When he was 18 years old,ÌęÌęhad a friend who gifted him his first fly rod. He’s been hooked ever since. Now, the Bend, Oregon–based angler is paying it forward by introducing his favorite pastime to roommate and friendÌę. A college student by day and DJ by night, Pasternak rarely gets time to spend in the great outdoors. It doesn’t take much convincing to lure him on a fishing trip to the Owens River, which snakes along the majestic foot of the Eastern Sierra.

While the escape from daily stressors is one thing, fishing together in such grandeur is another. Braving the elements, encouraging one another, and celebrating each other’s success makes this often solitary pursuit into a team sport, which adds a new dimension to their friendship.

“We get to bond in a new way,” Leonard says. “And it’s not like we’re bonding over music or something else. It’s something I’m truly passionate about and get to share with him.”

For Pasternak, the experience reignites a love for nature—one he plans to prioritize more frequently—while echoing Leonard’s perspective on a day that helps the duo “slow things down a little while, just get on the water and take a breath of fresh air.”

Nissan North America, Inc., headquartered in Franklin, Tennessee, delivers innovative automotive products and services that inspire and move people. As a global leader in electric vehicles and advanced automotive technology, Nissan offers a full lineup of vehicles, highlighted by the new . Driven by a commitment to sustainable mobility and thrilling performance, Nissan aims to transform the way people live and drive. For more information, please visit .

The post Partners in the Outdoors: Fly-Fishing appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

There isn’t much to Davis, West Virginia (population 581). Its downtown is only a few blocks long. There’s no movie theater, no Starbucks. The entire county has one stoplight. You could feasibly drive through Davis and miss it entirely if you were engrossed in a good podcast.

Davis sits on the northern rim of Canaan Valley, a broad, high-elevation basin roughly 2.5 hours west of Washington, D.C. It’s surrounded by 4,000-foot peaks, most managed as public land, and hubs for hiking, biking, and skiing. But Davis’s best attribute? It’s full of people stoked to be here.

Why I Love Visiting Davis, West Virginia, Year-Round

Some might be deterred by Davis’s lack of sushi or nightlife or community theater or even a Target. But I’ve been going there for 20 years, and every time I visit I’m mesmerized by the town’s bounty. The few restaurants are great for such a small town, there’s a proud beer scene, and access to outdoor adventure is off the charts.

Just ask Ian Beckner, a Davis native who moved away for college, then bounced around to other mountain towns before settling back in Davis to open a ski shop.

“There’s just so much here—so many trails, such good skiing,” he says. “People usually have to work two jobs to make ends meet”—there are no large employers or industries in the area—“but they don’t care too much about money. They just want to be here. Once you’re here, you don’t leave. I can’t tell you the last time I drove more than an hour away.”

The adventure portfolio is exceptionally diverse, considering Davis’s location in the southern Appalachians, a region not renowned for robust winter-sports opportunities. But this particular nook of West Virginia has four distinct seasons. Mountain biking rules the warm months and skiing takes center stage in the winter, thanks to a hefty average snowfall and a trio of ski resorts. And West Virginia gets powder: Lake Effect snow from the Great Lakes on one side, and storms from the Northeast coast on the other. On average, it enjoys more than 150 inches of snow annually. Compare that to the 30 to 40 inches of snow that typically fall on ski resorts in neighboring Virginia.

I can’t decide if I like Davis more when it’s warm or has powder on the ground. I’ve logged countless miles on the valley’s notoriously rocky and rooty singletrack and celebrated epic rides with friends by passing around jars of moonshine. I’ve also floated through knee-deep powder in both lift-served and backcountry glades. Ditto with sharing the moonshine then, too.

The Great Mountain-Biking-Versus-Skiing Debate

So which is better? The mountain biking or the skiing? This is something debated by locals.

On the one hand, hundreds of miles of singletrack wind through adjacent state-park, national-forest, and national-wildlife-refuge land. Remember the hardcore 24-hour mountain-bike races that were so popular in the ’90s and early 2000s? They began here, with the 24 Hours of Canaan.

On the other hand, you can be at either of the downhill ski resorts, the 95-acre Canaan Valley and 100-acre Timberline, in about 10 minutes. Each offers more than 1,000 vertical feet of skiing, as well as a touring center that pulls in hundreds of cross-country junkies daily when there’s fresh snow.

“The skiing is what attracted me first,” says Todd Romero, who moved to Davis in 2011, switching jobs from the tech industry to the public-school system and taking a huge pay cut in the process. “When there’s a solid base of snow, and you can ski the trees. It’s amazing. But the mountain biking is like nowhere else. I’ve been to other bike towns, but you have to drive to the trailhead. Here in town you’re at the trailhead.”

The More Some Things Change…

As a Davis outsider, I’d say the town hasn’t changed much in two decades. The mountains surrounding town keep it relatively isolated, as do the serpentine roads between it and larger burgs. Locals say housing prices have skyrocketed and those in the service industry say they have a hard time making rent. It’s tough to find rental data on a town of this size, but in general have climbed almost 4 percent each year since the pandemic. And it’s only getting pricier; according to , home prices in Davis jumped 10 percent in the last year alone, with the average home value sitting at just under $330K. Davis is suffering from the second-home crunch that has impacted just about every mountain town I know of in the past decade. The same thing is happening in my hometown of Asheville, North Carolina.

Beckner says there are now more restaurants to accommodate increasing numbers of visitors (the amount of money the county collects via hotel tax has almost doubled in the last decade, according to the ), and the downhill resorts are more crowded on weekends. But the Davis of today still feels like the Davis from his childhood, he says.

“We’re still a small town. It’s not commercialized,” Beckner says. “We have all these miles of trail, but still only one bike shop. We might have more of an influx of people trying to enjoy the vibe that we all live with, that’s true, but the core value is still what it was when I was a kid. People are here to get outdoors.”

Beckner tells me that his favorite weekly event is the weekly mountain-bike group ride, the epicenter of Davis’s social scene.

“If it’s Thursday night, you know where everyone will be. It feels like the whole town rides together, and then we all go get burritos together, and then we all go to the brewery together,” he says. “You’re mingling with your doctor and your accountant and your kid’s teacher. It’s loud, and it’s always a party. It doesn’t matter what you wear, what bike you’re on, everyone is out enjoying what we have.”

Without further ado, here’s the best of Davis and the surrounding Canaan Valley.

What’s Cool About the Winter in Davis, West Virginia

Skiing and Snowboarding

Two downhill resorts are minutes apart from each other. , part of Canaan Valley State Park, has loads of blue and green terrain, perfect for families and beginners. More advanced skiers can head for the fun, mellow glades off the black-diamond Dark Side of the Moon, from the top.

has steeper terrain and better tree skiing. It also has a high-speed six chair that gets you to the summit in under five minutes, so you can knock out laps until your quads quake. Pearly Glades, closer to the base area, offers steep pitches with comfortable space between trees, but mainly you’ll find tight tree runs all over this mountain, so you’ll need to focus. , downtown, has all the gear you need.

As great as the downhill skiing is, to me, the is what makes winter in Davis truly special. It offers more than 25 kilometers of groomed cross-country trails and more than 60 kilometers of ungroomed trails that climb and descend some 1,200 vertical feet. This isn’t flat-road skiing but backcountry fun). A dozen warming huts are scattered throughout the system, most stocked with pieces of chocolate. The Whitegrass łŠČčŽÚĂ© and gear shop welcomes skiers with a warm aprĂšs scene that includes multiple firepits, and Chip Chase, the center’s owner and a local legend, often mills around, sharing stories and his personal stash of whiskey.

Biking

Cyclists don’t have to give up riding just because it’s winter. A local trail builder, , has started grooming more than eight miles of fat-bike trails at Canaan Valley State Park. The place is even a stop on an annual that hits the valley and a few other spots in West Virginia and Maryland.

Ultimate Sledding

If you have kids, hit up the sled run at , which has a magic carpet and a hot-chocolate hut.

How to Maximize the Warm Months in DavisÌę

Hike, Fish, and (Much) More

Dolly Sods Wilderness, a small but spectacular 17,000-acre roadless area known for its high-elevation bogs and rocky outcroppings, is the destination for hiking and backpacking. Hit for fly-fishing, creek stomping (wading and exploring), and hiking on paths that range from easy three-mile out-and-backs to multiday 20-mile loops.

I have never yet played the golf course at Canaan Valley State Park, but I would love to.

Biking

But if you’re coming to Davis, you’re bringing mountain bikes. The singletrack is notoriously difficult and, at least in my opinion, all uphill. That’s part of the charm.

If you agree that rocks are fun, start with , which forms the backbone of the singletrack within Canaan Valley. Many offshoots and well-worn social trails branch off this eight-mile point-to-point route, and I guarantee you’ll get off your bike at least once during particularly spicy sections, so give it twice as much time as you think you’ll need.

Don’t fret if that sounds like more torture than fun; some new, machine-groomed flow trails have been built for us mere mortals. Hit , a six-mile swoopy loop in Canaan Valley State Park. has beta, rentals, and gear.

Where to Eat and Drink in Davis, West Virginia

Davis and the Canaan Valley only have a few restaurants, but those have everything I crave when I’m there.

and , serving pizza, are staples. But my favorite place to eat is at Whitegrass, whose caters to a more elevated palate; its great vegetarian chili hits just right on a cold afternoon. Sometimes there’s live music, and the specials change daily, but there’s always a crowd of rosy-nosed cross-country skiers, fresh off the trails and hungry, clustered in a handful of tables in the middle of the gear and rental shop. The place is cozy, loud on a busy afternoon, and really fun. When it’s time for a beer, head to , the locals’ favorite drinking hole.

Where to Stay in Davis

You’ll find Airbnbs throughout the valley, including a option attached to the bike shop. The lovely has lodge rooms and cabins fresh off a renovation (from $178.50), as well as campsites with electricity. I’ve camped in my 4Runner here in the winter, running a space heater from the outlet. Searching for something a bit more sophisticated? Book a night at the ten-room , and enjoy its mid-century vibe (from $100).

Graham Averill of Asheville, North Carolina, is șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online’s national-parks columnist. He’s hoping to bring his wife and kids to Davis this winter to ski at White Grass and sled on the hill in Blackwater Falls State Park. He recently wrote about theÌęmost beautiful towns in the SoutheastÌęand theÌębest ways to get outside in West Virginia, as well as an on-the-ground account ofÌęwhat it was like to survive Hurricane Helene in Asheville, and why he rues not visiting Capitol Reef National ParkÌęsooner.

The post Outdoor Access in This Town Is Off the Charts appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Ski trips shouldn’t be relegated to the rich and even richer. We all deserve to go powder chasing midwinter without dissolving our bank accounts. But these days, finding a budget way to ski requires serious homework. You can always venture away from the headliner areas to smaller, less crowded local ski hills that want to entice visitors through budget deals, but you may have to sacrifice quality of terrain and convenient lodging. Or you could go early or late season, but that means gambling on snow conditions.

So, what if you want to go big—like, say, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in mid-winter—but not spend big? It’s tricky but not impossible. Here’s how to visit a popular, world-class destination like Jackson Hole on a ski-bum’s budget. It’s also a great destination year-round, for hiking, biking, climbing, boating, fly fishing, and camping.

Getting to Jackson Hole, Wyoming

To reach Jackson, Wyoming, located at the base of the Teton Range, you can drive, fly, or take a bus. If you’re coming by car, it’s four and a half hours from Salt Lake City, Utah, or eight hours from Denver, pending road and weather conditions. offers bus routes into Jackson from Salt Lake City, Boise, or Las Vegas starting at $75. The Jackson Hole Airport has nonstop direct flights from 12 major U.S. cities, including Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, and Newark, but flights aren’t exactly cheap. United Airlines does offer an and $400 flight savings if you bundle lodging and airfare (deadline is by November 30, so save the idea for another year).

From the airport, hop a public bus or taxi into town. Don’t bother renting a car. Parking at the ski resort starts at $18 a day, so your best bet is to take the local ($3) from town or the Village Road Transit Center, and you’ll be dropped at the base of in Teton Village.

Lift-Ticket Deals in Jackson

If you can make it here early season, Jackson Hole Mountain Resort has a weekendÌęfrom December 6-8: show up wearing denim, and you can ski Saturday for $25 or get a three-day lift ticket for $199, plus half-priced gear rentals at and . Another great deal is that early or late season (November 29 through December 19 or March 17 through April 13), season passholders from any other ski area in the world can receive a 50-percent-off at Jackson Hole. Have an ? You can come midwinter and have up to seven days with the full Ikon Pass; five days with the Base Pass Plus (which has select blackout dates), . Otherwise your best option is to buy tickets online well in advance for the lowest rate (they start at $218 a day).

The best deal for skiing here isn’t at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort; it’s at , the town ski hill, which has big steeps and steep discounts. This is a much smaller ski area—500 acres compared to Jackson’s 2,500 inbounds acres—but its convenient location in town and minimal crowds make it a worthy destination, especially on a powder day. Single-day lift tickets start at $95, or with a $30 uphill ticket you can skin up under your own power and ski back down. The other hidden gem? , a 2,602-acre powder mecca just over Teton Pass, 45 miles or about an hour and 10 minutes from Jackson, where you can score a half-day ticket for $132. run from Jackson to Targhee and start at $199, which includes your lift ticket.

Hire a Backcountry Guide or Take a Lesson: Info But Sorry, No Discounts

There’s no discount way to book a ski lesson or hire a backcountry guide. You’ll pay a premium for these services. At Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, full day for experienced skiers start at around $379 (excluding lift ticket) per person. Resort for those just getting started skiing or wanting to progress to the next level start at $250 a day. If you’d rather not originate at the ski area, you can hire an AMGA-certified guide from for a tour of the terrain off Teton Pass or in Grand Teton National Park starting at $265 a person.

Find Cheap Lodging in Jackson

If you want to stay at the base of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort for the closest access to the lifts, your best budget option is (from $49), located right in Teton Village, which has both shared bunks and private rooms, plus a ski-tuning space, game room, and basic kitchen supplies.

Otherwise, stay in town—12 miles away—and you’ll have your choice of a few wallet-friendly accommodations. has newly renovated rooms starting from around $177, and . The (from $55) has pod-style bunks, free coffee, and storage lockers for stashing your gear. And the recently redone (from $160) has hot tubs and firepits, an on-site burger joint, and a walk-through or drive-through liquor store that also sells breakfast burritos in the morning.

Affordable Food and Drink Here

If you’re on the mountain or staying in Teton Village, prices for food and drink aren’t cheap, so you’ll want to know where to look, and you can always pack a PBJ in your pocket. Start with a cup of high-quality espresso from the take-out window at , next to the Mango Moose. The , at the gas station across the parking lot from the team in Teton Village, has a food truck out front and grab-and-go breakfast sandwiches and burritos. Mid-day or after skiing, hit up inside the Snake River Lodge for a $9 hot dog or tacos, or the , one of the most classic aprùs ski bars ever, which has $6 pizza by the slice. For fuel on the mountain, ride the tram to the top of Rendezvous Peak, take in the view of the Tetons from the observation deck, then pop into for an $8.25 house-made waffle with brown-sugar butter or Nutella. (Trust us, it’s worth every penny.)

In town there are lots of options for dining out, but many of them are pricy. Buying groceries at Albertson’s will save you. For other options, has tasty burritos from $11 or $6 tacos. Up a flight of stairs from Town Square, you’ll find , which slings thin-crust large pies starting at around $17, or pick up a $5 slice from .

With locations in downtown Jackson and, seven miles away, the town of Wilson, is a locals’ favorite for no-fuss coffee and bagel sandwiches (a naked bagel costs $1.50). And the best breakfast burrito in town is served until 2 p.m. out of a take-out window on Glenwood Street called , where for $12 you can get a massive burrito that’ll feed you for two meals.

Other Cool Outdoor șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs Here

It’s $5 to skate in the or on the (through the famous elk-antler arches) if you have your own skates (or $18, including the entry fee, to rent skates).

You’ll need to cross-country ski, snowmobile, or dog sled to reach , located south of town on Granite Creek Road, which is closed in the winter. It’s a 19-mile round trip ski to get there, but that’s the least expensive option ( rents Nordic skis from $40 a day; entry into the hot springs is $12) for this memorable day. Otherwise, you’ll need to throw down for a guided snowmobile trip ( leads them starting at $231) or a dogsled outing ( has full-day trips to the hot springs from $460).

It costs nothing to cross-country ski or fat bike along , a locals’ favorite trail that’s groomed in the winter and is a great biking and hiking trailhead in the summertime.

Another excellent year-round option is the short multi-use in the nearby town of Wilson.

Pro Tip

Here’s a fun way to be a conscientious visitor to the area, while scoring a discount: Support Jackson Hole’s community radio station, KHOL 89.1, with a of $60 or more, and you’ll get a member-benefit card for discounts to heaps of local businesses, including $2 off a burrito, 10 percent off Philly cheesesteaks at , 15 percent off at , 10 percent off at classes at , and free cross-country ski rental for two people at (that alone is worth $80).

Megan Michelson is an șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributing editor who loves skiing but not how expensive it is. She prefers the strawberry waffle from Corbet’s Cabin, and her favorite line at Jackson Hole is the very steep and very fun Tower Three Chute off Thunder Chair. Other recent articles by Michelson include “Why My Family Replaced Thanksgiving with Campsgiving,” about a great decision; a description of a tiny, remote backcountry hut, “This Is Hands-Down the Coolest Airbnb in Colorado”; and, more help with costs, “Shred This Colorado Mountain for $11 a Day—Plus Other Incredible Ski-Resort Deals.”

The post How to Visit Jackson Hole on a Budget—Know These Tips appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

This story update is part of theÌęșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűÌęClassics, a series highlighting the best writing we’ve ever published, along with author interviews and other exclusive bonus materials. Read “The Same River Twice,” by David Quammen,Ìęhere.

In the grainy Zoom window, I see Quammen’s walls of shelves, heaving with books, and also a large, empty glass tank.

“I’m in here with Boots the python,” he says, as if it’s totally banal to share office space with a large snake. “That’s his tank.”

Ah, the tank is not empty. That’s cool. And a little terrifying.

“Oh, he’s a sweetheart,” Quammen says. “My wife, Betsy, came downstairs one day about five years ago and said, ‘Don’t get mad at me, but—’ You know how those conversations begin. Betsy says, ‘Don’t get mad at me, but I’ve adopted a python.’ Betsy and I are snake people. I said, ‘What species?’ That’s kind of what passes for our collaborative decision-making.”

Boots is a “very gentle” ball python, Quammen says. “He, like most of our dogs and like the cat, is a rescue.” When Quammen lets Boots crawl around the office, the snake will sometimes slither up and into hidden spaces in the shelves.

“Their favorite habitat is rocky walls. A ball python can go into a niche in a cliff or a mud bank and wedge itself in there like a ball, and it makes it hard for a leopard or a baboon to pull it out and eat it. Boots wedges himself in my bookshelf, and I have to delicately figure out: Which book do I take out next in a way that does not hurt him, bend any of his scales in the wrong direction, to loosen him up a little bit? Eventually, he just sort of falls into my hands.

“He’s only bitten me once, and it was by accident. He was very embarrassed.”

We digress, perhaps. But a conversation with Quammen always contains multitudes: Darwinism, connubial negotiation and bliss, dedication to the literary and the true, and a fierce and gregarious curiosity, with Montana often in the wings. Let’s digress a bit more: had he not bought a used Volkswagen bus in England, and had George McGovern won the U.S. presidency in 1972, it’s very possible Quammen might never have ended up in Montana at all.

He grew up in Cincinnati and got into Yale, where he studied literature and wrote a novel, . He then won a Rhodes Scholarship and headed off to Oxford to earn a graduate degree, writing his thesis on the works of William Faulkner. He obtained the VW bus with money earned from the novel. But in May 1972, Quammen recalls, Richard Nixon ordered the mining of Haiphong Harbor in Vietnam, and “within about 24 hours I left the Rhodes without permission and came back to the U.S. to work for McGovern’s [anti-war] campaign. After McGovern was squashed in November, I promptly went back to England and found that the head of the Rhodes Scholarships hadn’t written me off.”

Quammen got his Oxford degree and then convinced his friend Dennis to ship the VW to a dockyard in New York. Following an unsatisfying stint in Berkeley, California, Quammen decided to drive the bus “to Montana, filled with Penguin Classics and a portable electric typewriter. And a very cheap fly rod, which I soon ran over and replaced with a better cheap fly rod. I arrived in Missoula on September 12, 1973. A significant day in my life.”

OUTSIDE: I came to work at the magazine the year after you wrote “The Same River Twice.” I don’t know if you remember, I was your fact-checker back in those days. I read this essay, and from that moment on I loved your writing. The bones of the story have everything to do with how you came to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű.
QUAMMEN: In 1981, Steve Byers, E. Jean Carroll, and I were all trying to break into magazine writing from Ennis, Montana, the little town we were living in. I was 33; they were a few years older. We heard that the editor of șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű magazine was coming to Montana to schmooze with writers, and we thought it’d be great if we could get a shot at meeting that guy and pitch stories to him.

From a phone booth in Bozeman, with a handful of quarters, I cold-called șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű in Chicago and asked for John Rasmus, editor in chief. My heart was racing. I was nervous. My mission was to say, “If you come to Ennis, Steve and I will take you fly-fishing on the Madison River.”

This young, casual voice comes on the line: “Hi, this is John.” I say, “Hi, John Rasmus. You don’t know me.” I do my little spiel, and he says, “Oh, OK. Cool.”

Steve and I taught him to cast a fly line in my side yard. Then we took him fishing, and we made sure that he caught some fish. By about sunset on this stretch of the Madison, he was landing a 16-inch rainbow trout.

We took him back to the farmhouse where Steve and Jean lived, and we cooked steaks and drank whiskey. By the end of the evening, we were all best friends. At some point I said: I got a story idea for you. I want to write a piece about what’s good about mosquitoes. John said, “Is anything good?” But in the sober light of day he said, “I’m assigning this to you, right?” I mailed the essay off in a manila envelope and thought, What’s going to happen?

What happened was he accepted it and offered you a job as columnist for a slot already known as Natural Acts.
That was the only time, I think, that I ever actually pitched șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű an idea. After that I’d just send him a piece, usually on time, but at the last minute: “Here’s an essay on sea cucumbers.” “Here’s an essay on giant Pacific octopus.” “Here’s an essay on why crows get bored.” Which is because they’re too intelligent for their station in life.

When I was doing the column, I tended always to look for some kind of synergy between elements that were unexpectedly combined, but when you put them together
 well, son of a gun. I had taken some courses in zoology at the University of Montana when I lived in Missoula. I had taken a course in entomology, another one in aquatic entomology, and another one in ichthyology. I was interested in how spring creeks worked, the fact that they maintain a constant temperature and therefore have a 12-months-of-the-year growing season and can be very productive. This creek behind Steve and Jean’s house was a spring creek.

And then Steve and Jean came to an end. I had so revered their union that, when they split, it gutted me. Then, several years later, I was noodling up a column.

I had that spring creek idea, but it was only half of a column. I needed another half. I needed the yang to that yin. That creek that I fished on with Steve, and the end of their marriage and the end of our special moment, the three of us in that town, became the yang of this piece. I always thought of that time as—there’s a wonderful sentence at the very end of , Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of Paris. He says, “This is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.”

One thing I enjoy about the essay is that there are no identifiers—I don’t know where it is except that it’s in Montana. As I reread it recently, I thought about how we are now so information saturated. This piece is almost allegorical—the opposite of online culture.
It’s a very particular, very personal story, but I wanted it to have some sort of universal dimension. I wanted it to have legs. I want to give myself credit for an instinct that not naming the town, not naming the people, not naming the specifics would give it a little bit of permanence. I was describing science with great care and, I hope, precision, but also connecting it with things that were very unscientific—either artistic or simply emotional.

I love that șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű was a place where you could do that, and everybody had the good sense to keep letting you do it.
I did between 152 and 155 columns, something like that. All those wonderful people at șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű just letting me do any damn crazy thing, as long as I could make it work and get it in on time. It was a fool’s paradise.

But you started out wanting to write fiction, right?
I wanted to be a novelist. I had taken one science course in college, a biology course, and it was not a good biology course. Didn’t even mention Charles Darwin.

I discovered Faulkner when I was a sophomore at Yale, and I became obsessed with his work. I studied him with a great teacher and a great friend to me, Robert Penn Warren, who knew Faulkner, and who was himself a southerner and a towering American man of letters. When I was a senior, I was rewriting what became my first published novel, To Walk the Line.

But I was a middle-class white male from a happy childhood in Ohio. The world didn’t need that guy to be a novelist. When I got to Montana I started reading nonfiction. Voraciously.ÌęFor the first time.

What prompted you to do that?
I had always been interested in the natural world, but I had been in New Haven and then Oxford—not places where the natural world is very strongly present. I got to Montana, and I got back to the natural world. I was interested in feeling the cold and the snow and feeling the flow of the rivers. But also, I was interested in thinking about it. I was interested in ecology and evolutionary biology. I started reading Darwin. I started reading Heraclitus. I started reading Herodotus. I started reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I started reading every which way: Loren Eiseley and J.B.S. Haldane and Mary Kingsley and Annie Dillard and others. And I saw people doing things with nonfiction that were every bit as creative and imaginative as fiction, and much more creative and imaginative than 97 percent of novels.

I want to ask about your books on pandemics, which are both highly literary and diligently reported. You were prescient on this topic, having published , your 2012 book about the rise in zoonotic diseases that transmit dangerously from animals to humans. A decade later came Breathless, in which you argue persuasively for the zoonotic theory of COVID-19 and against the theory that the virus escaped from a virology lab in Wuhan, China.ÌęÌęÌę
One story is the imagined story of a lab leak, and the other is the inferential story of a zoonotic spillover. There is a lot of empirical evidence to support but not finally prove the idea that COVID originated with a zoonotic spillover. There’s a whole historical and scientific context for that. There are pieces of immediate evidence that support that idea.

There’s no empirical evidence to support the lab story. But it is a very, very powerful, enticing story. And that is why it has legs, in my opinion. One of the things that they argue on that side is, “Well, if this came from a zoonotic spillover from a bat, why haven’t we found the original virus in the bat? It’s been four years now. That’s very suspicious.”

Well, no. The problem is they don’t know anything about the history of zoonotic diseases. With the Marburg virus, for example, it took 41 years to find the bat. With Ebola it’s been 48 years, and we still don’t have the answer. It is not mysterious that the last section of evidence in the structure of empirical support for zoonotic spillover of COVID hasn’t been found.

Are you working on a book now?
Yeah. My desk is covered with files, files, files, books, books, and files. I’m working on a book on cancer as an evolutionary phenomenon. I’ve been incubating this book for 17 years.

How is cancer evolutionary?
There is a school of thought that I stumbled across in 2006 or 2007 that says to understand cancer, you have to understand it from a Darwinian perspective. Every tumor is a population of cells. As a tumor begins, the cells start mutating more and more. As a tumor grows, it’s a population of cells that vary from one another with genetic variation. And they’re competing. They’re competing for space. They’re competing for blood. They’re competing for oxygen, for other resources that allow them to grow. And when you have a population of variant individuals competing for resources in order to survive and replicate themselves—does that sound familiar? You turn the crank and you have evolution by natural selection.

So why does chemo so often not work? An oncologist prescribes a drug, and I don’t know how much cancer you’ve experienced in your family or your life—

I had breast cancer, and my husband died of lymphoma.
All right. Ouch. Yes. So an oncologist says, “We’re going to treat this with chemo. This is a good drug.” And the chemo knocks down the cancer for six months or so. You get some improvement. And then the cancer becomes resistant to that drug, so you’re forced to use a different drug. Why does it become resistant? For the same reason that a field of grasshoppers becomes resistant to the insecticide DDT. You hit the grasshoppers with DDT one year. You kill off 99 percent of the grasshoppers, and 1 percent of the grasshoppers happen to have genetic resistance to DDT. Two years later, your field is filled with grasshoppers again. This is cancer as an evolutionary phenomenon.

If we live long enough and are lucky enough, we’ll all die of cancer. Lucky enough because it is a result of, among other things, but importantly, the cumulative number of cell divisions that you have. But here’s a question: Why do whales not get cancer?

Whales?
It’s a mystery. It’s called . Whales live a long time, and they have lots and lots of cells. Their cells are not larger than ours, they just have more of them. If you trace a linear curve, whales should be dying of cancer in early middle age, all of them, and they’re not.

Are there any tiny animals that don’t get cancer?
Yes. The naked mole rat, which lives in burrows in the Middle East. It has hardly any fur. It’s blind. It lives underground. A naked mole rat lives to be 20 or 30. A mouse lives to be two. There are cancer biologists who have whole colonies of naked mole rats and have been studying them for 40 years.

This conversation makes me want to be huge. Or very small.
Lisa, just remember: șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű in the 1980s, that’s what it was like, when we were very young and very happy.

The post How David Quammen’s Writing Career Was Influenced by his Time Fishing in Montana appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

You’re about to read one of theÌęșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűÌęClassics, a series highlighting the best stories we’ve ever published, along with author interviews, where-are-they-now updates, and other exclusive bonus materials. Read Lisa Chase’s interview with David Quammen about this feature here.

He never founded a philosophic school, like Plato and Pythagoras did. He didn’t want followers. He simply wrote his one book and deposited the scroll in a certain sacred building, the temple of Artemis, where the general public couldn’t get ahold of it. The book itself was eventually lost, and all that survives of it today are about a hundred fragments, which have come down secondhand in the works of other ancient writers. So his ideas are known only by hearsay. He seems to have said a lot of interesting things, some of them cryptic, some of them downright ornery, but this river comment is the one for which Heraclitus is widely remembered. The full translation is: “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on.” To most people it comes across as a nice resonant metaphor, a bit of philosophic poetry. To me it is that and more.

Once, for a stretch of years, I lived in a very small town on the bank of a famous Montana river. It was famous mainly for its trout, this river, and for its clear water and abundance of chemical nutrients, and for the seasonal blizzards of emerging insects that made it one of the most rewarding pieces of habitat in North America, arguably in the world, if you happened to be a trout or fly-fisherman. I happened to be a fly-fisherman.

One species of insect in particular—one “hatch,” to use the slightly misleading term that fishermen apply to these impressive entomological events, when a few billion members of some mayfly or stone fly or caddis fly species all emerge simultaneously into adulthood and take flight over a river—gave this river an unmatched renown. The species was Pteronarcys californica, a monstrous but benign stone fly that grew more than two inches long and carried a pinkish-orange underbelly for which it had gotten the common name salmonfly. These insects, during their three years of development as aquatic larvae, could survive only in a river that was cold, pure, fast-flowing, rich in dissolved oxygen, and covered across its flat bottom with boulders the size of bowling balls, among which the larvae would live and graze. The famous river offered all those conditions extravagantly, and so P. californica flourished there like it did nowhere else. Trout flourished in turn.

When the clouds of P. californica took flight, and mated in air, and then began dropping back onto the water, the fish fed upon them voraciously, recklessly. Wary old brown trout the size of a person’s thigh, granddaddy animals that would never otherwise condescend to feed by daylight upon floating insects, came up off the bottom for this banquet. Each gulp of P. californica was a nutritional windfall. The trout filled their bellies and their mouths and still continued gorging. Consequently, the so-called salmonfly so-called hatch on this river, occurring annually during two weeks in June, triggered by small changes in water temperature, became a wild and garish national festival in the fly-fishing year. Stockbrokers in New York, corporate lawyers in San Francisco, federal judges and star-quality surgeons and foundation presidents—the sort of folk who own antique bamboo fly rods and field jackets of Irish tweed—planned their vacations around this event. They packed their gear and then waited for the telephone signal from a guide in a shop on Main Street of the little town where I lived.

The signal would say: It’s started. Or, in more detail: Yeah, the hatch is on. Passed through town yesterday. Bugs everywhere. By now the head end of it must be halfway to Varney Bridge. Get here as soon as you can. They got here. Cab drivers and schoolteachers came too. People who couldn’t afford to hire a guide and be chauffeured comfortably in a Mackenzie boat, or who didn’t want to, arrived with dinghies and johnboats lashed to the roofs of old yellow buses. And if the weather held, and you got yourself to the right stretch of river at the right time, it could indeed be very damn good fishing.

But that wasn’t why I lived in the town. Truth be known, when P. californica filled the sky and a flotilla of boats filled the river, I usually headed in the opposite direction. I didn’t care for the crowds. It was almost as bad as the Fourth of July rodeo, when the town suddenly became clogged with college kids from a nearby city, and Main Street was ankle deep in beer cans on the morning of the fifth, and I would find people I didn’t know sleeping it off in my front yard, under the scraggly elm. The salmonfly hatch was like that, only with stockbrokers and flying hooks. Besides, there were other places and other ways to catch fish. I would take my rod and my waders and disappear to a small spring creek that ran through a stock ranch on the bottomland east of the river.

It was private property. There was no room for guided boats on this little creek, and there was no room for tweed. Instead of tweed there were sheep—usually about thirty head, bleating in halfhearted annoyance but shuffling out of my way as I hiked from the barn out to the water. There was an old swayback horse named Buck, a buckskin; also a younger one, a hot white-stockinged mare that had once been a queen of the barrel-racing circuit and hadn’t forgotten her previous station in life. There was a graveyard of rusty car bodies, a string of them, DeSotos and Fords from the Truman years, dumped into the spring creek along one bend to hold the bank in place and save the sheep pasture from turning into an island. Locally this sort of thing is referred to as the “Detroit riprap” mode of soil conservation; after a while, the derelict cars come to seem a harmonious part of the scenery. There was also an old two-story ranch house of stucco with yellow trim. Inside lived a man and a woman, married then.

Now we have come to the reason I did live in that town. Actually there wasn’t one reason but three: the spring creek, the man, and the woman. At the time, for a stretch of years, those were three of the closest friends I’d ever had.

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Rock fans of a certain age likely remember the gritty nineties punk band , rose to fame amid the mainstream success of Green Day, Blink 182, Rancid, and other groups of that era. If you attended the Van’s Warped Tour (which I did, multiple times), you probably saw them live.

Hot Water Music was co-founded by guitarist and singer, Chuck Ragan, who is also a passionate fly fisherman. These days Ragan, 50, operates his own river guiding business at his home near Grass Valley, California, and he continues to , as well as with Hot Water Music. We caught up with Ragan to learn about .

OUTSIDE: How do you make time for fly-fishing when you’re on tour?
These days I tour with two entities: Hot Water Music and my own solo stuff. Touring with Hot Water Music makes it tougher to fish, because I have less control over the agenda, so I just try to get out whenever I can. It’s rare, and it takes a lot of effort. Recently we were playing a show in Denver, had a night off, and then had another show in Phoenix. I was able to get out with my buddy Jim to a lake outside of Denver the night after the show while the rest of the band traveled to Phoenix. We fished for white bass. Then I had to jump on a flight that night.

When I’m touring on my own, I sometimes set up my traveled based around fishing—the time of year, the species that’s running, stuff like that. My agent may suggest I play in Detroit in January. Well, I love to fish there in March, so that’s when I’ll go.

Ragan: Did you fish much when you were on tour 25 years ago?
I remember it took me years to realize the fishing opportunities I was missing when we were on tour. Now, I look back and think that I was just blowing it. We were going to these amazing places, but we’d be staying up late, ripping it too hard, and then the next day just wake up feeling worthless. You walk outside the hotel room and here we are on the Blackfoot River or some other gorgeous place. I’d love to hit rewind and do that over. I remember on one tour thinking ‘Man, one of these days I’m going to visit these places again and really get out and explore.’

What advice do you have for people who travel frequently but also want to fish?
You really have to plan ahead. These days I find that pretty much everything I do—other than little opportunities that pop up—was planned out a year in advance. I sit down at the beginning of the year and black out the obligations for family, then guiding, then the tours. And I look at the days of the tour and just see where the opportunities lie. For my fishing, sometimes it’s based around moon phases, or when different species are good to chase.

When I do fish on tour, I’m all for supporting local guides, so I’ll usually hire one and use their gear. My advice: if you’re following a guide on social media and you admire then, and they’re chasing a species you like, reach out to them and drop them a note. Find a good time of the year when you may have a trip there, and hire them. For me, fishing on tour is more about the experience of being on the water and connecting with people and learning new methods than actually carrying fish. If we catch a fish, that’s great. But I’ve already caught plenty of fish in my life and I don’t need to chase any records while I’m out there.

How does fly-fishing inform your music?
I’m always working on melodies and phrases and recording them to my phone when I’m on river trips. In the old days I’d walk around with a cassette recorder and more or less do the same thing. When I’m guiding there’s a lot of down time—commuting, standing in the water—and this is when my brain starts working on my music. A lot of times I end up singing into my phone, or reciting some phrase that comes to mind. Then I go back and sift through the stuff, and every once and a while something good comes out of it. I’ll listen back to my voice memos and I can hear me howling lyrics while the river is raging behind me, and I remember that at that moment something came into my mind that made the hair stand up on my neck. I knew at that moment it was important and I that I should document it. It’s been this way for a while. A lot of those classic Hot Water Music songs were either started or finished out in the woods or at the lake. A lot of my songs have been written this way.

Are there any similarities between professional river guiding and playing music?
There are a lot of parallels between being an independent musician and a guide. I’m out there to have a good time and to share something I believe in with people. If my clients or fans can leave their troubles at the door and enjoy themselves for a minute, then that’s all the better. Playing music is just like going on those fly-fishing trips—I’m not there just to catch fish. If I do catch one it’s a bonus. If someone leaves my show and enjoys the music and gets something out of it, then that’s a big bonus too.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.Ìę

The post Hot Water Music Frontman Chuck Ragan Would Rather Be Fly-Fishing appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Here’s the dream: Quit your job and hit all 64 national parks in one huge multi-month road trip where you live mostly in a van and finally see all of these iconic landscapes for yourself. To call that dream unrealistic is an understatement, at least for me, for a variety of reasons (see “quit job,” above), though it’s been accomplished by an șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű writer.

The closest I’ve ever come was in my 20s, spending a month driving around the Rocky Mountains and American Southwest in my VW Jetta during summer break from graduate school. A decade or so later, I re-created that trip with my wife and our then four-year-old twins. Both experiences were awesome. One of them had more tantrums.

You can plan a great park trip that captures the open-road spirit on a smaller scale. Below, I’ve outlined five itineraries that take in multiple parks, all within a week. I picked a variety of terrain—lonely desert basins, ice-cold swimming holes, perfect hikes, and cultural wonders. There are one or two classic routes.

But mostly, I chose these because they go to parks that don’t get the massive amount of attention some of their cousins receive. So gas or charge up and go.

1. Blue Ridge Parkway, from Shenandoah to Great Smoky Mountains

Virginia/North Carolina

Distance: 470 miles

Duration: Four-plus days

This trip is in my backyard, so I’m biased, but it’s also awesome, because the entire 470-plus-mile route is within a national-park unit. The Blue Ridge Parkway stretches for 469 miles along the peaks and valleys of the Southern Appalachian mountain range, connecting two of the country’s most-visited national parks, Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina/Tennessee and Shenandoah in Virginia.

Driving the entire length of the parkway is slow (speed limit is between 25 and 45 miles per hour) and full of curves in the road, and also overlooks,Ìę side hikes to swimming holes, and mountain hikes through a lush landscape with elevations that top 6,000 feet. And that’s just the road between the two great national parks.

Heading south on the parkway, you will find picnic areas, trailheads, and scenic views. Give yourself at least a couple of days to complete the road alone, making sure to hike the three-mile out-and-back in the Peaks of Otter area near Bedford, Virginia, which leads to a panoramic view of the Shenandoah Valley and the Allegheny Mountains. When you get to North Carolina, hit Grandfather Mountain State Park, where you can climb the 7.6-mile out-and-back , scrambling along outcroppings and climbing ladders to the summit of the 5,964-foot Callaway Peak.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs in Shenandoah: Located just 70 miles west of Washington, D.C, Shenandoah National Park is home to 200,000 acres of 4,000-foot peaks, dense hardwood forest, waterfalls, and historic farmland. The most popular hike is also one of the park’s toughest; is a 9.2-mile loop that requires rock scrambling with some use of your hands to reach Old Rag Mountain, which offers 360-degree views of the park and surrounding farmland. You need a permit to hike the mountain between March 1 and November 30. It’s only $2, but permits are limited to 800 a day, so get them up to .

If you’re looking to cool off, hike the , an 8.1-mile loop that gains 3,000 feet while traversing two tight gorges packed with waterfalls and swimming holes. Lower and Upper Whiteoak Canyon Falls are the highlights, as Upper Falls drops 86 feet between narrow canyon walls, and Lower Falls has a primo plunge pool.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs in Great Smoky Mountains: The Smokies comprise a mix of rocky streams stacked with waterfalls and swimming holes, and steep slopes thick with vegetation. It’s hard to get across just how green this park is. On the northern end, you’ll find Midnight Hole, a deep, cold swimming hole at the base of a small waterfall. The pool is lined with 15-foot boulders, and locals like to jump from them into the deep part. Access is via the easy three-mile out-and-back . If you want to ditch the crowds (GSMNP gets 14 million visitors a year), hike deeper into the park. Ramsey Cascades Trail is an eight-mile round trip through stands of old-growth tulip poplars to the 100-foot Ramsey Cascade, the tallest waterfall inside the park.

A few historic fire lookout towers still stand inside the park, but the most scenic is Mount Cammerer, a circular wooden building perched on a rocky outcropping, nearly 5,000 feet in elevation, offering views of 5,000- and 6,000-foot peaks as well as the Pigeon River Gorge. from Big Creek Parking Area, and you will do a piece of the Appalachian Trail, enjoying scenic stretches along Big Creek before climbing to the ridgeline.

Stay: In Shenandoah, Big Meadows is a historic stone-and-chestnut lodge in the middle of the park. Choose from lodge rooms or rustic cabins (from ), and wander the mile to Big Meadow after dark for stargazing. Lodges and campgrounds are spaced all along the 469-mile Blue Ridge Parkway, so it’s easy to break the journey up into chunks if you’re not in a hurry. is one of the most popular overnights ($20 per night, reserve six months in advance). The 190-site facility sits next to Julian Price Lake, where you can . has a glamping resort on 182 acres of hardwood forest near the Gatlinburg entrance of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Each fully furnished safari-style tent has a private bathroom, and the place features live music, campfires at night, and yoga in the morning, not to mention an on-site restaurant with seasonal dishes and craft beer.

2. Joshua Tree to Death Valley, California

California

Distance: 250 miles

Duration: At least three days

This route will take you to an underappreciated gem.

Is it weird to spend several days in Southern California and not go to the beach? Well, this desert romp is packed with so much wild terrain you won’t miss the Pacific Ocean. Joshua Tree National Park is 800,000 acres of sandstone boulders, crusty desert floor, and stands of the eponymous trees, while 250 miles north, Death Valley is the largest national park in the lower 48, at 3.5 million acres. Inside are 14,000-foot peaks, expansive craters, dunes, and slot canyons.

Weather is a factor with this itinerary because both parks are in the desert and hot as hell in the middle of summer (temps can reach 120 degrees). So consider this a late-spring or early-fall trip. (If you ever go in summer, do all of your adventures at dawn, take a ton of water, and be back at your place or camp before lunch. Also tell someone exactly where you are going.)

The 250-mile drive is mostly two-lane highway that offers a mix of desolate beauty (you’ll drive between Leghorn Lakes Wilderness and Sheephole Valley Wilderness) and California weirdness (the World’s Largest Thermometer is on this route). Want more adventure? As you drive between these two standout parks, try a pitstop at Mojave National Preserve, which has the largest grove of Joshua Trees in the world, natural springs, and towering dunes.

You can fly into Las Vegas or Los Angeles. L.A. to Joshua Tree is about 150 miles and not terribly interesting, so let’s just go straight to the park.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs in Joshua Tree: J-Tree is a bucket-list rock-climbing destination, but the hiking is easily as good, and just being in the place is amazing. The 2.5-mile gives hikers a chance to see and scramble on some of the park’s signature boulders, including Split Rock, a 20-foot-tall formation with a fissure in the middle, and to explore a few small caves. If you want to see a lot of Joshua Trees (who doesn’t?), hike the in Black Rock Canyon, a 6.5-mile lollipop that traverses one of the densest groves of Joshua Trees in the park, or sections of ridgeline trail, with long-range views of the 11,000-foot peaks inside the nearby Sand to Snow National Monument.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs in Mojave National Preserve: Just 70 miles north of Joshua Tree, Mojave NP offers a convenient diversion on your way to Death Valley. Stretch your legs by hiking the three-mile out-and-back trail into , a 45-square-mile field with mounds of sand that rise 650 feet from the valley floor. The Kelso Dunes actually produce “booming,” which is a deep, rumbling vibration that you can hear and feel from the crest of one. Be aware that hiking in dunes is tough, as the sand shifts below your feet with every step.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs in Death Valley: You hiked dunes in Mojave, so in Death Valley National Park, let’s focus on the canyons and peaks. is a six-mile out and back through a slot canyon so narrow that at points you can touch both sides from the middle.

If it’s your first time to the park, you’re obligated to visit Badwater Salt Flats, the lowest and hottest point in the U.S. There’s no designated trail through the flats, so wander at will through the flat, crispy valley, flanked by the Panamint Mountains and Black Mountains.

Stay: The is a historic lodge located inside the park, with five-star accommodations. Consider this an oasis in the desert, complete with a spring-fed swimming pool (from $359 a night). At Joshua Tree, try to reserve a spot at , which has sites tucked between massive boulders. There are no hookups, but RVs are allowed ($25 a night). If you can’t score an advance reservation there, has first come/first serve sites ($15 a night). Also, is opening a new location outside of Joshua Tree in May, with campsites for van-lifers and private rooms, all of which have access to the property’s gear shop, coffee shop and communal spaces (rooms from $127 a night).

3. White Sands National Park, Carlsbad Caverns, and Guadalupe Mountains National Park

New Mexico and Texas

Distance: 300 miles

Duration: Four to five days

Want variety? This trip has a trio of national parks that are close geographically, but a world apart in terms of terrain. Carlsbad Caverns National Park is all about the subterranean, protecting 119 caves, the biggest of which are open to exploration. Guadalupe Mountains National Park covers a swath of 8,000-foot peaks in West Texas, and those include eight of the 10 tallest in the entire state. White Sand Dunes National Park is home to a 275-square-mile gypsum dune field that rolls towards the horizon in a series of white tidal waves.

All three parks are within a couple hundred miles of each other, and El Paso serves as an ideal starting point to fly into the area and rent a car. These parks don’t see the crowds that some of the big-ticket units draw in summer, so there’s a better chance for quiet and good campsites. The three also have totally different climates. White Sand Dunes is hot (but not like J-Tree or Death Valley), Carlsbad is underground, and Guadalupe is chilly.

Other than a brief period where you skirt around the edge of El Paso, you’re driving mostly two-lane highways with a real “middle of nowhere” vibe between the parks. Think sand and scrub brush for as far as the eye can see.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs in White Sand Dunes: is a five-mile loop through the heart of the sand dunes, following red trail markers. You’re climbing and descending 60-foot dunes the entire time, so pace yourself and expect your legs to be worked at the end. Bring a sled (sold at the visitors’ center if you don’t have your own), as you’re allowed to slide down the steepest slopes along the route.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs in Guadalupe Mountains National Park: The signature adventure is hiking the 8,751-foot , with a craggy, treeless summit, the tallest in the state of Texas. The views stretching east over the plains are endless, but to earn them you will climb 3,000 feet in just over four miles. Bring a jacket, as the summit is notoriously windy. But the real treat of Guadalupe Mountains is , a four-mile out-and-back that’s rocky with mandatory scrambling to traverse a dry river wash. Towards the end, you’ll climb Hiker’s Staircase, an easy hand-over-hand natural rock ladder out of the wash and into a narrow slot canyon.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs in Carlsbad Caverns: Start with a self-guided tour of the Big Room, the largest single-cave chamber in the U.S., loaded with bizarre stalactites and stalagmites. An elevator could deliver you into the cave, but instead walk the switchbacks down via the Natural Entrance, and feel what it’s like to go from the surface into the cold, dark underground. The full hike down the Natural Entrance and into the Big Room is 2.5 miles and should take a few hours; without the walk in, the hike is 1.25 miles, with a .6-mile shortcut also possible, and parts of the Big Room are . If you want something spicier, sign up for a ranger-led tour of , which requires descending 60 feet of ladders and ropes to a series of smaller rooms with crazy rock features, like the skinny, tall “Texas Toothpick” or “cave pearls,” which look like clusters of eggs ($20, reservations required).

Where to Stay: Guadalupe Mountains National Park and Carlsbad Caverns are close enough that one campground works as a base camp to explore both. Check out in Guadalupe Mountains, which has 20 tent sites and 13 RV sites you can reserve in advance ($20 a night). A number of hiking trails (including Devil’s Hall) begin here. The closest campground to White Sands is in Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, which has private desert sites ($10 per night). The backcountry campsites in White Sands are closed indefinitely, but nearby Alamogordo has a variety of chain hotels.

4. Denali National Park to Kenai Fjords National Park

Alaska

Distance: 400 miles

Duration: Five-plus days, but if you’re flying all the way to Alaska, take your time

Alaska is an awe-inspiring collection of giant mountains, permanent ice fields, and jagged coast, and Denali and Kenai Fjords national parks encapsulate choice slices of that unique topography. Denali National Park covers more than 6 million acres of Alaska’s interior, including the 20,310-foot Denali, but also the tundra and spruce forest that surround it and attract big-time wildlife like caribou and brown bears. Kenai Fjords National Park couldn’t be more different; instead of forest and towering peaks, it’s home to 600,000 acres of glaciers, inlets, bays, and islands. More than half of the park is covered in snow and ice year round, and the majority is accessed by water. While much of Alaska isn’t conducive to road trips because of a lack of roads, these two parks are less than 400 miles apart and connected by highways.

The two-lane blacktop between the main destinations rolls out like a highlight reel of Alaska, offering views of Denali’s snow-capped peaks at one point and the Cook Inlet at another. Keep an eye out for Beluga whales, which live and breed in the inlet. Chugach State Park, with its 3,000-foot mountains, is also on the route.

A visitor can fly into Anchorage, halfway between the two parks. You’ll basically have to ditch the car at each destination, as car travel is limited in both parks. There are few roads in Kenai, and the main road through Denali is limited to shuttle traffic to minimize impact on the landscape. But that’s part of the charm here.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs in Denali: Denali isn’t a “drive through” park. In fact, private vehicles aren’t allowed past mile 15 of the scenic Denali Park Road, though bikes get the green light. To ride in, start at the Savage River Visitor Center (mile 15) and bike to Sable Pass between miles 37 and 42, where the final 1,500-foot climb to the pass is rewarded by views that stretch all the way to Denali itself. But Sable Pass is best known for its wildlife. Mostly treeless and full of berry bushes, it attracts brown bears, caribou, and Dall sheep, which often graze in the tundra near the road. From the top of the pass, you can turn around and bike back, or, if you pre-arrange it, hop on the free , which has bike racks. offers rentals (starting at $75 per day).

Or consider a guided rafting trip on the Nenana River, a glacier-fed stream that forms the eastern border of Denali. Book a mild or wild day trip with . The 11-mile canyon run is packed with class IV rapids with names like “Coffee Grinder,” and the full ride, for ages 12 and up, is a brisk two hours. A different short option, the two-hour-long Wilderness Run, is ideal for young families, as it contains mostly class I-II rapids and offers a good chance to see wildlife like moose and caribou. (From $130 a person, May through September).

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs in Kenai: Kenai is a coastal park with most of its goods accessed via boat, but land lovers have options, too. Hike on the edge of the Harding Ice Field, the largest permanent ice field in the U.S., stretching for 700 square miles and feeding Exit Glacier, which forms a half-mile-wide river of ice that melts into Exit Creek. Start at the Exit Glacier Nature Center and hike the 8.2-mile out-and-back , which climbs a total of 3,000 feet through the surrounding forest to gigantic views of the icefield. If you really want to throw yourself into the landscape, book an intro-to-ice climbing trip with , exploring crevasses and climbing pitches of vertical ice with use of rope, crampons, and axes ($249 per person).

For a water-borne adventure, head to Bear Glacier Lagoon, 12 miles south of Seward, where a thin beach separates a glacier-fed lake from the Gulf of Alaska. The lake sits in a deep bowl rising to green ridges, and the water is littered with house-sized icebergs. offers fully outfitted day trips to the lagoon ($550 per person).

Where to Stay: In Denali, book a spot at , which has 32 sites tucked into a spruce forest ($49 a night). Located on mile 13 on the Denali Park Road, it’s easy to reach with a car (some campgrounds in Denali are only accessible by shuttle bus), but the real prize is access to Savage River and incredible views of Denali via a short gravel-road walk. Reservations are recommended, but not required. In Kenai, has 12 walk-in tent sites, first-come, first-served. They’re free, but fill up most nights during July and August. The , in the middle of downtown Seward, is a seven-room mid-century-era motel with renovated rooms located just minutes from the edge of Kenai ($190 per night, two night minimum).

5. Mesa Verde and Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Parks

Colorado

Distance: 160 miles

Duration: Three days

Rocky Mountain National Park gets most of the love in Colorado, and while it’s incredible, the Centennial State has other unforgettable national-park units. Mesa Verde National Park and the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park are nestled into the southwest corner of the state, proximal enough to make for an ideal weekend road trip. Mesa Verde is a cultural treasure, containing more than 5,000 archaeological sites, including the early cliff dwellings of the Ancestral Pueblo people.

The Black Canyon of the Gunnison is altogether different, enveloping a nearly 2,500-foot-deep gorge surrounding the Gunnison River. It’s a deep, dark chasm with sheer vertical walls, rugged hiking and climbing, boating, and world-class trout fishing.

You can fly into Durango to kick the trip off, and Telluride is smack dab in the middle of the route between parks if you want to throw in a visit to a classic mountain town. The , a locals’ favorite and handy but fantastic afternoon outing, offers views of the ski area and entire valley on varied and forested terrain.

The majority of this road trip cruises through San Juan National Forest on a highway with views of some of Colorado’s tallest and most iconic peaks, including the 14,158-foot Mount Sneffels and 14,023-foot Wilson Peak. You’ll pass right through Telluride, but you can also make a 22-mile roundtrip detour to Ouray to soak in the hot springs.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs in Mesa Verde: Get your bearings by driving the six-mile Mesa Top Loop Road, which winds along past excavated mesa-top villages, with overlooks to see cliff dwellings, including the Cliff Palace, which archaeologists believe could house up to 100 people. There are 30 miles of hiking trails inside the park, so you can see a lot of the area in a day. If you’re limited on time, hike the 2.4-mile , which will have you squeezing through boulder passages and traversing cliffside singletrack to a large petroglyph panel. To see the cliff dwellings up close, reserve a spot on a ranger-led ($8 per person, reservations possible 14 days in advance). The Balcony House Tour is the most adventurous: you ascend a cliff face into the 700-year-old dwelling via a series of ladders, then worm through a narrow tunnel that connects rooms.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison: The BCOG is a tough canyon to navigate, as there are no bridges connecting the North Rim and South Rim, so it’s a circuitous two-hour drive between the two sides of the park. The South Rim is the more developed, with a dozen overlooks, a visitors’ center, and an 88-site campground. The North Rim is more primitive, with a gravel road providing access to a few developed trails and a handful of overlooks. Both sides are stunning, but I’m pointing you to the South Rim for its hiking and scrambling routes. If you want to stretch your legs and enjoy the view, stroll the two-mile for shots of the canyon and river below. But you’re here for the scramble to the bottom of the gorge via the unmarked , which drops 1,960 feet in just one mile (the park allows use of the trail and offers a about it). There’s a lot of down climbing and loose rock, but at the bottom you’ll have the Gunnison River all to yourself. Bring a fly rod; the Gunnison is a gold-medal trout stream. This is a full-day adventure, and you’ll need a permit (free) to descend into the canyon. Get one at the South Rim Visitor Center.

Where to Stay: Both parks have large campgrounds, if you want to keep it simple and budget friendly. The Black Canyon of the Gunnison’s is convenient (only a mile from the visitors’ center), but don’t expect a ton of privacy ($20 a night, reservations recommended). The North Rim has a smaller , with 13 sites separated by piñon and juniper trees ($20 a night, first-come, first-served). , in Mesa Verde, is large, with 267 sites within a broad, grassy canyon ($38 a night, reserve in advance).

If you want to spend a night in Telluride, check out , an upscale hostel with private or shared rooms that caters to road trippers (from $40 per night).

Graham Averill is șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű magazine’s national parks columnist. He’s currently trying to convince his 15-year-old twins to re-create the national parks road trip they undertook a decade ago. It’s not going well.

For more by this writer:

The 9 Most Fun șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Lodges in North America

The 9 Best Gateway Towns to U.S. National Parks

The 8 Most Adventurous States in America. Number 1 Is 


11 Remote Destinations That Are Definitely Worth the Effort to Visit

The post The 5 Best National Park Road Trips in the U.S. appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

When PTSD from military service in Somalia changed the course of Chad Brown’s life, the subtle art of catch and release fly fishing changed it back. In this episode, the filmmaker, fisherman, soldier, and survivor tells the story of how giving back—to his community, to the river, to the fish—gave him a template for rebuilding his life.

The post The Subtle Art of Catch and Release appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

If you’ve ever lived along the East Coast, there’s a secret that all curious, outdoorsy people soon discover: the wildest, most deserted places are often those abutting the Atlantic. That’s right, the best East Coast beaches can be every bit as remote-feeling as Western landscapes. This is easier to comprehend when you realize that the East Coast has roughly 30,000 miles of coastline. (The entire Pacific Coast, by contrast, has 7,863.)

This revelation came to me early, while exploring New England in my twenties, and re-confirmed it in my 30s and 40s, as I looked to escape New York City on weekends. Since then, I’ve driven as far as Maine and North Carolina’s Outer Banks—roughly eight hours in either direction—from NYC to explore an “undiscovered” beaches and maybe catch a fish or two. I’ve also road tripped all over the south’s Lowcountry looking for an empty stretch of sand, and have spent way too much time on Florida’s Atlantic Coast trying to to catch a redfish or bonefish on a fly rod.

Look, I’m not foolish enough to think anyone can be an “expert” on 30,000 miles worth of barrier islands, salt marshes, and tiny beachside communities. But I’ve explored enough to say with confidence that there are some wild damn places out there, and I’ve been lucky enough to discover a few that are well worth a visit.

Here are just a handful of my favorites. This list also includes a mix of both remote, undeveloped gems and impossible-to-ignore standbys that are great simply because of their, well
beach vibes. It’s a whole thing, and any town that has it, like Cape May, New Jersey, or Folly Beach, South Carolina, is worth a look-see, too. Trust me, you can’t go wrong with any of these beaches, as long as you’re packing some sunscreen (and maybe a bottle of bug spray for the real remote ones).

Best Beaches in Maine

Sand Beach, Maine

Location: Twelve miles south of Bar Harbor
Why We Love It: Soft sand surrounded by the coniferous forest of Acadia National Park

This is probably —a pocket of white sand framed by rocky shorelines and wind-flagged trees—and one of the most beautiful beaches in U.S. National Parks. For New Englanders, Sand Beach is well-known—for good reason. It’s one of the few sandy beaches in this part of the state (hence the name), and it’s sheltered just enough from the wind that it’s often perfect for sunbathing on a warm day. In the summer months, there’s even a lifeguard on duty. This all means that it’s popular and you can expect crowds in July and August. Even then, only a handful of people venture into the water, because its temperature usually peaks south of 60 degrees Fahrenheit. But if you’re willing to brave the cold Atlantic, swimming here can be good. Despite its popularity, it can even feel secluded on the right day. There’s also hiking and paddling in nearby Acadia. One of the more difficult and popular treks is , a 1.4-mile loop that ascends 450 feet and offers stunning views of the below.

Know Before You Go: Even though it’s inside Acadia National Park, there is no fee to access the beach. The parking lot, however, occasionally fills up on busy weekend days, so it’s best to arrive early.

Bonus Beach: Roque Bluffs State Park, Maine

Location: In the heart of Down East Maine, eight miles from the small town of Machias
Best For: A choose-your-own-adventure swim, either in the cold ocean waters or in a freshwater pond

The bulk of this is a half-mile crescent of sand and pebbles that divides the shallow waters of 60-acre Simpson Pond from Englishman Bay. In the heat of summer, it’s possible to swim in either—or both, a plunge in the brisk saltwater followed by the comparably warm waters of Simpson Pond. While it’s great for a plunge, this is not a lounging beach, to be clear, as the pebbles make laying on a beach towel uncomfortable. But Roque Bluffs does offer a relaxing stroll with dramatic views of rugged islands jutting out of the ocean waters. There’s also a series of short trails in the fields and woodlands inside the park, with an excellent vantage point of Pond Cove and Great Cove. If you’re in the area, it’s worth a dip.

Best Beach in New Hampshire

Seabrook Beach, New Hampshire

Location: 15 miles South of Portsmouth, near the border with Massachusetts
Why We Love It: A quieter alternative to its more bustling neighbors, with pristine sands

New Hampshire has the at just 18 miles, but it packs some excellent beaches into that stretch. Its most famous is Hampton Beach, a classic New England destination with white sand, long boardwalks, and a circus-like atmosphere, thanks to its string of arcades. Much better is Seabrook Beach, across the inlet from Hampton, with impossibly white sand, consistent waves, and none of the crowds. By comparison, it feels hidden, serene, and impossibly quaint. There’s a reason for this: parking is nearly impossible to find because it’s without a resident parking permit. But if you make it here, you’ll have a wide expanse of sand to stroll along or set up an umbrella. The surfing is good here, and the dunes make it seem wild, even if you’re only a few minutes to the Hampton Beach circus.

Know Before You Go: To get around the parking, take an Uber or ride a bike from the town of Seabrook, less than 5 miles away. You can also pay for parking at Hampton Beach and walk across Hampton Bridge, then down to Seabrook, a little over a mile walk.

Best Beaches in Massachusetts

Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts

Location: The Outer Cape, roughly 90 miles from downtown Boston
Why We Love It: Unparalleled, wide-open stretches of soft sand and wind-swept dunes

No list like this would be complete without including , 40 miles of pristine beaches, freshwater ponds, and high dunes interspersed by lighthouses, cranberry bogs, and hiking trails. The recreational opportunities are practically endless, and whole books have been written about how to make the most of the beaches here. But if you want a down-and-dirty guide for newbies, this is it. Coast Guard Beach, in the town of Eastham, is one of the most popular beaches because it’s great for lounging and swimming on the Atlantic side, and it also offers paddling in nearby Nauset Bay or Salt Pond Bay. If you want to feel like you’re walking off the Eastern Seaboard, head to Marconi Beach, with sweeping Atlantic views. Hiking along the bluffs here will make you feel as if you could see a white whale at any moment.

Know Before You Go: Traffic headed to the Cape is infamous on summer weekends, so if you go during peak times, it’s best to stay overnight or through the weekend. (Or instead, go during the week.) If you do stay overnight, Provincetown, despite its crowds and high price tags, is worth the added cost. This artist colony and LGBTQ+ capital is brimming with verve and quirkiness and the energy it adds to a vacation is a perfect complement to days spent in the salt and sand.

Bonus Beach: Crane Beach, Massachusetts

Location: Five miles from the town of Ipswich, 30 miles north of Boston
Best For: Escaping the crowds and enjoying a slice of bucolic New England on your way to the beach

Cape Cod gets nearly all of the beach attention in Massachusetts, but this one, on the North Shore, backed by tall dunes and salt marshes. It can get busy on a summer weekend, but otherwise offers a peaceful opportunity for walking on the sand, hiking five miles worth of trails through the dunes, birdwatching, and paddling in the nearby Ipswich River or Essex Bay. Beach passes are required and can be . If you come, don’t leave before checking out , a palace-like summer estate built for industrialist Richard Teller Crane Jr., with impeccably maintained gardens and a rolling grass lawn stretching to the water.

Best Beach in Rhode Island

Sachuest Beach, Rhode Island

Location: In Middletown, next door to Newport
Why We Love It: A city-person’s beach that has a good hike within walking distance

Locals call this mile-long stretch of sand on the southeastern shore of Aquidneck Island , but it is anything but secondary. Not only does it have great swimming and sunbathing, the western flank of Sachuest, called Surfer’s End, is known for its consistent swells. If you get bored sunbathing on the beach, you can also easily walk to the eastern end, which is the beginning of , with three miles of trails. Birdwatchers are common here because of the diversity of species, including the second largest wintering population of harlequin ducks on the Atlantic coast. It also has great fishing from shore, including an active for striped bass.

Know Before You Go: This is a full-service beach, with concession stands, bathrooms, grills, etc., so don’t expect pristine wildlands—or to be by yourself. Rent a surfboard from the rental area and, after your session, check out Gilded Age mansions in Newport.

Best Beaches in New York

Ditch Plains Park Beach, New York

Location: Two miles east of Montauk Village, on the far eastern end of Long Island
Why We Love It: It’s home to one of the best surf breafks on the East Coast.

For many New Yorkers trekking out to the Hamptons, this two-mile beach is as much a part of summer weekends as Hampton Water rosĂ©. That’s, in part, because Ditch Plains is such a great place to set up for a day in the sun, thanks to its Ìę(depending on conditions) and lifeguards on duty from Memorial Day to Labor Day (roughly). There’s also a food truck next to the beach, called , that serves up some of the area’s best poke bowls and wraps. But the reason this beach is on this list is because of the surf break just offshore, which offers good waves in just about any swell direction. The lineup is notorious for getting crowded, but there are definitely days in the fall when, midweek, you can find yourself sharing swells with only one or two other surfers—or even snagging them all for yourself.

Know Before You Go: Parking in the lot next to the beach requires an (available to residents only). In the summer, take an Uber/Lyft or, better yet, rent a cruiser bike in Montauk and ride here.

Bonus Beach: Napeague Beach, New York

Location: Between Amagansett and Montauk, on the east end of Long Island
Best For: Getting a taste of what Long Island beaches felt like before the crowds invaded

Tucked off Highway 27 between the prim and proper Hamptons and the bustling beaches of Montauk lies one of the area’s great secrets: a two-mile stretch of sand that even locals overlook. Technically, it’s part of 1,364-acre , but the beach here feels private, in part because it’s sandwiched between two neighborhoods who guard their sand with zeal. Napeague Beach is, however, open to the public, and it’s popular with 4x4ers that have . You can easily walk to the sand, however, by parking at a small, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it spot on the south side of Highway 27. This is where 4x4s access the beach, and you’ll have to walk from here through the dunes. Doing so only makes the empty beach feel that much more rewarding once you get a full view of the wind-swept dunes, with the occasional surfcaster chucking rigs far out into the ocean. Thanks to its remoteness, this beach is also popular with the endangered piping plover, so it’s often closed during summer nesting season. When it’s open, however—especially in fall—it can feel downright abandoned.

Best Beaches in New Jersey

Island Beach State Park, New Jersey

Location: Barnegat Peninsula, south of the town of Seaside Heights
Why We Love It: White sand beaches in a wild landscape that feels frozen in time

Many New Jerseyans have never even been to this park, with 10 miles of sand dunes, maritime forests, and freshwater wetlands. That’s because this place is as far from the manicured sand, boardwalks, and hotdog stands as it gets. is proof that remote-feeling beaches can exist anywhere, even in New Jersey. In addition to being home to the state’s largest osprey colony, it’s frequented by peregrine falcons, waterfowl, shorebirds, and migrating songbirds. Fishermen flock here, too, whether they’re targeting the surf on the Atlantic side or casting in Barnegat Bay. There’s a designated swimming beach (called Ocean Swimming Beach), surfing, an area for kitesurfing, and even eight miles of trails. Sunbathing is really the only thing you shouldn’t do here, because you’ll be missing out on so much else.

Know Before You Go: One of the best recreational opportunities may be paddling from Island Beach into the Sedge Island Wildlife Management Area, one of New Jersey’s most productive wildlife habitats, with to paddle through it.

Bonus Beach: Cape May Beach, New Jersey

Location: Cape May, on the far southern coast of the state
Best For: Relaxing on manicured sand next to one of the most charming towns in all of New Jersey

This is the that many New Jerseyans will point to as their state’s best—and for good reason. The town of Cape May is lovely as hell, and downtown is adjacent to the main beach, with sugary sand that is raked cleaned nearly every day during summer, making it feel, well, pristine. It’s also welcoming, full of sunbathers and swimmers chilling out on the weekend, which is all part of the charm. This is a social beach, with the occasional fireworks show or . If you want to sneak away from some of the crowds during the day, walk to the West, towards Cove Beach, which usually has more room to lay out an oversized beach towel (and great sunset views). There’s also plenty of activities nearby, including a few beach breaks good for groms, skimboarding, fishing, and paddling in the harbor.

Best Beach in Delaware

Delaware Seashore State Park Beach, Delaware

Location: Seven miles south of Rehoboth Beach
Why We Love It: Six miles of ocean-front sand and 20 miles of bay shoreline full of possibilities

This popular offers easy access to the junction of Indian River Bay, Rehoboth Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean. As such, it is overflowing with activities: swimming, surfing, fishing, sailing, windsurfing, hiking, paddling, crabbing, and camping, among others. There are two ocean swimming areas, patrolled by lifeguards during the summer season, and there’s a decent , which can be great with some southerly wind protection (but is also challenging, thanks to its shallow water). If you want to stretch your legs, there’s a one-mile hiking trail through the adjacent , with raised boardwalks over the marshlands.

Know Before You Go: There’s a $5 daily entrance fee ($10 for nonresidents), but those fees help make this an extremely well-managed park, with great resources to help you plan practically any adventure, whether it’s birding, surfcasting, paddling, or something else.

Best Beach in Maryland

Assateague Island National Seashore, Maryland & Virginia

Location: Maryland’s Eastern Shore, roughly 10 miles from Ocean City
Why We Love It: 37 miles of remote dunes with herds of wild horses

There is no other place on the East Coast that demonstrates just how wild a coastline can be like this national seashore, which stretches across the Maryland and Virginia border. Assateague is one of the largest barrier islands on the eastern seaboard with uninterrupted coastal habitats, and it has become famous for its wild horses, which have been here for hundreds of years. If you want to see them, you’re probably better offÌę heading to the Maryland side or by booking a tour with a third-party organizer. There are two entrances, one in the north and one in the south, and there is no vehicle access between the two (other than by going back to the mainland). If you want to really explore the beaches—and you have a four-wheel drive rig—you can apply for and purchase an over-sand vehicle (OVS) , which allows you to access . You can fish mile after mile of remote surf or just find an open stretch of sand to sit down and enjoy the ocean breeze.

Know Before You Go: Nearly every year, it seems, Assateague breaks its previous record for visitation, with . So yes, expect to share the sand. The northern end of Assateague Island tends to be less busy than the southern end, but the surest way to get away from the crowds is with an OSV permit or by walking a few miles down the beach.

Best Beach in Virginia

False Cape State Park, Virginia

Location: Roughly 19 miles south of Virginia Beach
Why We Love It: It remains one of the last undeveloped shorelines in this part of the Atlantic coast.

This is not the place to come if you’re hoping to lay out a towel and soak in some rays (there are no dedicated swimming areas, either), but it is one of Virginia’s most dramatic, and least visited, parks. Situated between Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge and the North Carolina border, offers excellent stretches of open sand that are accessible only by hiking, biking, or boating to them. The reward is stunning coastal views, good surfcasting, and on the bay side, a maze of water trails to paddle. There are a to choose from, too, which total 15.3 miles. These include Barbour Hill, a 1.42-mile self-guided trek through the dunes to the ocean. If you’re committed, there’s even a primitive camping program, which requires a of anywhere from five to nine miles. But you’re almost guaranteed to be all alone.

Know Before You Go: The park operates a ($8 per person) that offers a four-hour guided tour through Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge and False Cape State Park, which is a good way to see the wildlife here without committing to a longer hike or adventure.

Best Beaches in North Carolina

Cape Hatteras National Seashore, North Carolina

Location: On the Outer Banks, along highway NC-12
Why We Love It: Iconic lighthouses, unparalleled surf, and vast natural habitats

It’s hard to think of a better beach for a list like this. In reality, though, this is an entire ecosystem, with 70 miles and 30,000 acres of grass-covered dunes, wide sand beaches, marshes, and woodlands that are home to some 400-plus bird species, among other critters. Sure, there will be crowds and traffic in summer, but it’s hard to find a more alluring coastline with so many activities. Surfing is excellent here, with regular swells at a range of spots, including Canadian Hole and the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, both near the town of Buxton. It’s also very well established as a kite-surfing hotspot, with consistent winds blowing through Pamlico Sound (launch from ). Fishing is great, too—both on the ocean and sound sides—and paddlers can explore the flat waters on the sound side as well, launching from the Oregon Inlet Kayak Launch. There are even three different hiking trails, including a through the dunes and maritime forests on Hatteras Island. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine a better seashore for basically anything you want to do outside.

Know Before You Go: Cape Hatteras National Seashore is free to enter, but there are fees for just about everything else—off-road vehicle use, camping, and climbing the 200 steps to the top of Bodie Island Lighthouse, for example (). Also, Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, a highlight for many people, is as it undergoes repairs.

Bonus Beach: Ocracoke Island, North Carolina

Location: In the southern Outer Banks, across the channel from Hatteras Island
Best For: Getting away from it all

Technically, this 13-mile-long barrier island is part of Cape Hatteras National Seashore, as most of it is managed by the park service, but it feels a world apart, thanks to its frozen-in-time quirkiness and just how raw the landscape feels. Ocracoke is also a testament to how going the extra mile is totally worth it. The island is only accessible by , which makes the beaches here much, much less crowded. It can often feel asÌę if you’re alone, especially in early fall. For surfing, the beach near Ocracoke Inlet offers consistent waves, and fishermen can surfcast along the Atlantic shores or set up on the sound-side shoreline, like at South Point. Hammock Hills Nature Trail offers a good walk for hikers. There’s even a herd of ponies managed by the park service that are that have lived on the island since the 17th or 18th century, give or take a 100 years.

Best Beaches in South Carolina

Folly Beach, South Carolina

Location: Twelve miles from downtown Charleston, on Folly Island
Why We Love It: An eclectic mix of Southern charm and seaside cool that’s hard to find anywhere else

Folly Beach is no secret—tourists have been coming here for generations—but this is the epitome of what a great seaside community should be. “Beaching” is just a way of life here, which makes the whole thing irresistible, even if you’re just walking down the fishing pier. Of course, there’s a reason people flock here: six miles of white sand, palm trees, and warm Atlantic waters ideal for sunbathing, swimming, and, of course, surfing. Folly’s most famous break is the Washout, known for kicking up some of the best waves on the East Coast. There’s also plenty of other outdoor activities, from kayaking and SUPing through the marshes on the Folly River side of the island to riding a cruiser bike around town. Folly Beach can be a bit of a scene at night, but that also makes it great for snagging some beach town energy and good eats, from fresh seafood to beachside tacos. There’s perhaps no better place to escape reality for a weekend (or two).

Know Before You Go: While surfing at Folly Beach is better in the winter, the summer months are the prime time for live music, festivals, outdoor movies, and crowds, making it the best time to experience its full intensity. Parking can be a challenge, so if you’re only coming for a weekend day, it’s best to rideshare.

Bonus Beach: Hunting Island State Park Beach, South Carolina

Location: 15 miles east of the town Beaufort, and roughly 90 miles south of Charleston
Best For: A beach trip that’s as much about outdoor adventures as lying on the sand

is South Carolina’s most popular park—5,000 acres of pristine Lowcountry that’s full of salt marshes, palmetto and live oak forests, and a four-mile-long stretch of white sand. Even with the crowds on a summer weekend, however, this barrier island feels pristine, as it’s almost totally undeveloped. And if you come on a weekday (or, better yet, in the fall,), it’ll feel downright remote. There are a number of great hiking trails in the park, including the and the easy-peasy , which might be the best spot along the coast for taking in the sunset. There’s a 950-foot fishing pier, and paddling in the marshes surrounding the island. As for the beach, it doesn’t disappoint either, and if you walk to the southern end you can see Little Hunting Island Boneyard Beach, where skeletal remains of dead trees dot the sand.

Best Beaches in Georgia

Sapelo Island, Georgia

Location: Roughly 75 miles south of Savannah, near the tiny town of Darien
Why We Love It: Untouched natural beauty and a rich history on the South’s most overlooked coastline

Sapelo Island, the fourth largest barrier island in Georgia, is one of the East Coast’s best-kept secrets. There are miles and miles of pristine beaches, maritime forests, and salt marshes across this island, which has hardly changed since the 1980s—or even the 1880s. While the landscape here is unforgettable, the island is mostly known for its unique history, being home to the Hog Hammock community, one of the South’s few remaining , descendants of enslaved West Africans brought to work on plantations along the Atlantic coast. Today, there are roughly 70 people who live in Hog Hammock. Each of the island’s two most famous buildings, the R.J. Reynolds Mansion and the Sapelo Island Lighthouse, have over 200 years of history on the island, too. In short, if you want a place that’s perfect for disconnecting from the modern world, this is it. You can ride a bike down the empty streets, kayak to Blackbeard Island National Wildlife Refuge (of Blackbeard pirate fame) for bird-watching, or simply stroll along the untouched shores—all of which can be mind-blowingly deserted. Nanny Goat Beach, for example, is completely wide-open sand with hardly a soul on it. It’s hard to believe a place like this even exists today.

Know Before You Go: This is not the place to come if you’re looking for a quick getaway. The only way to arrive at Sapelo is via a 30-minute ferry ride, provided by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources (). Planning ahead is essential, as you’ll likely need to stay the night and there are very few places to crash. AirbnB may be your best bet or reserve a spot at . Locals still protect this island and its heritage as if it’s their own—because it is. A little respect goes a long way to making your visit feel rewarding.

Bonus Beach: Cumberland Island, Georgia

Location: On the far southern coast of Georgia, just across the water from Fernandina Beach, Florida
Best For: Camping in one of the South’s most serene, untouched landscapes

Cumberland is Georgia’s largest and southernmost barrier island, and it’s easy to add another superlative to this list: wildest. This stretches over 17 miles of empty beaches, framed by majestic live oaks and palmettos, and is home to a population of feral horses, which you can often see passing by on the unpaved roads. The island’s isolation is its appeal, but there is plenty to do, too. There are wide sandy shores to walk on, ruins from to explore, and an to amble around on. Access to Cumberland Island is controlled via the National Park Service, and the easiestÌę way to get here is via a (and you’ll need an if you plan to camp here). There are no stores and very limited facilities, so you also need to be self-sufficient. But the experience of camping under the stars with the sounds of the ocean and the sight of wild horses is simply unmatched.

Best Beaches in Florida

Cocoa Beach, Florida

Location: A little over an hour East of Orlando, just a short drive from Kennedy Space Center
Why We Love It: A surfer’s paradise with a laid-back atmosphere on Florida’s “Space Coast”

Cocoa Beach, with its endless stretches of soft, sandy beaches, and consistent waves no matter the season, is one of the East Coast’s most iconic beach destinations. No other city on the eastern seaboard is so well-known for its surfing and surf culture (it’s the hometown of Kelly Slater, after all). It lives up to the hype. There are waves for beginners and seasoned surfers alike, with the iconic Cocoa Beach Pier providing the perfect backdrop for those looking to simply enjoy the view of the lineups. The area is also steeped in space history, being just 20 miles to the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral. You can even watch a rocket launch from the beach if you time it right (check out the at the space center’s website). If you’re looking for slower-paced activities, there’s decent fishing from the pier and the Banana River is great for paddling. Windsurfing is common here, too, so there’s plenty going on, even without rocket ships to the moon.

Know Before You Go: It may seem like cheesy activity, but the nearby is totally worth the trip. The same can be said of the , which bills itself as the largest surf shop in the world, at 52,000 square feet.

Bonus Beach: Sebastian Inlet State Park, Florida

Location: Florida’s central east coast, roughly 17 miles north of Vero Beach
Best For: Surfing and fishing excursions

is well-known for its surf breaks and its fishing spots, which are both excellent on account of the park being situated where the Indian River flows into the Atlantic. The park’s First Peak and Monster Hole offer some of the best surf breaks on the East Coast and its waters are teeming with snook, redfish, and Spanish mackerel, making it a premier fishing destination. The Indian River Lagoon has calm waters that are good for paddling and there’s even a decent trail in the park to walk on, called Hammock Trail. There are, of course, long stretches of unspoiled sand great for sunbathing and shell collecting (this is a Best Beaches list, after all.) It’s a bit of an ordeal to drive to it, because the causeways accessing the barrier island are miles apart, but that also makes it less crowded. The best part, though, is that it’s far away from the hoopla of the Miami metroplex in the south and Daytona Beach in the north, meaning this beach is totally worth the extra effort to get to it.

Ryan Krogh lived on the East Coast for 12 years, split between Boston and New York City, and spent nearly every weekend finding the area’s best nooks and crannies for adventures. Among the many great ones was a day at Napeague Beach, reeling in striped bass on a fly rod. He now lives in Austin, Texas, where he spends much of his time exploring the Hill Country and the Texas coast while dreaming of getting on another fall striped bass blitz off the shores of Long Island.

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The bad news is trout aren’t getting dumber. More flies on the surface and extra boots in the water mean you have to approach these fish with stealth and finesse. The good news: our 2024 gear selections won’t make the cast or catch a fish for you, but they sure help level the playing field. Last summer and fall, four testers took over 40 items from Idaho to British Columbia to narrow down the very best options for you.

At a Glance

• Rod:
• Luxe Rod:
• Sunglasses:
• Rain Jacket:
• Backpack:
• Waders:
• Wading Boots:
• Fly-Fishing Questions and Answers
• How We Test
• Meet Our Lead Testers

All gear in this guide was tested by multiple reviewers. When you buy through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission. This supports our mission to get more people active and outside.ÌęLearn more.

Greys Cruise Fly Rod/Reel Combo 9’ 5-Weight

Weight: 2 lbs

Pros and Cons
⊕ Great beginner rod
⊗ Action makes long casts with heavy flies difficult

Bottom line: This wallet-friendly kit performs well in 90 percent of fly-fishing situations.

If you buy the Cruise kit, it’s for budget reasons. The reel is die-cast instead of machined, and the rod components, guides, wraps, and others are modest compared to higher-end options. That said, this four-piece, medium-action, easy-to-cast rod comes with everything you need to get started—a large-arbor disk-drag reel, backing, a weight-forward floating line, a leader, and a protective tube. It casts dries and small nymphs nicely between 20 and 50 feet; however, with heavier nymphs and streamers—including bead-head and cone-head varieties—our casts often folded at 40 to 60 feet. Still, if you’re buying for a beginning fly-fisher or want an extra stick when your go-to rod fails, you can’t get such decent quality for a better price. Have a kids’ birthday coming up? Make them smile.

Orvis Helios D 9’ 5-Weight Fly Rod

Weight: 3.06 oz
Size: 10’ 4-wt to an 8’5” 14-wt

Pros and Cons
⊕ Extremely accurate
⊕ Made in distance (D) and finesse (F) models
⊗ Pricey

Bottom line: If the most technologically advanced fly rod ever built is your jam, Helios is your rod.

Anglers rarely need to throw an entire fly line—unless there’s a unique fish on the far bank, or they’re showing off. One of our testers is that showoff at the boat ramp; last fall, he threw an entire line with Orvis’ new 9’ 5-weight Helios after having tested the rod for several days on Montana’s broad Missouri River. Nobody asked for his autograph, but a few onlookers did ask him which rod he was using. The Helios is available in distance (D) and finesse (F) options and 29 length and weight combinations. We found that a 9-foot 5-weight is perfect on most trout waters. We chose the finesse model when fishing light tippets for large fish, especially on flat-surfaced spring creeks, tailwaters, and still waters. The distance model was our go-to when throwing most dry flies, along with streamers and nymphs. This rod is highly accurate and fast thanks to its stellar build, which means over-lining it one stop (for instance, using a 6-weight line, versus a 5-weight) might improve its feel if the rod doesn’t load to your liking.

Costa King Tide Sunglasses

Weight: 8-base frame 49g (including side shields and lenses); 6-base frame 48g
Size: L

Pros and Cons
⊕ Pair with any 580 lens
⊕ Removable side shields offer full light blockage
⊕ Adjustable nosepiece allows custom fit and excellent ventilation
⊕ Non-skid material on top of frame
⊕ Available in RX
⊗ Price
⊗ One frame color

Bottom line: This was the most versatile frame we tested with a variety of high-quality lens choices.

I didn’t need Costa’s King Tide shades to see the bluefin tuna off Southern California’s Coronado Island—those breezers often broke the surface within the boat’s casting range. But, I was very grateful for their protection during what, unexpectedly, turned out to bea 16-hour day on the ocean, partly in the glaring sun. The removable side shields offered excellent light and wind protection, and the adjustable nose piece held the frame off my high cheeks and kept the air flowing to prevent any fogging. Their rubber, non-slip pads (located on the top of the shields) held the glasses in place when I set them on various surfaces, even while we were pitching on the Pacific. Word to the wise: if you do remove the side shields, the King Tides slide off surfaces like any other glasses, which risks shattering lenses. The King Tides are available in a variety of 580 lens tints. For testers, Blue Mirror and Green Mirror worked well on the Pacific, and Copper/Silver Mirror and Sunrise/Silver Mirror were solid choices for freshwater.

Patagonia Boulder Fork Rain Jacket

Weight: 3.7 oz
Size: S, M, L

Pros and Cons
⊕ Streamlined
⊕ Low bulk
⊕ Three large pockets
⊕ Longer cut for additional protection
⊗ Longer cut could allow water in hand pockets during deep wades

Bottom line: The multi-activity jacket that served us best in the backcountry fly-fishing arena.

You can get more pockets, zippered ventilation, and neoprene cuffs on fly-fishing-specific jackets, but those extra features add bulk and weight, which doesn’t serve well when hitting off-the-grid waters. This streamlined 3-layer jacket with DWR coating kept us dry and didn’t snag when we crept through the brush and morning dew on northern Idaho’s native cutthroat waters. The jacket packs down to softball size and is easily stuffed into our waistpacks and daypacks. A large fly box fit nicely in the lay-flat chest pocket, which gave us adequate fly choices during full days in the backcountry. Two side pockets held additional gear, such as split shot, gloves, and tippet. An adjustable draw-cord hood fit well, whether we wore a ball cap or stocking hat, and effectively prevented windblown rain from creeping past the collar and down our necks and backs.

Fishpond Wind River Roll-Top Backpack

Weight: 3.6 lbs
Size: 38L; 31” tall unrolled; 24” rolled three times

Pros and Cons
⊕ Keeps gear dry
⊕ Carries two rod tubes
⊕ Removable hip belt
⊗ No exterior side pocket for water and/or bear spray

Bottom line: When critical gear must remain dry, this is our bag.

We carried this soft-sided pack to Alaska, testing it during a challenging week of weather that ranged from light drizzle to full-blown rain and gale-force winds that grounded floatplanes for days. We tossed the Wind River onto the floors of open aluminum skiffs, packed it through the willows and head-high grasses, and the rugged TPCU-coated exterior, combined with roll-top security, kept our gear—including cameras and lenses—dry. The new Wind River offers a thermoformed back panel and an adjustable hip belt that always kept us comfortable. The hip belt is also removable, which allowed this bag to easily slide into overhead compartments on commercial flights and slip, unencumbered, into the piles of gear that ride in a floatplane’s rear fuselage and pontoons. Note: Alaska pilots detest hard-side roller duffels and they’ll tell you as much (they aren’t pliable, take up more space, and are heavier than soft-sided gear). Luckily for us, the Wind River passed the pilot’s soft-sided test for packability. Plastic straps on the front of the bag allowed us to carry two rod tubes at a time.

Simms G4Z Stockingfoot Waders

Weight: 47.2 oz
Size: S, M, MK, L, LK, XL, XXL

Pros and Cons
⊕ Sleek and easily adjustable harness/suspender system
⊕ Bonded center zipper more pliable/comfortable than previous stitched-in models
⊕ Two interior, fully submersible zippered pockets
⊗ Pricey
⊗ Hot on warmest summer days

Bottom line: This high-end wader performs flawlessly in all seasons and on all waters.

I never wanted a Cadillac, nor could I have afforded one, but I’ll sure hit the water in Cadillac-quality waders, which is exactly what the SimmsG4Zs are. These waders offer a new sleek harness and suspender system that’s easily adjusted by lockdown clasps, and the excess suspender straps slide into external chest pockets, which makes on-the-water fit adjustments a snap. Simply unlock the clasp, place a hand in a front pocket, pull down on the strap, and re-lock for a secure and custom fit. Simms also extended the wader’s four-layer Gore-Tex Pro Shell fabric to the crotch and seat, making these more robust in the highest wear areas, a design touch we appreciate in an expensive wader. The upper portion of the wader is a three-layer Gore-Tex Pro Shell material, where a front and center zipper is now bonded, rather than stitched, to the fabric.. The result of that three-layer fabric and bonded zipper combination is a more pliable and therefore comfortable feel. We also liked the generous fit that was easier to get in and out of than other waders we tested.

We tested these waders on 80-degree late-summer and fall days, and on winter days with temperatures in the 40s and wind gusts of up to 30 miles an hour. On the warmest days, you’ll get hot under the four-layer fabric and likely need to open the center zipper for ventilation, which works well. Additionally, a new velcro wading belt is easily adjustable and allows for increased interior airflow when needed. On cooler mornings and summer evenings, you can wear multiple layers under the G4Zs and not be restricted in movement. These fit well—not tight, yet we didn’t feel like we were wading in a garbage bag. Two interior waterproof chest pockets open and close with TRU Zip zippers and kept our essentials, like cell phones and licenses, completely dry.

Patagonia Forra Wading Boot

Weight: 41 oz

Pros and Cons
⊕ Lightweight
⊕ Quick drying
⊕ Comfortable enough to hike in
⊗ With no foam backing on the upper they could rub the ankle bone

Bottom line: This high-end wader performs flawlessly in all seasons and on all waters.

There are a few main reasons I would own Forra boots: they are lightweight, they lace tight, offer excellent toe and heel protection, and are perfect for all-day hikes and overnights. The mostly dry upper dries fast and helps keep the weight down, which was nice for backcountry missions, and stuffing them in our duffel for flights.

However, we should all take Patagonia’s marketing verbiage, “super sticky grip” and slime-defying grip,” with a grain of salt. I would not dare wade the Madison, Clearwater, or Lochsa rivers (among others) without studs on these boots. Fortunately, they are available with a ($49), which makes this a non-issue.

Fly-Fishing Questions and Answers

Do I need waders for summer fly-fishing?

This question all depends on air and water temperatures. For instance, in the northern Rockies, even the dog days of summer may begin in the 40-degree range. With an early start, sans a solid base layer and waders, you might whimper back to the rig and wait for the sun to rise high. In Alaska, you might not even see the sun for a couple of days. In addition, waders protect you from stinging/biting insects and thorny vegetation. Wet-wading is a summer treat, but you should always have waders for backup against the weather, including summer thunderstorms that sometimes drop multiple inches of hail, and air temperatures by 20 or 30 degrees Fahrenheit in an hour.

Which dry flies do I need for summer fly-fishing?

You’ll need different flies for the different regions you fish. In general, you’ll cover mayfly, caddis, stonefly, and terrestrial hatches. Below is a quick guide to matching each of the below flies:

• Mayflies (sizes 14, 16, and 18): Parachute Adams’, Purple Hazes, Sparkle Duns, Rusty Spinners, and Quigley Cripples
• Caddis (sizes 12, 14, and 16): Caddis Variant, Cornfed Caddis, Peacock Caddis, and Outrigger Caddis
• Stoneflies (sizes 4, 6, and 8): Stimulators, Water Walker Golden Stones, Rogue Foam Salmonflies, and Morris Fluttering Stones
• Ants (sizes 4, 6, and 8): Amy’s Ant and Ant Acids
• Hoppers (sizes 14 and 16): Parachute Hoppers and Morrish Hoppers

Do I need polarized sunglasses to fly-fish?

Technically, no. However, being able to see contrast and definition under the surface of the water gives an angler a huge advantage. You’ll spook fewer trout, see structures (boulders, logs, matts of grass) that attract fish, and you’ll avoid debris that might cause a stumble and fall in the water. Plus, you have a better shot at seeing fish before they see you.

How We Test

Number of Testers: 4

Number of Products Tested: Over 40

Number of Bodies of Water Tested in: 15

Four avid fly-fishers packed 40-plus items to various rivers and lakes this past year, testing that gear in several challenging locales, including Idaho, Montana, Alaska, California, and British Columbia. We set up and cast fly rods side by side, deep waded with a variety of waders—checking for leakage and comfort—and hung gear in rain, sleet, and snow—for up to 48 straight hours—to test if they could hold out the water. We considered fly lines and reels, rods, emergency equipment, wading boots, belts, staffs, base layers, packs, jackets, and more.

Meet Our Lead Testers

Greg Thomas

Greg Thomas is the owner of Angler’s Tonic and the former editor-in-chief of Fly Rod and Reel and American Angler magazines. He’s the author of Fly Bible: Montana and Fly Fisher’s Guide to Washington and, especially, enjoys time in the backcountry, hiking with his Labrador, Rye, casting to native fish in oft-overlooked places. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

Kelly Klein

Kelly Klein is the associate gear editor at șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű and a beginner at fly-fishing, so she enjoyed testing the products that made the learning curve less steep. Based in Bozeman, Montana, she tested gear on Montana’s upper Madison and Missouri rivers, the Colorado River, and Utah’s Green River.

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