rock hills and boulders. I hiked half of the eight-mile trail before setting up my tent in the stone cloisters, where I could boulder for hours amid a maze of sandpaper-grippy rocks, rest in the shade, watch lizards rustle by, and feel the heat of day yield to high-desert chill. It’s where I return for a convenient dose of solitude, and the sounds of wildness that still haunt my favorite patch of Mojave Desert sand. —Robert Earle Howells

Details: Joshua Tree National Park [760-367-5500; ] Entry fee, $10 per vehicle; backcountry camping is free.

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Mountain Biking Death Valley
You could take the easy way out and bike Death Valley National Park’s cool high country. But that’s not why you’re here. Get the real low-down desert experience on the dirt road from Ubehebe Crater to Racetrack Playa. You’ll pedal out of volcanic rubble, through Joshua-tree forest, and finish in a mirage-inducing dry lake bed. Season: Anytime but summer. Distance: 28 miles one way. Do-It-Yourself: The road is out-and-back, so set up a shuttle or do the 56-mile round-trip. The campground ($10 per night) at Mesquite Springs is a good staging area. Elsewhere, you must camp two miles from the road. Information: 760-786-2331; .

Backpacking the Inyo Mountains Wilderness
In this precipitous 11,000-foot range overlooking the Saline Valley and the California-Nevada border, the rough 40-mile Lonesome Miner Trail starts at 1,800 feet among Mojave Desert sagebrush and climbs into bristlecone and pi-on pine at 8,600 feet, with a total of 17,000 feet of elevation gain on the way. The reward: immense views and three refurbished miners’ cabins for shelter. Season: Spring and fall. Do-It-Yourself: The southern trailhead in Hunter Canyon is reachable from Saline Road in Death Valley. The north trailhead is at Reward in the Owens Valley. Information: Call the Ridgecrest BLM office (760-384-5400) or visit .

Climbing Red Rock Canyon
Half an hour west of Las Vegas, the 200,000-acre Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area boasts more than 800 climbing routes ranging from 5.3 to 5.13+. A classic Red Rock ascent is the two-day, 13-pitch original route up Rainbow Wall, three hours from the Pine Creek trailhead. Then it’s a 5.9, A2 mix of finger cracks and laybacks with a bivy eight pitches up. Season: Year-round. Do-It-Yourself: The park is day-use only except with permits for multiday routes (702-647-5050; entry fee, $5 per car). Guided Trips: Jackson Hole Mountain Guides (702-254-0885; ) runs tours of the best climbs ($80-$125). —Jonathan Hanson

Night of the Blue Norther

A thawing-out spring break on the Rio Grande is anything but

CHIHUAHUAN > IN BRIEF Blooming yuccas, giant prickly-pear cacti, stark limestone peaks—the 175,000-square-mile Chihuahuan is North America’s largest and highest desert, lying mostly between 2,000 and 6,500 feet.

We were cooking curried mac and cheese on a cobble beach on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. It was the third day of a six-day, mid-March river trip and eight of us from the mountains of Colorado had come to Big Bend to thaw out and to clear our brains of a winter’s worth of snowdrifts and mud. Except it hadn’t been exactly hot. The river was low and rocky, hard on the two canoes and four kayaks. Since Santa Elena Canyon was too low to run, we put in just below it, with plans to head 73 bumpy miles downstream to Rio Grande Village. We wore sweaters and dragged our boats over slick shoals. But it was beautiful. The prickly pears were blooming yellow. Vermilion flycatchers flitted like brilliant wind-torn flowers along the bank.

Now we huddled around the small fire. I looked across the river at Texas. The Chisos Mountains, some 15 miles to the northwest, abrupt and rugged and black, absorbed the last light like a pile of coal. Then I noticed movement. A clump of spindly ocotillos waved urgently. Cottonwoods, just upstream, began to thrash. Then it hit. The fire exploded. The pot tipped and the lid sailed into Chihuahua. In the 50-mile-an-hour gusts, we were blinded by sand. It was a blue norther, out of nowhere. I fell asleep in the roar, and when I woke up in the night the wind had died and the temperature had plummeted.
In the morning there was ice in our water bottles and sand in our ears. We had to use Ziploc bags for gloves. It didn’t matter: That afternoon as I paddled slowly into a huge flock of ducks I heard the air rip. A dark missile sheared down over our heads, and a mallard burst sideways in a flurry of feathers and landed on the gravel bar; a peregrine falcon double-pumped his wings and proudly gripped his prey. The desert had worked its magic. In that moment I forgot an entire Colorado winter. —Peter Heller

Details: Desert Sports in nearby Terlingua [888-989-6900; ] rents canoes, kayaks, and rafts; provides shuttle service; and runs two- to seven-day guided raft trips on the Class II-IV Rio Grande.

More Chihuahuan ���ϳԹ���s

Camping in White Sands National Monument
The backcountry campsite in White Sands is barely a mile from the tourist road, but you might as well be on a planet circling another star. Gypsum dunes rise all around, glowing with almost phosphorescent power in the starlight. If you’re lucky a kit fox might poke its nose over a dune to check you out. And, staring at the brilliant night sky above, you’ll wonder: Hey, is that a meteor or a UFO headed toward Roswell? Season: Spring and fall. Distance: 2 miles round-trip. Do-It-Yourself: Permits are $3, available at the park visitor center only on the day of use. The backcountry campground has no facilities, and no fires are permitted (they would fuse the sand). Information: 505-479-6124; .

Hiking the Guadalupe Mountains
One of the Southwest’s “Sky Islands,” the Guadalupe Mountains soar 3,500 feet above the Chihuahuan desert scrub to Guadalupe Peak at 8,749 feet (the highest point in Texas). From the Pine Springs Campground you can launch a 25-mile backpacking trip through the pine- and fir-clad high country, with views across two states and two countries. Season: Spring, summer, and fall. Distance: 25 miles round-trip. Do-It-Yourself: Pine Springs Campground ($8 per night) is 103 miles east of El Paso, Texas, on U.S. 180. Take the Tejas Trail to 8,631-foot Bush Mountain, and loop back down on the Bush Mountain Trail. Pick up a free backcountry permit at the visitor center. Information: 915-828-3251; .

Mountain Biking the Big Hatchet Mountains
Agoraphobics need not apply. The section of the Continental Divide Trail that runs the length of the Little and Big Hatchet Mountains is smack in wide-open, Louis L’Amour country in New Mexico’s boot heel. For a cross-country challenge, start at the town of Old Hachita and head southeast for 30 miles along the flanks of the 8,000-foot ranges, and watch for desert bighorn sheep on the slopes. Season: Spring and fall. Distance: 30 miles one way. Do-It-Yourself: From Las Cruces take I-10 west 90 miles, and then go south on New Mexico 146 to Hachita. About 25 miles south on New Mexico 81, park at Old Hachita and head south on the road marked by a cairn. Information: New Mexico BLM, 505-525-4300. —Jonathan Hanson

The Gulch Club

Four friends play the slots in Utah’s canyon country and win big

GREAT BASIN >IN BRIEF This 200,000-square-mile basin-and-range country is known for its cold winters, beautiful sandstone arches, and slot canyons. Extending all the way into Canada, the Great Basin is dominated by plains full of sagebrush.

Hole in the Rock Road turned my dog’s teeth into castanets. A godforsaken strip of red dirt running southeast from the desert-rat town of Escalante, Utah, Hole in the Rock could be the most hideously washboarded road in the Lower 48. Driving to the slot canyons of Coyote Wash in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument meant 27 miles of rattled skulls for my wife M’Lissa, our friends Dave and Michele, and me. When we turned off to camp on the rim of the wash, we tagged the road “Gaping Chasm in One’s Soul Road”—though I’m sure it’s been called worse.

We awoke to sunrise over ruddy mesas, which glowed as if lit from within, laced up our trail-running shoes, and dropped into Coyote Wash, following a path of cairns through juniper bushes. All the slots in Coyote Wash are under a mile, so we hiked several that day.

First came Dry Fork, with 50-foot-tall slabs so close together that we could plant our hands on one wall and our feet on the other. Then came Spooky Gulch, one of the narrowest—even Calista Flockhart would need to turn sideways in order to squeeze through. The upper section of the half-mile-long gulch is technical, demanding an occasional bouldering move.

We ended with Coyote Wash’s signature slot: Peek-a-Boo Gulch, erosion at its weirdest. Peek-a-Boo winds for a quarter-mile among sandstone bridges, Swiss-cheese holes, spiral staircases, and V-shaped pinches. As Habitrail is to gerbils, Peek-a-Boo is to hikers—or at least it should be. To those Utahans worried that this part of the Great Basin will attract too many tourists, I say anyone who survives Hole in the Rock road deserves to explore there. Not that my dog is in any hurry to go back. —Rob Story

Details: The Escalante Interagency Visitor Center [435-826-5499] in Escalante issues backpacking and overnight-camping permits (backcountry camping is free). Its Dixie Interpretive Association sells maps and guidebooks. For more information, visit the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Web site, .

More Great Basin ���ϳԹ���s

Llama Trekking the San Rafael Swell
Once a million-acre sandstone bump, central Utah’s San Rafael Swell has eroded into a labyrinth of buttes, towers, and natural arches, with canyon floors exposing 250-million-year-old rock. The soft footpads of llamas make no sound and leave no trace as they schlepp your gear along the San Rafael River, leaving you free to swim and hunt for petroglyphs and pictographs in side canyons. Season: Spring and fall. Distance: 6 to 12 miles round-trip. Do-It-Yourself: BYO llama. Guided Trips: Rosebud Llamas (three-day trips, $360 per person; 435-548-2630) leads fully catered treks along the river.

Mountain Biking Capitol Reef National Park
Sure, iron oxide dyed the sedimentary rocks, but all you need to know is that the Navajo called Capitol Reef “land of the sleeping rainbow.” The 60-mile Cathedral Valley Loop road tours the best of it, with plenty of switchbacks and a river ford. Expect deep mud after rains. Season: Spring and fall. Distance: 60 miles. Do-It-Yourself: From the visitor center on Utah 24 (435-425-3792), head east 12 miles to Hartnet Road, where the loop begins. Guided Trips: Timberline ���ϳԹ���s (800-417-2453; ) includes Capitol Reef on its ten-day Canyon Country Classic tour ($2,195).

Canyoneering Paria Canyon
It’s the quintessential slot-canyon primer. Northern Arizona’s Paria combines claustrophobic splendor and a strict 20-person-per-day permit system. The best route takes five to six days and begins with a shortcut through the shoulder-width Wire Pass to Paria and into Lee’s Ferry. Wading icy pools is mandatory. Season: Spring or late fall. Distance: 43 miles. Do-It-Yourself: Reservations are available from the BLM (). Guided Trips: Wild Horizons (888-734-4453; ) offers a three-day, 17-mile sampler of the Paria wilderness ($625). —Jonathan Hanson

Best Close-to-the-City Day Hikes

Desert Hors D’oeuvres

Phoenix, Arizona
Echo Canyon Trail, Camelback Mountain Recreation Area

Where: Echo Canyon Place off McDonald Drive (44th Street) in the middle of Phoenix

This steep 1.25-mile trail, popular with local runners, rises a total of 1,300 feet through cacti, creosote, and chuparosa to the 2,704-foot summit of Camelback Mountain. Your sweat earns you the best view of town—from town.


Albuquerque, New Mexico
Rinconada Canyon Trail, Petroglyph National Monument
Where: Three miles north of I-40 on Unser Boulevard

Thousands of petroglyphs, up to 12,000 years old, dot the basalt boulders along this gentle 2.5-mile trail. The rising and setting sun reveal different glyphs throughout the day, so even if you don’t happen to see a roadrunner or a circling hawk, you’ll always see something new.
Los Angeles, California
Devil’s Chair, Devil’s Punchbowl County Park
Where: End of Longview County Road, about 60 miles from downtown L.A.
Hike one mile on the Burkhart Trail, passing through the jumbled sandstone seam of the San Andreas Fault, then take the upper trail to Devil’s Chair, two miles farther. The 6,300-foot outcropping overlooks crater-size Devil’s Punchbowl and the Mojave Desert.


Las Vegas, Nevada
Silica Dome Trail, Valley of Fire State Park
Where: 55 miles northeast of Las Vegas on I-15, near park headquarters at Rainbow Vista Trailhead

A 1.5-mile trail leads to the summit of Silica Dome, with the ochre Jurassic sandstone also found in Zion and Bryce National Parks spread out below. Hike in the morning, and in the afternoon devour that all-you-can-eat buffet on the Strip or swim at equally depraved Lake Mead, five miles east.


San Diego, California
The Slot, Anza-Borrego State Park
Where:
Buttes Pass Road (dirt) off California 78 at mile marker 87

Named after Spanish explorer Juan Bautista de Anza and the local borrego, or bighorn sheep, 938- square-mile Anza-Borrego State Park is 85 miles east of San Diego. On this two-mile in-and-out trip you probably won’t see borregos (or Juan Bautista), but you will drop into the dark and narrow Slot, one of the park’s twistiest sandstone canyons.

Sip, Don’t Chug

—And other Desert Lies

Myth #1:
Strip down to cool down.

Cotton may kill in the mountains, but in the desert it can save lives. Indeed, light-colored clothing not only protects you from sunburn, but also traps sweat that would otherwise evaporate in the dry heat. Cloaked in a cool layer of your own perspiration, you’re less vulnerable to heat exhaustion and heatstroke. Stripping is fine in Vegas, but in other desert locales indecent exposure is a capital offense.


Myth #2:
Food and water are equally important when you’re lost in the desert.

Humans can survive without food for up to three weeks—but without water say sayonara, Sonora, in three days or less. Not only do you need water sooner, but you need more of it. Food can actually suck H2O from your gut during digestion, speeding up dehydration. Put simply, you’re better off studying your map for the nearest water source rather than grilling up comfort food. (Mmm… javelina burger.)


Myth #3:
Deserts are full of fantastic mirages.

Well, there’s no such thing as a Disney-style mirage where pantalooned sheiks eyeball a harem of buxom belly dancers (unless you’re suffering from dehydration-related dementia, which is another story), but faux lakes and funky mountains do creep into view from time to time, caused by layers of heated air bending rays of sunlight. If you’re not prepared, mirages can distort distances, leading to bad judgments and wrong turns. Trust your map, not the dancing girls.


Myth #4:
Cacti are lifesaving wells of potable water.

Well, you wouldn’t exactly call the stuff inside a cactus “water.” If you slice the top off a cactus, you’ll find mushy green innards, and though you may be able to squeeze some juice from them, the bitter, alkaloid-rich liquid can cause vomiting or diarrhea, dehydrating you even more. Of course, a lucky gamble might keep the buzzards away a little longer.


Myth #5:
Sip to conserve your water supply.

What you learned in college applies in the desert as well: Chug, chug, chug, chug. You need to maintain the volume of water in your bloodstream to keep your billions of cells hydrated and your brain functioning, and demure little sips aren’t going to get the job done. So go ahead and take a big gulp or two—rescuers have found more than one dead miser clutching a half-full canteen.


Myth #6:
If a rattlesnake bites you, cut open the wound and suck out the venom.

Steer clear of the old cut-and-suck and you avoid more than a nasty hickey. Slicing open a snakebite exposes capillaries to the venom, speeding it on its way to destroy blood vessels and muscle tissue. Instead, splint the punctured limb before hiking out to the nearest hospital ASAP. Chances are you’ll survive. Of the 7,000 or so people bitten by venomous snakes in the United States each year, only nine to 14 bite it, so to speak.

Q+A: Dry Advice

Nobody feels more at home in parched, prickly places than David Alloway. One of the country’s leading desert experts, he runs a school, David Alloway’s Skills of Survival (), near Big Bend National Park in west Texas. We caught up with David after he’d just finished working on an episode of a new reality-television series, The Worst Case Scenario.

How’d the TV shoot go?
We filmed it in the Anza-Borrego Desert in southern California. The ambient air temperature was 121 degrees, and the ground temperature was 163 degrees. We had four people drop on the camera crew. One day they brought in this motorized glider with a heck of a camera system for overhead shots. Anyway, it got so hot in the plane, the cinematographer threw up on the electronic gear and blew it all out.
So in this episode you teach about survival situations?
Yeah, but I didn’t do any Crocodile Hunter stuff like kiss a snake on the lips. We did put a scorpion in my boot and I dumped it out in the morning to show why you should do it. But because this scorpion was a rented scorpion, I didn’t squash it.

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten in the desert?
Probably iguana with chile sauce in Mexico. I’ve eaten kangaroo and some grubs in Australia.

What do grubs taste like?
It depends. Some have a nutty flavor; some are slightly sweet. You can bake them, like a bacon rind. Cook ’em up by the fire. But what most people don’t do, you need to tear those legs off first, because they really scratch going down as they’re trying to climb back out. But seriously, people say, “You eat it guts and all?” Some people eat sardines. And those are not clean, you know.

What’s the most common mistake in a survival situation?
The panic factor. Instead of sitting down and logically thinking things through, people panic. They start running. They get lost and decide they’re going to run their way out of it, and they leave the trail. And that’s where they screw up. If they stay on the trail, that will be covered first thing by a search. A lot of times people go off and start looking for food, which is pretty far down, way down, the list of things you should be doing.

What is the most important thing in your survival kit?
I would say it would be potassium permanganate. It’s a vial of little chemical crystals, and with it you can make water potable, you can start fires with it, it’s a topical antiseptic, and it’s a fungicide. That vial will purify 300 gallons of water.

What’s the most evil plant in your area?
Lechugilla. It has a chemical on the tips of the thorns that causes immediate pain and swelling. It’s also somewhat antiseptic, so if that thorn breaks off in you it won’t fester up. It might take ten weeks to pop out, so you have to have it surgically removed.

How do you stop a bad case of the runs out in the desert?
You can take a piece of charcoal—let’s say about the size of a walnut—and grind it up real good, mix it in water, and drink it. That’ll help bind you up.

Tell me about things you’ve been bitten, stung, clawed, or poked by.
Well, I’ve never been snakebit. I came very close once. I had a rattlesnake strike my boot, and one of the fangs penetrated, and the venom dribbled down my ankle. I’ve been stung by scorpions half a dozen times. Usually it was my fault, putting on my boots without shaking them out.

A Brief Desert Canon

PHOTOGRAPHY
Desert: The Mojave and Death Valley, by Jack W. Dykinga

Brilliant, color-saturated images of deep canyons and patches of lush green scattered throughout the harsh and beautiful Mojave.


FICTION
The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles

The story of three young Americans who find themselves in North Africa, where they encounter the desert’s shifting moods and alien cultures.


MUSINGS
Desert Solitaire,
by Edward Abbey

The classic meditation on deserts by America’s crustiest codger, Abbey’s masterpiece is part rant, part celebration, and still prickly after 30 years.


GUIDEBOOK
A Natural History of the Sonoran Desert, edited by Steven J. Phillips

The award-winning text includes a calendar of natural events highlighting animal migrations, full moons, and the Sonoran’s awesome spring flower show.


CLASSIC FILM
Beau Geste

This 1939 Gary Cooper film follows the Geste brothers as they join the Foreign Legion and head off to do battle in the Sahara.


DOCUMENTARY
Cadillac Desert

A four-part PBS series based on the Marc Reisner book chronicles the West’s quest for water in the 20th century.


ADVENTURE FLICK
Lawrence of Arabia

The brilliant dramatization of the career of T. E. Lawrence, the man who reshaped the map of the Arabian Peninsula.

Hot Stuff

Fierce sun, thorny foes, and bewildering terrain: The desert is no place to skimp on critical gear, such as these essentials heartily endorsed by a desert rat who’s made most of his mistakes already�but never again

FOR YOUR BODY
Covering your skin with tight-weave clothing trumps sunscreen, especially if the garments are as copiously ventilated as RailRider‘s Eco-Mesh Shirt ($50, buy a size too big for extra airflow) and Pants (with side-zip mesh panels, $70), both developed especially for the Marathon des Sables race across the Sahara. 800-437-3794;

The desert wind and intense glare off sand and rock take a toll on your eyes, making wrapping UV-resistant shades a necessity. Oakley‘s Straight Jacket Electric Blue shades ($195) do it all while staying color-true. 800-431-1439;
You’ll cease sneaker madness once you’ve been cactus-thorned; opt for leather boots. (But not Gore-Tex-lined— too hot!) The nubuck leather Montrail Cristallo ($165) is out-of-the-box wearable and amazingly breathable, and a pair of Fox River HikingFox merino wool socks ($11-$14) will keep feet dry and in thermal equilibrium. Montrail, 206-621-9393, ; Fox River,

FOR YOUR SAFETY
The old gallon-a-day saw is for loafers. Hard hiking under the desert sun requires you to drink even more water, but few hydration packs have the ability to handle that much liquid. The 2,770-cubic-inch Ultimate Direction Warpspeed ($140) can tote an impressive 2.6 gallons— 128 ounces in its primary reservoir, 96 ounces in a second reserve bladder ($26), and a 54-ounce flask in each of two side pockets ($7 each). 800-426-7229;

Shade is easier to wear than to find. Besides protecting skin and pate, a hat reduces UV bombardment of the eyeballs by 95 percent. Sportif’s Wind Knot Hat ($29) also shades the neck with a removable cape that tucks into a pocket on the cap. 800-776-7843;

Desert: cholla thorns, scorpion stings, rock abrasions, heat exhaustion, sunburn, blisters. ���ϳԹ��� Medical Kits Day Tripper ($38): splinter-picker forceps, tincture of benzoin, double antibiotic ointment, antiseptic towelettes. Add a few packages of CeraLyte oral rehydration salts ($7 for two liters’ worth) and some sunscreen (SPF 30, at a minimum) and you’ll probably cheat the buzzards…this time. 800-324-3517;

FOR YOUR POCKET
Navigation is tricky in the wide-open desert, but you damn well better know where the next waterhole is. Brunton’s Multi-Navigation System ($400) uses 12 GPS satellite channels to pinpoint your locus within three feet, and a built-in magnetic compass minimizes battery drain when you simply need to take or follow a bearing. 800-443-4871;

Whether it’s to signal your location or light your camp stove, you need fire in the desert, but incessant wind renders most sources impotent. A Zippo Outdoor Series Windproof Lighter ($20) is the virile solution—stays lit in a howler, antarget=_blankd is practically eternal. 814-368-2700;

Binoculars are a necessity and a pleasure—for route-finding and dispelling mirages, and for viewing wildlife. The light weight (10.6 ounces) and sure grip of the Pentax 8×22 DCF MC ($290) strike just the right balance of size and power. 800-877-0155;

The Leatherman Pulse ($72) has a locking blade so you can open up your can of Dinty Moore without opening your thenar muscles, too. Great for sharpening your chuckwalla-roasting stick, repairing your shades, or popping a Corona back at camp. 800-847-8665;

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