To quote a former Secretary of Defense notable for a lack of insight and introspection, there are always 'unknown unknowns' when going into a situation. But a retrospective analysis sometimes shows clear signs of error, hubris, or willful incompetence leading us to ask: "what were you thinking?" From the world of backcountry skiing comes the …
Category: Commentariat
Closing the curtain on the 20/21 season
The final fizzled snowstorm up north was our April Fool's joke coming right at the end of the season. I didn't want to make light of the season by posting yesterday- that would have felt cruel. Quick retrospective The Coronavirus pandemic created a stampede on purchase of outdoors equipment, including cross-country skis. Prospects that this …
365 plus 1
COVID lockdown for us continues. A year and a day and counting. At home we still maintain a 6-8 week supply of toilet paper and paper towels, and I make sure I have at least four weeks' worth of the bagged ground coffee I like best (itself a subsitute for the freshly-ground coffee I used …
A crystal globe, an environmentalist, and The New Yorker
It's likely that almost every cross-country skier in the U.S. knows who Jessie Diggins is; many snow sports aficionados know how important winning the World Cup is; but there are a lot more people who are neither athletes nor cross-country skiers but know who Bill McKibben is. And there are plenty of people who don't …
Continue reading A crystal globe, an environmentalist, and The New Yorker
Randonnée redux rabbit hole
I thought I'd taken a pretty nerdy trip with last year's post "Pins to pivots and the nightmare of the 90s", but I gladly yield to the world of AT/Randonnée, which assigns a different meaning to the term 'ski touring' than I'm accustomed to. At the site Wildsnow they dedicate a page to retelling the …
Across the Snow Line 