Tim Mathis's Blog, page 11

"...and then, together, we walked across that line." The Moab 240, by Wes Ritner

One of the most touching stories to come out of the Moab 240 this year was about the two runners who tied for 2nd place: Serbian professional runner Jovica Spajic (who we interviewed in our podcast about the event), and the winner of the 2018 Bigfoot 200, Wes Ritner (who wrote a previous post about that win for this blog).

It's not too much of a spoiler to say that the two ran the vast majority of the race together. In a race this long, that meant two top competitors running together in virtual lockstep for more than 2 days straight!

Wes was kind enough to share his personal account of the remarkable experience with us here.

Unless otherwise credited, all photos courtesy of Scott Rokis. He's one of the best outdoor and race photographers around, and we'd encourage you to check out his work.  Arrival It was the afternoon before the race, and I’d just finished the check-in process. I’d retrieved my drop bags from my car, and was carrying them to the designated area. That’s when I saw Jovica. He was up a small slope from me, standing where all 150 of the runners would soon gather to hear the pre-race briefing.

Jovica and I were too far apart for me to say anything. I could have shouted, but it seemed like that would have been obnoxious since we didn’t know each other very well. Instead, I waved. He waved back. His face was unmoved. Stoic.

I wasn’t sure how to read his lack of an expression. We’d been the first and second place competitors for the first 140 miles of last year’s Tahoe 200 race, so I thought that maybe he viewed me as an opponent rather than as a friend. I wanted to respect his feelings even if I didn’t understand them, so I decided I should just give him his space.

I finished the short walk to the drop bag area without another glance up.

​I didn’t see Jovica again until we found ourselves standing side by side near the starting line the next morning in the gradually increasing light of the rising sun. Still trying to respect his space, I remained silent. We stood there for several long moments before he broke the ice by saying hi. We exchanged well-wishes for the coming race, then the horn blew and the race began.
Leaving Amasa aid station. Jovica is a couple minutes ahead of me. Start to Breaking Bad.  57.3 miles.  Mile 0 to 57.3
A few of us broke out ahead from the start, running just a little faster than was necessary for a race this long. I knew we’d be passing through a corner of Moab before turning onto a winding, single-track trail which included a steep, technical ascent to the top of a high mesa. What I didn’t want was to be caught in the midst of a large pack of runners as we moved along that single-track trail. It was better to expend a little extra energy now to get ahead of the pack rather than wasting energy trying to move through the mass of runners later when we’d all be limited by the confines of a narrow trail. Jovica must have had similar thoughts, because he was up with the lead group a few paces in front of me.

Once atop the mesa, the trail went through a valley before crossing several miles of slickrock. Jovica, Colin Marz and I ran together across the slickrock, chatting idly and working together to navigate through a couple sections where the route was unclear.  At the Amasa aid station, mile 18, I had to transfer some fruit squeeze packs from my drop bag to my hydration pack, so Jovica made it through the aid station faster than I did. But I was less than a mile outside the aid station when I found myself again running with him.

At this point, on the trail to Hurrah Pass aid station, Piotr Hercog of Poland was in the lead. Jovica, Colin and I were running together in a collective second through fourth place. Ryan Wagner rounded out the top five, and was trailing close on our heels. Hurrah Pass was an eight-minute stop for me, and then I was on my way just a couple minutes behind Jovica. I caught up to him, and we ran the next, relatively flat 25-mile section at a reasonable, steady pace. Colin Marz dropped back sometime during that section, but there were a number of other runners not far behind us. The only time we deviated from our steady pace was after we were passed by Eric Deshaies, of Canada. We made a brief effort to not let him get too far ahead of us, but a couple miles later we chastised ourselves for being sucked into altering our pace. A small lead in the early part of a race as long as Moab was meaningless. There was a silent agreement that we wouldn’t make that mistake again.

It was at the Breaking Bad aid station, mile 57, that Jovica vomited for the first time. It would happen to him about five more times before the day was over. Every time, without fail, he’d pause momentarily after vomiting, then he’d walk forty or fifty meters, and then he’d start running again. There was no stopping him.

Our shared running patterns formed during these early miles of the race. Unless the trail was wide, one of us would be in the lead, and the other would follow close behind. If the lead runner started to slow down, the runner in back would pass and re-establish the pace. If one of us had to stop to adjust something in his pack, the other would sometimes stop alongside the first, but more often would just slow to a walk until the other caught up. None of this was ever spoken about or part of a plan. These patterns just developed organically. Breaking Bad to Shay Mountain.  63.7 miles.  Mile 57.3 to 121.0
Jovica is an experienced, successful runner from Serbia who has run some of the world’s toughest races. When he’s not out on the trails, he’s part of an elite Serbian counterterrorism force based out of Belgrade. Though technically a police force, his unit is closer to a military organization. I graduated from West Point and then served as an officer in various tank battalions for an additional seven years before leaving the Army and shifting to a career in manufacturing and distribution management. I have to believe this common military touchpoint shaped the discipline which seemed to be the root of our similar approaches to racing.

We hit the Hamburger Rock aid station, mile 74, at 10 PM. I had only one crew member, Annie, and Hamburger Rock was the first stop where I would see her. She was ready with a chair and a blanket set out for me. A hydration pack lay nearby, already loaded with fluids, fruit squeeze packs and everything else that I would need for the coming miles. I drank orange juice and ate some potato soup Annie had prepared for me. In races as long as Moab, my stomach tends to react better to bland food, so I had actually done a taste test of potato soups earlier in the year. The purpose of the test was to find the blandest potato soup available. And the winner? Well, if you’re looking for some utterly tasteless soup to serve to people you don’t like, I give Walmart’s Great Value cream of potato condensed soup a very high recommendation.

Eric Deshaies arrived at Hamburger Rock at about the same time as Jovica and I did, but Eric got back on the trail quickly, whereas we took our time. Ryan Wagner and Sean Nakamura arrived after us, but they departed before us as well. We passed Sean relatively quickly after leaving Hamburger Rock, but Ryan and Eric stayed ahead of us for a while.

​By the time we hit the Island aid station at mile 87, Jovica’s stomach had settled, and it had been several hours since he’d last thrown up. We sat down in a pair of camping chairs to refuel and rest. After a few cups of Coke, I decided to try some of the aid station’s soup. Unfortunately, a couple swallows of the salty broth pushed my stomach over the edge, and it was my turn to vomit. Regardless, we were moving again within ten minutes of arriving at the aid station. I decided to back off the salt for a while. I stopped taking salt tablets, and, at the next aid station, I even switched to filling my pack with water instead of the electrolyte beverages I’d been filling it with all day. This worked for me, and I didn’t have any real stomach issues for the rest of the race.

The first night was easy to get through without falling victim to sleepiness. My body was used to this level of sleep deprivation from the 100-mile and 200-mile races that I’d run in the preceding years, and I no longer even felt the urge to sleep during the first night of a race. We passed Eric just before Bridger Jack aid station, about 27 miles after he’d passed us. Regardless, all of us—Ryan, Sean, Eric, Jovica and I—remained within close enough proximity to one another that it didn’t really matter who was in front of whom at this point.

We hit Bridger Jack aid station, mile 102, just after 5 AM Saturday morning, which meant we’d done our first 100 miles in under 22 hours. This was a little ahead of my planned time, so I felt pretty good about how we were progressing. However, in what was becoming a trend, Eric and Sean left the aid station ahead of us.

The route out of Bridger begins on a dirt road that winds slowly down the mountain. Several miles along this road I realized I hadn’t seen a course marker in a while. I mentioned it to Jovica, but we decided to go a little further because neither of us had seen anywhere to turn off the road since the aid station, so it seemed impossible that we could have missed a turn.

Then we saw Eric backtracking up the road toward us. This was not a good sign. Sure enough, when he got to us, he said he’d checked his GPS, and we’d all somehow missed the turnoff to the trail. We turned around and ran back up the dirt road a couple miles, looking for the trail as we ran, but we saw nothing. We eventually bumped into Ryan and a couple more runners coming down the road from the aid station who had also missed the invisible turn. Working off the maps on two of the runners’ cell phones, we searched together for a few minutes, but couldn’t find the turn. Then someone suggested going back the mile or two to the aid station so we could ask the volunteers if they knew where the turnoff was. I reminded them that the volunteers might not know where the turn was either.

In an effort to stave off this go back to the aid station line of thought, I turned on my phone and opened the GPS app into which I’d downloaded the course route. I noticed that the GPS tracks were a perfectly straight line through this area despite the fact that the road itself was smoothly winding. This meant that when the tracks for this portion of the trail were recorded, the GPS had lost signal. The inaccurate GPS track was a part of the confusion. But I also found a point of intersection between the trail we wanted and a point on the road where the recorded path appeared to be correct. This was where we had to go, and it was very close. I made a quick appeal to the growing cluster of lost runners, then headed toward that point of intersection. The group followed, and I found a hidden, unmarked turn which was our trail.

Fifty feet past the turn was a lone marker that couldn’t be seen unless someone had already found the hidden turn and started to walk down the trail. We moved the marker to a dead limb right at the intersection of the road and the trail. It wasn’t a great spot for the marker, but it was significantly better than where it had been before, and it was the best we could do with only a single marker. Hopefully, the runners arriving later would see it.

​The trail dropped us into a dry riverbed, and soon we were beginning the long climb up Shay Mountain. There were six or seven of us in the same general vicinity at this point, but shortly after the ascent began, Jovica, Ryan and I broke off as a lead group to complete the ascent. All three of us would arrive at Shay Mountain aid station together.  At Shay Mountain. That’s Jovica under the white blanket and me under the blue. Five minutes of heaven. Shay Mountain to Road 46.  45.7 miles.  Mile 121.0 to 166.7
It was 3:30 PM on Saturday when we arrived at Shay Mountain. Annie was waiting for Jovica and me, and Ryan’s mom was there for him. Piotr, we soon learned, had departed the aid station about 30 minutes before we arrived. I ate some real food, and I curled up on a blanket in the sun for several minutes. I didn’t actually fall asleep, but it felt good to close my eyes.

Sean Nakamura arrived at the aid station after us, but he refueled quickly and departed before us. This had definitely become a trend that needed to stop.

We passed Sean within the first two or three miles of leaving the aid station. After we were a few hundred meters ahead of him, I commented to Jovica that Sean’s running style seemed to be to maintain a slightly slower pace, but to blow through the aid stations without wasting a moment. We needed to be quick at the next aid station so we didn’t enable Sean’s tactic. Jovica agreed. When we arrived at Dry Valley aid station at mile 139, we’d already established a specific time goal for our stop, and we departed right on the mark. As it turned out, after passing Sean back at mile 123, we wouldn’t see another runner for the remaining 117 miles of the race.

For all the facets of racing style that Jovica and I shared, there was one aspect that was almost comically different. It played itself out during several segments of the race. The latter portion of the route to the Road 46 aid station was one such segment. We were 160 miles into the race at that point. The conversation started the same way it always did.

“I think we’re almost to the aid station,” Jovica said.

We were ascending a gentle slope that seemed to have no end. I remained silent as I checked my watch to see how long we’d been running since the previous aid station. I made an assumption about our pace, multiplied it by the amount of time we’d been running, and then said, “I think we’ve got a few more miles to go.”

“No, I really think we’re getting close.”

I hesitated, unsure Jovica wanted to hear this next bit. “We’d need to be going about two minutes per mile faster than I think we’ve been running in order to be close. I think we’ve still got another five miles to go.”

Silence. We kept running.

​Jovica and I both ran from the heart. We shared a passion for being out on the trail, we shared a passion for facing a daunting challenge, and we shared a passion for persevering through pain and exhaustion. There was discipline to our pace, and there was joy in the experience. But somewhere in Jovica was the need to believe that a respite, no matter how brief, was near. And somewhere in me was a need to try to understand exactly how far away that respite was. I never made those distance calculations unless Jovica brought up the topic, but, if he brought it up, I had to figure out how far the aid station might be. We never argued about who was right. It was always just two people sharing their perspectives. We always kept moving together. Side by side or one of us in front. Together.
Descending on the dirt road from Oowah Lake to Porcupine Rim. Road 46 to Porcupine Rim. 57.0 miles. Mile 166.7 to 223.7
At the Road 46 aid station, Jovica and I met up with Kerry Ward. Kerry is an ultrarunner I’d run with throughout a long stretch of the Bigfoot 200 in 2015. On Facebook a couple weeks before the race, Jovica had made an appeal to see if anyone was willing to pace him for any portion of Moab. Quite generously, Kerry had answered that call, and had flown out to meet Jovica and pace him for 53 of the last 73 miles of the race. With Jovica and I running together, I would get the benefit of a pacer for those miles, and I’d get to spend some time with an old running friend. Kerry would run with us from Road 46 to Oowah Lake, then he’d take a break while we ran the 20 miles from Oowah Lake to Porcupine Rim so he could be fresh for our last 16-mile stretch.

​The trail out of Road 46 is a steep, rocky ascent. Kerry led the charge, and had us moving along at a good pace until, a mile or two into the climb, he stopped abruptly to announce that we were off course. Jovica and I started looking for course markers while Kerry took off, GPS in hand, to find the trail. Kerry found the trail a few minutes later, and we all started moving forward again.

If there was one thing that characterized my experience during the fifteen miles from Road 46 to the Pole Canyon aid station, it would be extreme sleep deprivation. I fell into step behind Kerry and Jovica, my brain shut down, and I just moved along through a vague nightscape of rocky trails and stunted trees. I’d known the second night would not be as easy to get through as the first night had been. Not only had the endless hours of running worn on me, but I hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before the race. I’d fallen asleep at 8 PM on Thursday night—which would have been fantastic if I’d slept all the way until the morning—but I’d woken up at 12:30 AM and I hadn’t been able to fall back asleep. So, by the time the race started at 7 AM on Friday, I’d already been up for 6 ½ hours with only 4 ½ hours of sleep.

Kerry and Jovica chatted throughout this section. I would sometimes try to tune in to their conversation as a means to stay alert, but it only worked so well, and I’d eventually slip back into a semi-somnambulant state. At one point, I made a concerted effort to wake myself by engaging in the conversation. That helped for a little while before, inevitably, I fell silent as I became sleepy again. Kerry—ever the dedicated pacer—then made an obvious and reasonably-successful effort to give me something to focus on by telling the longest and most wandering story imaginable. The story centered on a friend of his who had recently run his first 100-mile race. It could easily have been a five-minute tale, but Kerry took the narrative down every rabbit hole and into every loosely tangential detail possible. I found myself focusing alternately on the story itself and the fact that Kerry was clearly stretching it out for my benefit.

When we arrived at Pole Canyon aid station, there was not a single sign of life. The lamps were out, the stoves were off, and the personal tents of the volunteers were all zipped up. I spotted two blankets, grabbed them, and immediately began looking for a place on the ground to lie down that wasn’t covered with jagged rocks. Jovica dropped into a camping chair and wrapped a blanket over his shoulders while Kerry began rummaging through the aid station supplies for food. Moments later, a powerful gust of wind flipped the aid station canopy and its poles into the air. The entire assembly flew over Jovica’s and Kerry’s heads and into the nearby trees. It startled all of us, and it woke up the volunteers who clambered sleepily out of their tents to begin reassembling the aid station and firing up the stove.

Not long after we departed Pole Canyon, I began coming out of my sleepy state, and, as the sun rose above the horizon, we started making better time. There was a memorable climb up a steep cow trail that required trekking poles and a lot of determination. Even the mindless, free-grazing cows in the area were smart enough to use this particular trail solely for descents. It was only the foolish, ultrarunning humans who were dumb enough to ascend it.

The last several miles before the Oowah Lake aid station consisted of snow-covered, rolling hills. With each step, our feet post-holed through the thin crust of snow and into the deeper powder beneath. It was slow-going, for the most part, aside from a few short downhill sections where momentum carried us more easily through the snowpack.

At Oowah Lake, I took the time to eat an entire cheeseburger and to close my eyes for a few minutes. Jovica refueled and swapped his grimy socks for a fresh pair that Annie dug out of my gear in the back of the truck. Eventually, we got moving.

The route from Oowah Lake to Porcupine Rim began with a single-track ascent before intersecting a dirt road that would take us the rest of the way to Porcupine Rim. We sped up once we hit the road, and, for the first time in the race, I pulled out my phone to see how far back the next runner was. Earlier, we had made a decision that we weren’t going to attempt to catch Piotr, the Polish runner in first place, but we wanted to make sure Ryan, the next runner, had no hope of catching us.

We were making good time on the road at the same time Ryan would have been hitting the pace-slowing snow on the trail to Oowah Lake, so, every time I checked my phone, we had opened a wider gap between Ryan and us. When I checked the gap for the last time, Ryan was almost 20 miles behind us, so I finally put the tracker away for good. Of course, not long after I put the tracker away, I heard….

​“I think we’re getting close to the aid station.”

Smiling, I glanced at my watch and began making calculations.

Also smiling, Jovica just shook his head. Our pacer, Kerry Ward, convinced us to pose for this photo as we descended the Porcupine Rim trail. We grumbled a bit at the time about the fact that we just wanted to keep moving toward the finish, but Kerry made a good call on this one. Porcupine Rim to Finish. 16.3 miles. Mile 223.7 to 240.0
When we arrived at Porcupine aid station, we decided to take our time and enjoy both our stop at the aid station and the subsequent sixteen miles without the ordinary pressure of a race. The race was all but done. Barring an injury, our finishing places were assured, so it seemed like a good time to bask in the joy of a hard-fought battle drawing to a close. Kerry rejoined us at Porcupine Rim, and Annie was there as well. We laughed and chatted with each other and with the aid station volunteers. Twenty-three minutes after arriving at Porcupine Rim aid station, we were on our way.

By this time, Jovica and I had run 224 miles together without ever talking about sticking together through the entire race. And we had certainly never discussed finishing side by side. But, somehow, we both knew that was our plan. About four miles into this last section, Kerry asked what our plan was regarding the finish. There were eighteen countries represented in the race, and, from past experience, Kerry and I knew that the race director always lined the chute to the finish line with the flags of all countries participating. With the sun setting behind one of the distant mesas, we decided that our multi-national team would each carry the flag of our country as we crossed the finish line.

We were descending the technical, rocky path that is Porcupine Rim trail. I’d run Porcupine Rim a couple times a year earlier. I loved the rocky beauty of that trail, and I respected its ankle-rolling nature. It can be a fast but challenging trail to run in the daylight. At night, with the play of shadows on the uneven rock surfaces, the trail becomes a little more difficult but can be almost as fast.

When the sunlight had dimmed enough that I started to have difficulty seeing, I stopped, took off my hydration pack, and opened the rear zipper pouch to take out my flashlight and my headlamp. I have terrible night vision. So, in races, I always have two sources of light. The first is an ordinary headlamp. The second is a small but extremely powerful flashlight. If I put my flashlight on its highest setting, the handle actually becomes warm to the touch, but the light will turn a swath of the night into day.

The pouch contained a pair of fruit squeeze packs, but no flashlight, and no headlamp.

This wasn’t a problem, because I was certain Annie had just tucked my flashlight and headlamp into another of the pouches. I checked the front of the pack. Nothing. I checked the rear pouch again. Still nothing. I unzipped the pouch that held the water bladder. It too was empty.

Annie had prepared my gear at more than seventy aid stations since she began supporting my crazy ultrarunning endeavors, and she’d never once left anything out of my pack. To speed up my naturally slow aid station stops, we always brought two hydration packs to each event. She, along with her sister Becka who typically supported me, were like a pit crew at a car race. I’d run into the aid station, drop off one pack and put on another that they’d already prepared for me. They’d respond to my changes in an instant if, for example, in the intervening miles since they’d last seen me, I could no longer stomach the yogurt squeeze packs they were resupplying me with, and instead needed them to give me a bottle of fresh grapes to carry. They made such changes quickly and without complaint even though I’m sure it was frustrating. And they did this despite sleep-deprivation which was often almost as extreme as my own.

Not having a light source as night fell was just something to deal with. If anything, it made me appreciate how unbelievably perfect Annie had been in every one of my races leading up to this point.

By now, Jovica and Kerry had put on their own headlamps and could see something was wrong.

“I don’t have a light,” I said. “I have terrible night vision. I’m going to be moving slowly.”

There wasn’t even a moment of hesitation before Jovica said, “You can use mine. I have good night vision. I’ll run between the two of you.”

I asked Jovica if he really wanted to give me his light, but I already knew the answer. In 230 miles of running, I’d gotten to know the kind of person he was.

Kerry ended up running beside Jovica while I ran directly behind him with the borrowed headlamp aimed at his feet. We ran at a pretty solid pace considering one of the three of us wasn’t wearing a headlamp. How Jovica was able to sustain that pace in secondhand light across rocky, uneven ground is beyond me. And how he arrived at the decision to give me his headlamp is even further beyond me. Somewhere through the miles and the hardship, he had become a true friend.

Toward the end of the descent, Kerry remembered that he had a flashlight tucked into his pack. He gave me the flashlight and I gave Jovica the headlamp. A mile later, we passed through a culvert and onto the bike path that we’d follow for the last three miles to the finish line. We paralleled the Colorado River for most of those three miles, and then passed beneath a highway. From there it was only a few minutes before we saw the lights of our final stop.

Kerry ran ahead as we approached the finish line. He grabbed the Serbian flag for Jovica, and the US flag for me. He handed us our flags and then, together, we walked across that line.

We finished in 62 hours, 40 minutes and 49 seconds. The winner, Piotr, had finished 2 ½ hours ahead of us. The next finisher, Ryan, would finish 9 hours behind us.

Jovica and I sat at the finish line enjoying the warmth of a propane heater and talking to the people around us. I don’t know how many words we said to each other as we sat in the comfort of the tent and the heater. There might have been many words, or there might have been none. I was too tired then to remember it now. It doesn’t matter. We shared a 240-mile adventure. We shared 240 miles of pain. We shared 240 miles of learning who each other was when we were stripped down to the bone, when every shred of pretense was torn away and all that was left was who we truly were.

​We’ll share another adventure somewhere down the trail of our lives. Of that I’m certain. Crossing the finish line Epilogue Sunday night, in my hotel room after the race, I woke up three or four times. Each of those times, I woke up in sheets soaked by my own sweat. The dream I’d been having was the same every time. I was running on a trail covered with fist-sized, jagged rocks. It was very much like parts of the trail between Pole Canyon and Oowah Lake. I was running alone. I saw not a single person during the entire dream. I was just running and running and running.

Each time, after waking up, I’d drink a cup of water to replace what I’d just sweated onto the sheets. I’d crawl back into bed, but I’d shift a fraction of a meter to one side to avoid laying down between the wet, cold sheets I’d left behind. This cycle repeated itself for four consecutive nights. There were two queen beds in the hotel room, and, two of the nights, I actually had to switch to the second bed in order to find a dry spot to sleep.

On the fifth night, I woke up only twice. The first time was just like every other time. The bed was wet with sweat, and I’d been dreaming of running solo along that endless trail. But the second time I woke up was different. I’d still been sweating during the dream, but, unlike every other time, I’d dreamed that I’d actually finished this imaginary race. There were no people at the finish line just as there’d been no people in any of the dreams. The finish line was just another dry, desolate, rock-strewn spot. But I knew I’d finished. The race was over.

​In the weeks since I dreamed of crossing that finish line, the dream hasn’t recurred. I don’t know what the dream meant. Maybe it meant nothing. But maybe, just maybe, it was my subconscious showing me how empty it would be to go through such a difficult endeavor without the help of partners and friends as great as Annie, Jovica, Kerry, and every volunteer along the way who gave me food or water or even just uttered a kind word of encouragement.

Thanks to all of you who helped me cross the finish line in Moab. It was an amazing journey, and I could not have made it alone. Photo by Annie Davis If you enjoyed this story, we hope you'll check out our full 2018 Destination Trails 200 Mile Coverage, which includes Wes' other story from the Bigfoot 200, a couple of podcasts, and a ton of other fun stuff!

A Dirtbag's Guide to New Caledonia. Enjoying a Pacific Paradise on a Budget.

Noumea If you’re the type of person who daydreams about:

Living in a hut on a tropical beach for a few months where no one’s around but a couple of French beach bums and some wild boar, and staring out at the blue, blue ocean to contemplate whatever it is you need to contemplate, Finding your own small, empty, island to hole up on, orDropping off grid to carve out a life that doesn’t require much of anything,
it might be worth thinking about New Caledonia.

I’m not sure if you can do those things there, but it seems like you probably could.

If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a small group of islands and islets in Melanesia - forming a roughly equilateral triangle with Australia and New Zealand, where it is the Northeasterrnmost point. It’s not that far from Vanuatu, if that helps. 

If you aren’t already there, it’s almost definitely a long way from where you are. We booked an AirBnB on a woman’s catamaran in the main harbor in the capitol, and she told us that a lot of people arrive by boat and fly home, ditching their vessels because it’s too much trouble to get them back to Europe or the United States or wherever they’ve drifted in from.

It's pretty sleepy, but it still does a healthy tourist trade with English speakers and people from mainland China and Japan. The main group of foreigners, though, are French. The proper official name is Nouvelle Caledonie, because since 1853 the French have put themselves in charge of things. Along with a lot of blue water, the islands have one of the richest nickel deposits in the world, and the white people there taking it are primarily francophones.

Originally though, it was a Melanesian paradise - Kanak, specifically. People have been there for 3000 years, which is pretty incredible when you think about it. They still make up 40 percent of the population, and their culture is alive and quite visible all over the islands. As is the case everywhere I’ve ever been in the Pacific, they seem to exist in a uneasy detente with their colonizers. Just before we arrived in November 2018, there was a national referendum on whether or not to remain a French colony. Kanak flags were flying everywhere, and only 56% voted to stay.

I didn't know any of that before we arrived, and our own trip to the country happened mostly on a whim. We were looking for flights between the South and North Island of New Zealand, where we were traveling from our home in the US, and noticed a cheap flight to a place called “Noumea”. We Googled it, found out it was the capital of a country we’d never thought much about, and decided “what the hey”.

We were only there for a week, and I’m by no means an expert, or even a novice, but we did dig around enough to function something like scouts for others out there who might be interested in paying a visit. Looking West into the mountains from a swimming hole in the middle of nowhere, East Coast, near Thio. What's it like? The country felt, to me, as much like Latin America as anywhere else I’ve been - clearly colonial, clearly possessing a strong native culture. There’s a significant amount of wealth disparity, but poverty - while present - doesn’t appear to be the defining characteristic of the population. In the Capitol, Noumea, there are plenty of upscale neighborhoods and tourist businesses, while the Cathedral’s paint is slightly peeling, neighborhoods are dotted with grafitti’d empty warehouses, and the occasional house will have a couple of chained up rottweilers barking menacingly at you as a security measure. The physical location is beautiful, and everywhere we went felt safe and relaxed. The infrastructure is solid - roads are good, beaches are clean, and the parking is closely monitored - which we found out when we got a $10 parking ticket for some infraction that I still don't understand because it was in French. It was a small enough amount to seem as quaint as it did annoying.

Outside of Noumea, the country is notably sparsely populated. Even in beautiful spots that are marketed openly in tourist information centers, it’s easy to find yourself all alone. If you want long quiet walks on a secluded beach, you have plenty of good options.

For an anecdote: at the first campsite we visited - the largest in the area where we were able to camp right on the water and which came with several recommendations - we showed up in the afternoon to a closed gate. We saw that there were a couple of people milling around in the property - two campers, and a guy welding something - so we walked around the gate - there was a clear footpath.

When we got to the back of the property, a startled Frenchman asked us, “What do you want?!” Not angry - just genuinely surprised to see us.

“We want to camp - is that possible?”

“Oh, yes. The gate was closed, right? How did you get in?”

“We walked around it.”

“Oh, did you come in a car or something?” (We were at least 20 miles from the nearest town at this point.)

“Yes, we left it outside the gate.”

“Oh. I see. Do you have any toilet paper? You will need it because there is none here.”

We did, thankfully. He opened the gate and let us in, and drove away in a pickup truck, leaving us by ourselves at the site. Before he left he told us not to worry about paying until the morning. We never saw him again, but we did find someone who I believe was his wife - a Japanese woman who spoke perfect English and spent the morning sitting in a lounge chair, staring contentedly into the mangroves and ocean that the campsite bordered.

It seemed like a nice life.

Outside of Noumea it’s also notably more Kanak, and you’re as likely to experience and enjoy native culture as French. Life closer to subsistence is more visible in the countryside. Especially on the East Coast, it’s the kind of place where it’s most common for houses to be made of corrugated metal, and normal for men to wander the streets with machetes because they’re working their fields. 

Tourism sites all say that Nouvelle Caledonie is known for its delicious French cuisine. And it’s true. It’s easy to find a good cappuccino, a fresh baguette, and pain au chocolate  even in small towns.

It’s not a cheap place to travel, exactly, but it’s also not ridiculously expensive. I’ve heard prices commonly compared to New Zealand, and I’d say that is roughly accurate - though I think food is slightly pricier in New Caledonia. We would typically pay between $4 - 7 US for a good coffee, $8 - 10 for a national brand beer at a restaurant and $15 - 20 for a meal. If I had to guess, I’d say cost of travel is probably lower than Hawaii or Tahiti - the other two small Pacific Island groups we’ve visited.

And whatever the costs or the quality of their fois gras, most travelers go to New Caledonia because it’s pretty.

It’s surrounded by the world’s largest lagoon, which means that coral reef protects most of the main island from the heaviest waves (There are only one or two beach breaks for surfing in the country because of this). The water tends to be shallow, warm, and swimmable, and there are endless snorkeling and diving possibilities. Boat-based activities are one of the most common pastimes, and you’ll find lots of rental and tour options if that’s your thing. It wouldn’t be disappointing at all to go there and just hang out at the beach. Some of the prettiest we’ve seen anywhere were there, at Poe and Thio, and we didn’t even go to what’s said to be the most beautiful spots, on the Isle of Pines and the other offshore islands.

To our own interests, there is also a developed trail system in the country. The jewel in the crown is the GR1 - a 100k hut to hut hike that cuts through the south of the Island - but there are plenty of smaller trail systems through every type of geography. It was easy to find beautiful places to hike, run or mountain bike on well-maintained trail.

There is a spine of mountains that runs up the center of the main island, which adds to the beauty. The West Coast is quite dry - it looks like Australia, mostly, with dry hills, red dirt and white sandy beaches. The mountains are quite wet. And the East Coast is the way I picture Polynesia - ferns and waterfalls and beautiful coastline and dramatic mountains. It’s largely unpopulated and it’s where much of the best scenery on the main island is, in my opinion.

My personal favorite unexpected perk about the country is that it had what all warm climates should - a network of campgrounds that was as extensive as their network of hotels. Like the one where we found the startled Frenchman with no toilet paper, a lot of these seemed like a family with a bunch of land in a pretty place decided to set up some toilets and let people stay for a few bucks a night. That’s come to be maybe my favorite camping atmosphere - kind of Airbnb in a friendly person’s yard. And it wasn’t expensive. $10 -15 US per person is a bit less that what I’ve come to expect to pay in North America for a similar level of service.

We found a lot of campgrounds in spectacular locations. If you dream of camping with a beautiful view of turquoise water, but don’t want to worry about getting your rental car down a 4x4 track, New Caledonia had amazing options. In Poe, our $20/night spot was on the same beach, a few miles down, from an impressive Sheraton resort. The views were just as good and it felt just as secluded, and it was easy enough to sneak into the Sheraton for a dip in their pool when we got bored of the ocean. Plus there’s very little chance a wild boar will charge through your room at the Sheraton, and we got to have that experience in our campsite. (Edit: after I wrote this, a local wearing a tusk necklace showed us a picture on his phone of a boar that he saw at the Sheraton that morning, on the golf course. True story.)

Like good hustlers around the world, a lot of these places will also cook you a meal and sell you the basics of what you need if you ask, and some will pick you up from the larger towns nearby if you call ahead.

Here are four photos from places we camped. 9 essential things you need to know English will get you by. French will help you make friends. We speak only the French we learned in high school 20 years ago, but were able to get by. It’s worth buying a French app or phrasebook if you plan to travel outside of Noumea and the main tourist centers like Isle of Pines.  The information offices, which you will find in Noumea and most small towns of any size are the best. They’re typically staffed by friendly locals who speak at least passable English, and have nothing to do but help you find the places you want to go and tell you about the country. As an added bonus, they typically have free Wifi and offer you coffee or tea simply because they’re kind people. We didn’t have SIM cards, but found that the brochures and employees had all of the information we needed..Drive on the right. No turn on red. Public transit between towns and in Noumea is passable but not perfect if you’re trying to get to less populated spots on the coast, and it’s not that cheap. We didn’t try hitching but we saw people doing it, and it seems like the kind of place where it wouldn’t be too hard, or too risky. For us it was worth it to rent a car. It wasn’t terribly pricey. About $50/day included basic insurance. It made it much easier to get to groceries and out of the way campsites, so saved us on food and accommodation in the end. Petrol’s expensive, so we kept our time in the car to a minimum - which was fine because there are so many beautiful spots within an hour or two of Noumea. Distances here aren’t crazy. From the bottom of the mainland to the top is about a 5.5 hour drive. You can drive around the entire mainland in about 2 days - plenty of stops included.Be mindful of your map though - make sure the roads you’re taking are passable. In the central mountains in particular between Canala and Thio, we accidentally took our tiny rental Peugot on a journey it was never intended for along muddy roads that bordered a precipitous dropoff! ATMs are widely available in smaller towns, especially along the main North/South highway. Most places take credit, but not the furthest out. I felt most secure with a couple hundred dollars worth of Francs on hand. Outside of Noumea, tourist places - including restaurants - sometimes require booking ahead. Some places are clearly just side projects so the pizza guy might not be home when you want a slice if you don’t call him beforehand, especially in small towns away from main villages. So it would be nice to have a SIM or burner phone here. Attractions - including restaurants, hotels, and campgrounds - on tribal land have their own etiquette. I won’t get into it, but it’s enough to know that you should get the orientation at a tourist information site if you plan to hang out on tribal land. (This isn’t a warning against it, just to be clear - tourists are welcome and an important part of the tribal economy, and all of the locals we met were super friendly! There are just cultural norms to be aware of, and reservations tend to be required!)Wifi is not that common or fast. Several places we stayed said they had it, but didn’t. We got almost no work done while we were there (excluding tapping out this blog.) It’s a good place to unplug. Information centers are a reliable go to if you have an important email to check or want to book that Noumea Airbnb from the road! 6 top regions and how to get there. Noumea. The capitol is the only proper city in New Caledonia, and it’s where you’re going to either fly or float into. And that’s not a bad thing. Its a genuinely beautiful town, with its own pleasant beaches at Lemon Bay (Baie des Citrons) and Anse Vata, a nice local market with lots of tropical fruit, good restaurants, hotels, and AirBnBs. It’s small enough to get around on foot if you are intrepid, but there are plenty of buses, water taxis, ferries, planes and tours to get to other places. We were only there for a couple of days, but if you spent a week there, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Pro Tips: the information center is on the harbor near the public market, and just outside of town there’s a large Decathlon outdoor store that sells everything you need for any outdoor activity.  The Tjibaou Cultural Center is a national museum devoted to Kanak culture. It's a bit out of the center but completely worth visiting. West Coast. The West Coast of the Island is easy to access via highway. It’s the dry side, and the beaches here are positively Caribbean - white sand and palm trees, mangrove, coral reef, sleepy bars and small towns. We loved the beaches around Boureal, La Roche Percee and a nearby hike that took us to three separate coves. Whenever we travel, one place per trip seems to charm us thoroughly. On this trip, it was Poe. The beach was spectacular, the campsite (Camping de Poe) was incredibly friendly, beautifully located, and cheap. We also enjoyed the Sentiers de Deva trail system for hiking and mountain biking just outside of town, and at the local information center, there was a friendly old local who spoke a few words of English and spent a lot of time explaining interesting facts about the area to us. (Did you know, for instance, that Caledonian crows use tools and are considered as potentially the smartest animal in the world? The center for their study is located (on tribal land) at Deva.) East Coast. New Caledonia’s East Coast is less populated, more culturally Kanak, and more dramatically beautiful than the West Coast. I recommend it. Hienghene is maybe the most spectacular spot on the mainland, and the drive up the East Coast highway is as beautiful as any.  Great South. This region is usually listed as a top place for outdoors types because 1) the Blue River National Park is a great spot for kayaking and hiking, and 2) the GR1 goes right through. Full disclosure - we’d planned to hike a big portion of this, but couldn’t bring ourselves to it for a couple of reasons. It’s quite difficult and expensive to get to the current start of the GR 1 at Prony. It was hot, and the beach seemed a lot more attractive than sometimes exposed trails in the center of the Island. And the scenery, based on an extensive browse of promotional brochures, looks similar to places we’ve been in Australia. The coast just seemed like a better investment of our week. Someone needs to write a good intro to this trail in English, because most of the information is in French. It won’t be us, at least not until next trip. C’est la vie.Central mountains. Super rugged and awesome. It feels very Jurassic Park here, and there are no major settlements. Ferns and jungle and waterfalls and weird local flightless birds and shit. The Giant Fern Park near Sarramea is among the best spot for viewing flightless birds and other local wildlife.Isle of Pines and the offshore islands. Based on the photos, we contemplated spending the bulk of our trip on the Isle of Pines - probably the best bang for your buck in terms of beach scenery that New Caledonia has to offer. There are a couple of places to camp there, and by all accounts it is totally worth the trip. Unfortunately for us, it’s not that easy of a place to get to, depending on when you arrive. Flights go multiple times a day from Noumea, and I’m sure the views are super pretty, but the extra $400 wasn’t in our budget (that wasn’t much less than we spent on the flights from NZ!). There is a passenger ferry, but it only goes twice a week. You can take a day trip on Wednesdays, or you can take an overnight on Saturday to Sunday. For us, unfortunately, it didn’t line up with our schedule so I can’t tell you how great it is. But if I had to guess, I’d say it’s probably worth the $400 if you have it.​ There are a couple of other offshore islands that fit this descriptor as well. We didn't visit but you probably should. Beach and river meet at La Roche Percee. For someone looking for a relaxed, budget tropical paradise, New Caledonia is as good a choice of Pacific Islands as any. Like any Pacific Island, it’s easy to spend money there on luxury and adventure tours. But it’s also an easy place to just exist contentedly - camping at the beach, hiking in the mountains, eating baguettes and charcuterie and drinking cheap beer from the grocery. If you’re a Kiwi or an Aussie, give it a go on your next holiday. If you’re reading this from the US or the UK, to be honest I have no idea how you might end up here, but if you do you won’t regret it.

​Just remember to bring your own toilet paper. If you like out of the way places and adventure on the cheap, sign up for information about our upcoming book, The Dirtbag's Guide to Life. It'll be your comprehensive guide to life, adventure, and living your dreams on the cheap. Become a Patron!

5 Strategies to Keep Wanderlust (and Instagram) from Ruining Your Life

by Ana Hinz I'll admit it - I feel a little bit guilty because Angel and I have been posting Facebook pictures from a two month trip to New Zealand just as our friends back in North America are headed in to the depths of the winter doldrums. To add insult to injury, we've been enjoying a respite in the 2nd most popular place for Americans to threaten to run away to during the 2018 Mid Term elections. I can feel your jealousy and resentment from across the Pacific!

That's why I was really stoked when our friend Ana Hinz sent on this guest post for the blog, about how not to let social media inspired wanderlust ruin your life. It's a great set of tips that we wholly endorse - whether you're a world traveler or stuck in your day job - and we love Ana's humor and insight, and like us she is a former Mid-Westerner who dreamed of running away to see the world.

She describes herself as a Midwesterner transplant to Seattle who is happiest with a trail beneath her feet or a dram in her hand. To read more of what she writes, Ana blogs about running and hiking on the beautiful trails of the Pacific Northwest, and exploring the fascinating world of whisky at Will Run for Whisky. She also share an epic, hilarious story about running her first 100 mile ultramarathon on episode 60 of our podcast!

Here she is, on how to keep wanderlust, and Instagram, from ruining your life. ​I'm someone that has always looked to the future, ever since I was a child. I distinctly remember a moment (I was probably 7 or so) standing at the edge of a field in my small hometown, and wondering where else could I go? What could I see? (Like Belle from Beauty and the Beast, but in Wisconsin and not France... so less brie and more cheddar.) While it's a charming thought, and likely the perfect start for a story about a glamorous world traveler (spoiler: I'm not one), it also has a significant downside. In short: wanderlust is ruining my life.

​Let me explain. Farm field in Eastern Wisconsin I was raised as an only child, so I had a lot of solitude and time to entertain myself. Thankfully, I loved daydreaming and reading books about far-flung places. I got the fun of learning about it as well as imagining it, with a few well-curated photographs for illustration.

Contrast that with modern technology, and having Instagram at our fingertips. We can indulge in "travel porn" at any moment of the day. And wow, do we. We gobble up photographs of stunning locations around the world, and add new places to our exponentially growing bucket list. We double-tap these photos, and then after a 10-minute binge session, compare our own seemingly mundane existence, and ask ourselves what the hell we're doing with our lives.

No? Just me?

Is my life so disappointing? Of course not. I’m active and healthy, have a fantastic husband, a good job, amazing friends, and live in a safe and beautiful place. However, with time, my existence has become comfortable (the complacent American Dream, it seems.) And comfort does not spur growth. I want freedom, but from what? My privileged life? Ugh. I disgust myself. But traveling to a new place can be a catalyst for healthy challenges and personal growth, and I'm craving that adventurous change of routine (and Instagram is amplifying that desire.)
Sunrise over Ireland ​Of course, we all know that seeing people's perfectly curated lives on social media can spark envy. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that these photos are often staged and edited, and not a true representation of what actually happened. 
A great Instagram shot. We don’t need to talk about the road with heavy traffic directly above me. Or that my feet were soaked. ​We know intellectually that we shouldn’t compare someone's highlight reel to our blooper reel. Comparison is the thief of joy. Yada, yada, yada. But here's the thing: Instagram didn't create my wanderlust. It's always been there. And this doesn't mean that I should stop dreaming. Or setting goals. Or being inspired.
​
While wanderlust can push us to explore the world in new ways, it also intensifies dissatisfaction with our current lives. So how can we be inspired and not depressed by wanderlust? 1. Find local adventures. This summer I spent time exploring local places within a few hours’ drive, and I loved it. It helped bring my focus back here to the present (and the financially feasible.) Go hike that trail you always meant to check out, or visit that vineyard you heard about one time, or visit that state park just an hour away. Microadventures like these remind me how many amazing places there are, right in my "backyard." Be a tourist in your home geographical region! 2. Take a social media break...or just tone it down. ​Okay, let's discuss this one. While I'm all for taking a break from the soul-sucking dumpster fire that is Facebook and/or Twitter, I'm personally not quite ready to give up my visual escape that is Instagram. Mostly because it's not really the platform that is the problem. It just amplifies something that already exists in my psyche. However, as we all know, everything is best in moderation (except maybe chocolate and hugs.) So maybe dial back the usage to one session a day, or just a few minutes at a time instead of a 20 minute session that leaves you depressed from all of the totally-authentic-and-not-edited-at-all perfection you just witnessed on your feed. 3. Escape via a book instead of a screen. ​If you still need an escape (ahem, I do), perhaps try a vintage form - a book! Flex that (possibly rusty) imagination by reading travel essays. (I love this collection.) Or if you want to feel better about your life choices, you can always read about dramatic polar expeditions or woefully unprepared Amazonian adventures by a former president . If you're still looking for a visual escape, check out a photography book as visual candy and a learning opportunity for your own photography. Reading books about traveling and adventure is my go-to when I desperately need an escape from the couch. 4. Get out of your comfort zone with a new hobby. Want to escape to something new and exciting? Try a new hobby! Write about someone traveling to a new place. Take an art class to create your own beauty. Go to a concert featuring traditional music from around the world. Try a new sport with a friend, like trail running, rock-climbing, or kayaking. Begin learning a new language (in a class or using Duolingo - whatever works.) Take a salsa or ballet class. Try cooking some recipes from a place you’ve always wanted to visit. There are loads of small ways to get that thrill of experiencing new people, places, food, music, scenery without having to get on a plane. I’ve tried a number of these options, with varying levels of success, but I loved the challenge of each one! 5. Sell everything and hit the road. If all else fails, this is always an option. The goal is to lose the social media envy and keep the inner child who thinks about life's possibilities. When we indulge our wanderlust with travel, we are open to new experiences. Just like that little kid that dreamt about traveling the world. That wondrous soul gets stomped on enough in the demanding reality of adult obligations, so let's not continue that trend during our leisure time. Let’s take this opportunity to foster that curiosity!

​While it may feel boring compared to a round-the-world vacation (sorry, fresh out of those), let’s workshop some solutions to this challenge! How do YOU encourage or tame your wanderlust?
One of my favorite local adventures from the summer: a sunset hike near Mt Baker, WA. If you like what we're up to here at Boldly Went, check out our Patreon page and consider joining the small but mighty horde of supporters, and pledging anything from $1/month in order to help make it feasible for us to continue creating the Boldly Went podcast and other online content!​ ​​​ Become a Patron!

The 9 Indisputable Best Things about New Zealand

Angel and I find ourselves in an unfortunate situation, whereby neither of us were born in the proper country.

After several months of research across the last few years involving street tacos, warm winters, warmer people, affordable everything, and locally grown coffee, Angel was able to diagnose recently that she was intended to have been born in Mexico.

I, on the other hand, have suspected since 2005, when we left after living there for a couple of years, that I was intended to have been born in New Zealand.

We find ourselves back here for the next several months, and I plan to spend most of my time staring contentedly into the distance with a barely perceptible smile on my face, absorbing everything wonderful that New Zealand has to offer.

Along the way, I’ll take a few breaks from my relaxed sense that all is right in the world in order to write blog posts, so you can share some of the magic.

I think and hope that some of these articles will be useful for people who are interested in visiting, but this first post, I decided to write something purely celebratory, and so would like to offer you this list of the Indisputable Best Things in New Zealand, as voted on by me. These things won’t be the things that you already know - about Hobbits and Rugby and universal healthcare and all that. They’ll be the little things that make the place magic.
Lake Wanaka from Isthmus Peak 1. It really is that pretty. I know, I said I wouldn’t say things you already know. But when you just see pictures online, it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s an Instagram filter. But I can confirm that New Zealand is legit. It’s the stunningly attractive love child of Hawaii and Switzerland that somehow found its way to the middle of the Pacific, where no one could find it for the vast majority of human history, thereby preserving itself in pristine beauty. The light here is perfect. There are waterfalls and rainbows everywhere. The glaciers descend to sea level and the snow-capped mountains shoot directly out of the ocean. The whole country is swarming with delightfully adorable baby lambs, and they keep the perfectly green lawns covering the entire country (aside from the beaches and the snow capped mountains) mowed to professional standards. It’s not possible, but it’s real.
The Cheeky Kea 2. The birds here are fantasy creatures who just want to be your friends. Some may be aware that a peculiarity of New Zealand’s history is that it broke off from the mainland of Australia before the evolution of mammals. As a result, aside from a  few recently arrived bats, there were never mammals here to fill most ecological niches, so the native birds evolved to fill their roles. Hence the Kiwi, a ground dwelling, fur covered oddity that is functionally more of a lazy rodent than an actual bird. But also hence a wide variety of other very unusual birds, that seem like something out of one of Lewis Carroll’s fever dreams.

One consequence of the country’s isolation is that (although introduced rats, stoats, cats, possums, and adorably, hedgehogs, are wreaking havoc nowadays) through most of evolutionary history, the birds here didn’t have to worry about predation from creatures like ourselves. So they still behave largely as if we’re curiosities rather than threats. In the time that we’ve spent here, birds that we’ve had fly directly up to us, land just a few feet away, and interact with us as peers include:

The Morepork: A strange little owl with giant eyes whose call sounds, as you might have guessed, something like “more pork”.

The Kea: The world’s only alpine parrot, and my all time favorite animal, it has the diet of a goat and is known for eating boots and cars and anything else left alone for more than a minute or two. And for being cheeky and dancing for food and entertaining tourists. It’s the flying naughty clown of the high alpine peaks.

The New Zealand Wood Pigeon: A large, common, iridescently colored pigeon whose wings flap so loudly that they sound like small helicopters crashing through the brush.

The Fantail: A sparrow-sized bird with a boat oar for a tail, which does flips and tricks mid-flight, mainly just to impress you.

The Bellbird: A normal enough appearing forest bird whose call sounds uncannily like the clanging of bells rather than anything a living creature should be able to produce.
3. There’s great coffee everywhere. This shouldn’t be the case, because as far as I know it isn’t grown locally, but it’s really easy to find good espresso here, even in strange little country towns that have no business producing pleasant cafes. They even have a signature drink - the flat white, which I honestly can’t distinguish from a latte though I’m told they’re not the same. 4. Kiwis have never learned to be cruel. In the United States, people have learned that to stay on top, you have to crush your enemies, who are all around you. That’s not a political statement, it’s just a way of being for about 40% of the population, driven mad by cable news and fear of non-existent boogeymen. We assume our friends want to sneak off with our things and our neighbors want to murder our children.

In New Zealand, if your car breaks down at 2 am on a dark country road, you should walk up to the nearest house and knock loudly on the door without reservation, because the owners will greet you with pleased surprise about having just made a new friend. They’ll thank you for stopping by, invite you in, have a chat, give you some tea, offer you a room for the night, and lend you their car the next day so you can get where you’ll going. They’ll call their cousin to tow your car to the garage, and he’ll give you a discount on the fix because of your trouble.

And it’s hard not to feel like they’re on to something. Why not live like this?
Photographic proof that everything is covered in adorable lambs, green grass and mountains. 5. Everyone here wears the same clothes every day. You wouldn’t necessarily pick this up unless you stayed here for a long time, but it’s generally true that everyone here has a pair of shorts, a sweater (jumper), a couple pairs of pants (trousers) and a couple of shirts. Every time you see them, they’ll generally be wearing the same thing, with only minor variations to match the seasons.

Once again, this is an absolutely sensible way of living. New Zealand is a wealthy country, and people here could afford the same level of variety that Americans enjoy. But why in the world would you waste your money on a different set of clothes for every day of the month? As long as everyone agrees to follow this same set of rules, no one will feel social pressure to one up their neighbors, everyone will be much happier and will have much more disposable income to spend on things like pleasant coffees and sensibly priced holiday homes.

Speaking of that... ​6. Holiday homes are common, and they’re quaint little huts rather than extravagant eyesores. In my own upbringing, I don’t remember meeting anyone who had a vacation home, until my grandfather constructed his own cabin on a lake in Kentucky. To me, this was the height of financial success, because it’s true - in the US, where I come from, only the very wealthy seem to have vacation homes, and they’re typically complex affairs.

Here, it is extremely common for families to have a small “bach” on the beach or in the mountains, which are often unheated, communal, picturesque cabins where family and friends can get together and have shelter, a stove and a toilet in a beautiful spot anytime they’d like it. The country - at least the South Island - is composed entirely of empty countryside, so these somehow manage to never be intrusive on the expansive views that they offer. Blue Pools, Mount Aspiring National Park 7. All of the rivers are clear to bright blue. ​ I’m not sure how it’s possible, but it seems that there are no tannins here - except in the excellent wine - because all of the fresh water is picturesque. ​ One of the literally trillions of waterfalls in Mt Aspiring National Park. 8. The National Parks are free for all to enter, and no one can build on the water, leaving the coast open for all of the public to enjoy. Again, why not live like this? Who does it benefit to sell off all of your beautiful things? Why not keep the best things in life free and open to the public? Please show me New Zealand’s social contract, because I would like to sign it. View from Rocky Mountain, Lake Wanaka 9. Similarly, there are trails and huts everywhere. ​ If you’re wondering where to go in New Zealand for a nice bike, hike, or trail run, the answer is everywhere. Trails range from rarely utilized muddy cattle paths across private land that require permission to access to manicured Great Walks that are maintained meticulously, and at great expense, by the national government. But they are essentially everywhere you can imagine. It’s an outdoor lovers paradise. (Sorry - you knew that, but I can’t help reiterating that it’s true.)
If you ask them, Kiwis will find ways to convince you that this isn’t actually a utopia, but of the places I’ve been, it’s as close as anywhere. There’s no way any of this is hyperbole. It’s just magic and I’m sure that it was some sort of mistake that I wasn’t born here, because at heart I’m Kiwi as.

If you like what we're up to here at Boldly Went, check out our Patreon page and consider joining the small but mighty horde of supporters, and pledging anything from $1/month in order to help make it feasible for us to continue creating the Boldly Went podcast and other online content!​ ​​ Become a Patron!

The Outdoors: Not white people sh*t. Talking to our people about the 2018 Refuge Outdoor Festival

Between a car breakdown, sickness, and travel for out of state events, we were happy to be able to make it out on Saturday to the inaugural Refuge Outdoor Festival in Carnation, WA from September 28 - 30, 2018. A festival whose tagline was "To Explore and Celebrate Nature, Diversity, and Life", it was developed by Chevon Powell and Golden Bricks Events with and for people of color in the outdoor community. We met Chevon a few months back when she was kind enough to sit down for an AdventShorts interview about her experience in the outdoors, and her motivation for creating the festival. We're white. We know. We'll get to that. Speaking concretely, the 2018 Refuge Outdoor Festival was a gathering of (primarily) people of color from around the country who are interested in the outdoors enough to pay money and take a bunch of time to go camping with other like-minded people of color.

It was camping, concerts, silent discos, hiking, service projects, presentations, hanging out by a river, and a series of conversations.

And it was genuinely diverse: we met people whose backgrounds were Columbian, Mexican, African, African-American, Native American, Native Hawaiian, Caucasian, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, and almost definitely more. Straight, queer, male, female, non-binary, and almost definitely more.

More abstractly, it was a rare experience - an “outdoorsy” event that was specifically for people of color. For reasons that might be obvious from the photo in the top right of this blog, it was a first experience for me in this kind of environment.

It’s worth us taking a minute to write about for a lot of reasons.

One is to signal boost. Chevon Powell, the organizer, told us that the one thing she wanted us to pass on from the weekend is that it will happen again. Please stop reading right now to follow them on their various social media, so you’ll get the updates. I'll wait here... Refuge Facebook

Refuge Instagram

Golden Bricks Facebook

Golden Bricks Instagram
Okay, welcome back! As Caucasians at Refuge, we were along primarily to learn and listen, but a big direct takeaway from participants was that we should talk to our people about the things that came up during the weekend. While there are plenty of people of color in our audience, it’s more likely, if you’re reading this, that you’re white like me. So, here you have it. The overarching story: The outdoors isn't, and never was, a "white thing". A thing that hit us right in our interests at the festival was that a lot of the weekend’s seminars had a storytelling focus, and a major theme of the festival was sharing stories about what it means to be a person of color in the outdoors. It stands to reason: Chevon Powell mentioned in an interview before the event with SNEWS that one of her major goals for the festival was establishing representation - to change the narrative trope that “people of color don’t go outside”.

So it's maybe no surprise that a big takeaway from the weekend was that the story that "the outdoors" is a thing for white people is a myth - not a reality. 

The weekend's diverse critical mass made the point clear - it was a group of hikers, campers, runners, backpackers, paddlers, and climbers who were also people of color. But the idea, on the face of it, is laughable when stated directly. One of Chevon's quotes from the SNEWS interviews makes that point: “We’ve been outside for a long time. We didn’t make it to 2018 without being outside.” We all live in the same world - enjoying it, living in it, and interacting with it is a universal human experience.

Another trope that the weekend challenged was that outdoor recreation specifically is "white culture".

The idea made it into Urban Dictionary, so I'm guessing I'm not the only one who's heard the idea that climbing mountains and kayaking and trail running and backpacking is white people shit. While it is true, according to at least one survey anyway, that Caucasians are disproportionately represented among people engaging in outdoor recreation (see The Outdoor Recreation Participation Survey from 2017), a point that came across clearly is that every culture represented had various modern and historical expressions of outdoor recreation - Japanese ski culture, Korean hiking culture, Hawaiian water culture, African running culture, etc. etc...   

If you're a person of color reading this, it may be an obvious point that POC go outside and play in a variety of ways, and for a variety of reasons. As a white person, that should be an obvious point too. I'm writing from a McDonalds in Moab, Utah, looking around, and there are dirtbags here from all over the world, and of all skin tones. It shouldn't be news.

But the fact that my operating assumption as a white person has generally been that outdoor recreation is "white culture" gets to the problem of the messaging that “outdoors is a white thing”. Memes (and Urban Dictionary entries) don't necessarily have to reflect the nuances of reality. Even when an idea is obviously false, it can get entrenched and become part of a person's unconscious worldview unless it’s actively challenged. And I think that gets to the value of what Refuge is doing to challenge that idea - both for POC and for those of us with less melanin.

The outdoors isn't white people shit. The experiences of people of color outside are often different than the experiences of white people. Having said all of that, another theme that came up repeatedly during the weekend's conversations was that there are some distinct ways in which many people of color experience the outdoors in ways that white people may not.

One positive theme that several people who were first or second generation immigrants mentioned were the historical connection that they made between the outdoors and labor. A couple of people whose parents had immigrated to the urban US from farming cultures in particular said that going outside reminded them of that part of their family past, and made them feel more connected to both their environment and their culture.

(While I said that POC often experience the outdoors differently from white people, this was actually a theme that I could identify with easily - a descendant of Appalachian farmers who moved north to work in Ohio's steel mills, it's not unusual for me to think about my family's history outside when I'm out playing, and I've often thought about hiking and trailrunning as ways that I've figured out how to live out that legacy of hard work in the mountains even though I'm basically a soft urbanite.) 

Also positively, a participant who was a first generation immigrant from Africa talked about the historic sense of connection between the land and the gods in the culture he was raised in, and the sort of spiritual sense of meaning that comes along with being outside​ as a result.

But it was also a major theme across the weekend, and across participants, that many people of color have a relationship with the outdoors that has been informed in some way by trauma - either personal or historic.

Chevon has said on multiple occasions that the genesis of the Refuge festival came from a personal traumatic experience, where on the way to her first solo backpacking experience, she was pulled over by a police officer who called for backup because he didn't believe her story, that she was a black woman going into the woods for fun. And as she pointed out in the SNEWS interview, this type of experience with incredulous, and even hostile, law enforcement isn't unique among people of color going outside. 

Multiple people talked about the legacy of colonialism, and the way that traditional cultural patterns of interacting with the world were replaced in recent generations by Western or Christian traditions, and that their most natural means of interacting with the world were presented as primitive or even evil.

And several people who were either refugees themselves, or the children of refugees, spoke about aspects of the outdoor experience - camping, or traveling on boats - as raising complicated emotions due to their history with refugee camps or boats as vessels of escape.
Takeaways For us, Refuge was a really valuable experience that gave us a much better perspective on what is required to support diversity in the outdoors.

I took away that working to shift the assumption that the outdoors is "white people shit" is important. “Why aren’t there more POC outside?” is a limited question whose answer is that there are - they’re just not there in the same ways that white people are, and they're often experiencing it differently.

A correlated idea is that creating an environment where a diverse group of people can participate in the outdoors comfortably isn't about encouraging them to do things the way I do them - it's about supporting their efforts to get outside into the natural world in a way that works for them.

So, supporting people of color who are creating space for themselves in the outdoors is a key thing. As Chevon said, representation matters, and I really hope readers will put energy, money and time into making sure Refuge, and organizations like it, succeed and grow.

​Along with supporting Refuge, for more follow up:

1) Follow Chevon's actual advice on how to support POC in the outdoors on the SNEWS interview I keep mentioning.

2) Listen to Chevon's AdventShorts interview.

3) Listen to this AdventShorts interview with Sophia Danneberg, the first African-American to summit Everest, where she talks about her experience in the mountaineering world as a black woman.

​4) And throw some support behind the organizations who are doing the work every day, including: Climbers of Color, Outdoor Asian, GirlTrek, Latino Outdoors, Rainier Valley Corps, and Brown Environmentalist. And if you like what we're up to here at Boldly Went, check out our Patreon page and consider joining the small but mighty horde of supporters, and pledging anything from $1/month in order to help make it feasible for us to continue creating the Boldly Went podcast and other online content!​ ​ Become a Patron!

Wes Ritner: Bigfoot 2018: 200 Miles of Redemption

Wes Ritner, winner of the 2018 Bigfoot 200. Introduction A year before Bigfoot, in September of 2017, I was running my second Tahoe 200. I’d trained for Tahoe harder than I’d ever trained before, and, after finishing in fourth place the previous year, I went into the 2017 race with the hope of winning. Viewed from the online race tracker, it might have looked for a while as if I was doing reasonably well. I trailed Jovica Spajic of Serbia in second place for most of the first 120 miles, and a couple times I overtook Jovica to take the lead. By the time I hit the Tunnel Creek aid station at mile 140, the race was a three-way tie for first place between Georg Kunzfeld of Germany, Jovica, and me. We arrived at that aid station together, all moving a bit slowly. But the difference between them and me was that they seemed to be feeling reasonably well, whereas, due to major electrolyte issues, I hadn’t been able to keep any food down except a few grapes for the last forty or fifty miles. Jovica and Georg got back on the trail after a brief stop to refuel. I took my time at the aid station, eventually got moving again, and then dropped out of the race five miles later. I still couldn’t eat anything without vomiting, and, based upon my dark brown urine, my kidneys were in the process of shutting down.

That drop was my biggest disappointment in 28 years of running.

​It was hard to get my mind off of what happened at Tahoe until March of 2018, when I began training for Bigfoot. I’d run Bigfoot once before, in 2015, and I knew it was a tough race through the Cascade Mountains with a lot of steep ascents. But it was my chance, in my mind at least, to move past what I viewed as a terrible failure. I didn’t have to win, but I had to give it the best effort I possibly could. Start to Blue Lake.  12.2 miles.  Mile 0 to 12.2 When the horn blew at the start of the race, I made a conscious effort to not allow myself to be sucked in by the excitement of running hard out of the gate. I wanted to be somewhere up with the frontrunners, but, above all, I wanted to control my pace. After the initial hundred meters of pavement, the first section of the trail was a relatively easy climb that most people near the front of the still-dense pack ran, with some occasional walking of the steep parts. It wasn’t long before I was able to look up the slope and count roughly nine runners ahead of me. It was possible a couple more had already slipped out of sight over the next crest, but it didn’t matter. I maintained my pace.

The route got tougher as we moved farther along the course, and the first signs of the pack stretching out a bit became apparent. At one point, I was about to cross of one of the ash-filled washes when I mis-read a course marker as indicating I was supposed to turn to the right and head up the ridge on the near side of the wash. I went a couple hundred meters before spotting two runners on the opposite ridge. Realizing my mistake, I turned around and headed back to the dry wash. There, at the base of the opposite hillside, was the marker I’d missed. My only consolation was that I’d caught my mistake before I’d gone very far.
Blue Lake to Windy Ridge.  18.1 miles.  Mile 12.2 to 30.3 This section is notorious for causing many cases of dehydration each year. The route takes runners through the blast zone of the Mount St. Helens eruption, where there is no cover from the sun, and everyone passes through the area during a hot time of day. Not wanting to repeat a 2015 episode at the Blue Lake aid station when I’d left without enough fluids, I did a few things differently this year. Most importantly, instead of starting the race with just the 70-ounce bladder that fits nicely into my pack and is my default fluid carrier in most situations, I ran the first 40 miles carrying not only the bladder, but also extra bottles that essentially doubled my fluid capacity. This ended up serving me well, and I made it to Windy Ridge with no hydration issues.

During these early miles of the race, before the pack really started spreading out, I chatted with a few people as we moved along. I ended up running alone almost the entire race, so it was nice to have some occasional, friendly banter during the first thirty miles. The route for the last few miles to the aid station was different from the route we ran in 2015, and included a dirt road that went on a little longer than I wanted it to. But the road was basically flat and unchallenging, so I tried to make a reasonable effort to take advantage of the easy miles.
Windy Ridge to Johnston Ridge.  9.6 miles.  Mile 30.3 to 39.9 ​At the Windy Ridge aid station, the volunteers had been told to reset everyone’s SPOT tracker—a mandatory GPS device that allowed the race officials to track us and allowed our friends to see online how we were progressing. My tracker was apparently functioning fine based upon a post-race look at the live tracking map, but, after it was reset at Windy Ridge, it failed to work for the next several hours. This caused a bit of consternation for my friends and family watching the live tracker from home, who worried that my red and non-moving icon meant that something had gone very wrong for me at Windy Ridge.

I wasn’t as efficient at this aid station as I should have been, largely because I wasted time figuring out what I was going to eat from the variety of offerings the volunteers had laid out for us. But, after a few minutes, I got myself moving again.

This section began by backtracking along the dirt road we’d run in on, then descending from the ridge to turn northeast and pass Spirit Lake. The only real vertical gain during this section is toward the end as the trail climbs up toward Johnston Observatory. The route before that climb is flat or gently rolling, and includes several treks through well-marked bushes. The only real downside of the bushwhacking was that, because the foliage was so thick, I couldn’t see what I was about to step on a lot of the time, and I had to slow down to avoid risking a rolled ankle.

​I heard the chatter of a couple runners close behind me during the bushwhacking portion of this leg, and it made me worry I was about to be passed, but I managed to avoid being overtaken. I was most of the way through the climb to Johnston Observatory when I came upon a young woman sitting in the shade of a bush along the trail. She asked me if she could have some water. After taking several long sips from my pack, she seemed a bit more relaxed. I asked if she wanted more, but she said she’d be ok, because a ranger was already on his way to help her. I saw her rescue ranger a few minutes later as I continued my ascent. Not long after that, there was a short, bush-lined path, and I came to the aid station at the edge of the parking lot. Johnston Ridge to Coldwater Lake.  6.6 miles.  Mile 39.9 to 46.5 Johnston Ridge aid station was the first time I had the opportunity to see my crew, Annie and Becka, since the start of the race, and they were ready for me. Assuming I would be chilled despite the heat of the day, they had a camping chair waiting for me in the sun. If this were day 2 of the race, they would have been right about me needing a source of warmth. But, at mile 40, my body hadn’t yet reached the point where it would start shivering every time I stopped running. We shifted the chair so I was beside the aid station itself, sharing the shade of its canopy. Becka and Annie allowed me to spend a little more time here than I’d originally planned—6 minutes versus 2 minutes—but it was time well spent, and it allowed me to eat and drink as many calories as I could handle.

When I departed Johnston Ridge, there were at least a couple runners sitting there who’d been there when I’d arrived. It was either here, or when I departed the next aid station at Coldwater Lake, that I slipped into fourth place behind Andy Pearson, Jordan Chang and Ryan Wagner. Either way, I was only vaguely cognizant of it. I was more focused on pushing the pace I knew I could sustain. 

The route to Coldwater Lake started with a short run through the general area of the observatory, and then consisted of a lot of descent with only a small amount of climbing. The descent was fun and easy, and was largely concentrated into the first several miles, before the course went through a series of forested rollers. I took this section at a good pace, and was surprised when I popped out of the forested area sooner than expected onto a road that I recognized as being only a brief jaunt from the Coldwater Lake aid station. Again, my crew was ready for me when I arrived. They were amazing in this regard throughout the entire race. I have no idea how they were able to find their way through the maze of unmarked, forest roads to be awake and alert and ready every time I came into one of the aid stations where crews were allowed.

​I checked in with the volunteers, then walked over to where my crew had parked our vehicle, and plopped down into the camping chair. The run from Johnston Ridge to Coldwater Lake was the shortest stretch between aid stations on the entire course. It felt great to see Annie and Becka so soon, and it felt great to have an excuse to sit down after seemingly just departing Johnston aid station a few minutes earlier. Coldwater Lake to Norway Pass.  18.7 miles.  Mile 46.5 to 65.2 ​Unlike 2015, I ran a good portion of this section when it was light. After running along the edge of the lake for a while, I crossed over the bridge, stopping momentarily on the far side to sit down and pull my poles out of the Velcro loops that kept them attached to the back of my hydration pack. Then the ascent began. It wasn’t as difficult as I remembered it from 2015, although this was partially because, this time, in the daylight, I was able to get a broader perspective of what I was climbing, unlike when I did it three years earlier in the dead of night. Even more importantly, the amount of vert I trained in 2018 was easily three or four times what I’d trained in 2015. By the time I was heading up the Mt. Margaret out-and-back, it had gotten dark. Someone wearing a headlamp was coming down after already summiting. Ryan Wagner. Seeing him on the out-and-back meant he was only a few tenths of a mile ahead of me. A move up to third place was within reach.
Norway Pass to Elk Pass.  11.1 miles.  Mile 65.2 to 76.3 Ryan must have been pretty efficient at the Norway Pass aid station, because, by the time I arrived, he had already departed. My crew kept me to 15 minutes at this stop, which is exactly what I’d built into my plan. I was not always so disciplined at the aid stations, and, no matter what race I was in, I tended to stay longer than necessary if my crew didn’t keep me in line.
​
I made the turn out of the aid station, and I was off to begin the next ascent. It was during this section that I passed Ryan, moving me into third place behind Andy and Jordan.
Elk Pass to Rd 9327.  15 miles.  Mile 76.3 to 91.3 When I arrived at Elk Pass, my crew’s vehicle was parked next to Jordan’s crew’s vehicle. Becka let me know this as soon as I arrived at the aid station, and she cautioned me that Jordan was sleeping, so we tried to be as quiet as possible. Catching sleep at an aid station is tough enough as it is, without your neighbor making unnecessary noise. I changed shoes at this stop, ate some potato soup my crew had prepared for me, and then was on my way in about 13 minutes. With Jordan still sleeping, this put me in second place. It was 3:20 AM of the first night.

I was part of the way through this section, with one branch of the trail stretching straight in front of me, when I saw course markers indicating I needed to make a hard, right turn onto another branch of the trail that led downhill. I made the turn to the right, and then traversed a series of ups and downs as the trail seemingly worked its way along a rolling spur. It was at least 20 minutes after making the turn before it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen a course marker in a while. I’d loaded the GPS tracks for the course onto my phone before the race, so I stopped, powered-up my phone, and then checked my position relative to the course.

The GPS showed me off course.

Granted, I’d experienced at least two instances in different races where the GPS tracks were wrong, but it wasn’t likely I was experiencing that here. I was frustrated that I’d run for 20 minutes along this trail, but I knew it could have been worse. The frustration did have the positive effect of fueling my legs with the extra strength to make the return trip more aggressively than I’d been moving previously. When I got back to the original turn, I again saw the pair of markers clearly indicating that I was supposed to go down this “wrong” path. Someone—probably an ill-intentioned hiker—had deliberately altered the course markings to send runners off course. I did a quick recon along the trail that my GPS indicated I should take, and, sure enough, a short distance past the intersection I found another marker. I ran back to the intersection and moved the sabotaged turn markers to correctly indicate that runners were supposed to go straight. In all, I lost about 40 minutes to the sabotage.

​When I got to the next aid station at Road 9327, I told the volunteers about the sabotage, and they said they were going to send someone to re-check the entire section and to re-mark anything that wasn’t clear. My experience with all of the volunteers in this race was uniformly fantastic. They were eager to help, and they went above and beyond what might ordinarily be expected in order to help the runners get safely to the finish.
Rd 9327 to Spencer Butte.  11.2 miles.  Mile 91.3 to 102.5 ​I cruised along at my planned pace throughout this section. 
Spencer Butte to Lewis River.  9.6 miles.  Mile 102.5 to 112.1 From Spencer Butte aid station, the trail eventually led to a long and steep descent to the Lewis River. The descent occasionally relented with a not-as-steep section, or with an occasional lateral shift around the mountainside rather than down it. But, by the time the trail finally leveled out and turned left to parallel the river, I was ready for something other than down. For the next few miles to the aid station, the trail wound through a sometimes rolling and sometimes flat area which was very runnable. I tried to take advantage of the terrain, running steadily aside from a few very brief steep sections. The waterfalls on the river were gorgeous enough that I’ve already added the Lewis River to my list of places I’d like to explore at a time when I’m not in the middle of a race.

When I finally made the turn off the main trail to begin the short, 200-meter out-and-back ascent to the aid station, I was surprised to encounter Andy Pearson and his pacer descending toward the main trail. I’d thought Andy was farther ahead of me.

​Annie and Becka weren’t waiting at the aid station like they usually were. Apparently, an aid station volunteer had told them the next runner was 2 ½ hours behind Andy. My crew was certain I wasn’t that far back, but they had no idea I was only a few minutes away. When I arrived, they’d already walked back to their vehicle that was parked in a nearby lot. The volunteers sprang into action as soon as they saw me, whipping up a burger and sending someone to get my crew. My crew gave me my pack for the next section, helped refuel me, and got me back on my feet. Ultimately, I made it through the aid station within a few minutes of my planned time, so the confusion about the timing of my arrival didn’t have any real impact. I was just happy to have closed so much of the gap between Andy and me. 
Lewis River to Council Bluff.  18.9 miles.  Mile 112.1 to 131 My primary strengths as a result of my training in 2018 were the ability to maintain a consistent running pace on most ascents, and the ability to aggressively hike the steeper trails. A byproduct of these strengths was that I usually felt fresh after a long or steep ascent, and, therefore, I was able to run the downs well. The area where I’d focused the least amount of training was flat terrain. Whenever I’d done flat runs in training, they’d always been done in the form of a recovery run the day after a hard run or after several days of consecutive hard runs. So, for the entire year, I’d never done a flat run at anything other than a leisurely pace. Therefore, lined up against my competitors in a race on flat ground, I assumed many of them would be able to beat me. So, as I headed down the short trail from the aid station to the main Lewis River trail, I couldn’t help but think about the relatively flat terrain which had preceded the aid station, and worry that someone was close on my heels.

My confidence increased as I worked my way along the main trail and started hitting some reasonably steep rollers, knowing there was a big ascent coming soon. I was banking on the climb affording me an opportunity to put some distance between myself and whoever might be behind me, and, possibly, to gain some ground on Andy. Then, just a few miles along the route, I saw Andy and his pacer hiking slowly downhill just ahead of me. I was moving quickly at that point, and kept up the pace as I ran down the sharply curving trail past Andy before disappearing over a fold in the terrain.

It felt good that I’d moved into first place, but the race was far from over. This was somewhere around mile 116, so there were still 90 miles between me and the finish.

​For the rest of the section I powered through the long series of ascents strong and steady, and I always felt good enough to hit the downs reasonably hard immediately after cresting each of the climbs. I didn’t know it at the time, but Ryan Wagner was going strong too, and was, in fact, about twenty minutes behind me.
Council Bluff to Chain of Lakes.   9.8 miles.  Mile 131 to 140.8
​I ran this section slower than planned, losing a little more than a minute per mile. Toward the end of the run to Chain of Lakes, the trail led to a road. There was a turnoff to the right that I suspected went to the lakes and the aid station, but the course markers had us continuing straight along the main road. Soon, I was dropping onto a trail that began ascending back toward the lakes that I had just descended past. It was probably indicative of how the sleep deprivation was impacting me at this point that, despite my love of the ups, I actually got a little irritated that I had to go uphill to get back to the lakes so soon after descending. But, even then, I recognized the fact that I was just redirecting my irritation at not already being at the aid station. 
Chain of Lakes to Klickitat.  17.3 miles.  Mile 140.8 to 158.1
I arrived at Chain of Lakes aid station at about 11:00 PM on the second night. It ended up being my longest aid station stop of the race. I spent the first several minutes in a camping chair at the edge of the aid station working on getting some food down. When the shivering in my legs started getting worse than normal, Becka convinced me to go inside the warming tent. Ryan arrived at the aid station about 30 minutes after me, and we said hi as he walked into the warming tent. We chatted briefly, but it seemed like neither of us was feeling particularly awake. I put on dry clothes, even though I’d quickly be getting wet again as soon as I brushed against the rain-soaked bushes lining the trail. When I was reminded the next section included three or four river crossings, I knew putting on dry clothes had been an entirely futile gesture, but, for just a few minutes, it felt absolutely amazing.

​When I left the warming tent, I told Annie and Becka that I needed to close my eyes for five minutes. We walked back to where they’d set up our crew station, and I sat down and closed my eyes. Three minutes into it, I knew I wasn’t going to fall asleep, and I knew I was just wasting time. So, I got up, put on my hydration pack, and hit the trail. This was the first of the three short naps I would take during the race.

A few miles after the Chain of Lakes aid station, the trail descended to a river. This was the deepest water crossing in the race. There was a rope that had been stretched from one side of the river to the other, so I grabbed onto it and made my way across.

I’d been moving at a reasonable pace through the first part of this section, but, soon after the second water crossing, I slowed down as sleepiness started to overcome me. Later, when I was moving through a long, flat area, I realized just how groggy I was getting. I became aware that I was shuffling along at a very slow pace, but I was unable to wake myself from this state. After the race, in fact, I learned that the route from Chain of Lakes to Klickitat took me three hours longer than my planned time, and was far and away the slowest segment of the race for me.

At one point, I was even surprised that I was still finding course markers along my path, because it seemed as if, in my present mental state, there was a high probability I could just wander off the course without ever realizing it. In several places the trail was overgrown with bushes, making it even harder to follow. And every bush I touched added water to my already soaked legs and shorts. I was wearing my waterproof jacket, at least, but I wasn’t carrying anything waterproof for my legs and I wouldn’t have worn waterproof pants even if I’d had them. Adding layers would only slow me down. If my core was warm, my legs would be warm. After all, they were the ones doing all the work.

At some point, I decided I needed to close my eyes again just to clear my head. I knew I couldn’t continue sleepwalking through the night forever. I waited until I came upon a small spot on the trail that had been shielded from the rainfall by overhead branches, leaving a small patch of dirt that was almost dry. I curled up on this dry patch, tucking my knees up to my chest for warmth. I didn’t sleep, but it felt magnificent to just lie there and rest. No more than five minutes later, I stood up, put my gear on, and began running. Unfortunately, the effect of my rest was short-lived, and soon I was sleepwalking along the trail again.

Sometime during the descent to the road crossing that marks the beginning of the final short, flat section of trail before the long ascent to Elk Peak, the piercing shriek of a nearby mountain lion cut the chilly mountain air and snapped every bit of grogginess from me as if I’d just had three hours of sleep. It’s not as if I suddenly started running with vigor, but I definitely began moving faster than I had been, and, perhaps more importantly, I felt awake and alert. Granted, my forward progress for the next mile was slowed by intermittent glances over my shoulder to verify that the angry mountain lion wasn’t about to jump on my back, but it felt good to be doing something other than shuffling sleepily along.

The ascent to Elk Peak was difficult. However, unlike back in 2015 when I’d last run this race, I knew to expect the rolling series of false summits, so that aspect of the course didn’t have the same, psychologically draining effect it’d had on me in 2015. The sun came up somewhere during this climb, and I was happy when I finally crested the summit, knowing the remainder of the route to Klickitat aid station was essentially a series of semi-steep, downhill switchbacks. Klickitat to Twin Sisters.  19.4 miles.  Mile 158.1 to 177.5

The Klickitat aid station was positioned at the side of a dirt road. Upon arrival, I sank into a soft camping chair and requested an egg sandwich from the volunteers. A couple minutes later, I had my pancake and egg sandwich in hand. I took one or two bites, and then promptly threw up. Apparently, the very distinctive flavor of the cooking spray they were using didn’t agree with my increasingly delicate stomach. The volunteers offered to make me something else cooked in oil instead of the cooking spray, so I waited a few more minutes while they prepared a couple pan-toasted English muffins and a cheese quesadilla. I ate a quarter of the quesadilla, and, though I could still taste some of the cooking spray that was probably residue from the pan, I thought I would be able to eat the rest of it. In the interest of getting back on the trail, I put the English muffins and the remaining three-quarters of the quesadilla in my pack to consume on the run, and I headed back into the forest.

​A mile or two along the trail, I decided I needed to start working on getting more calories into my body, so I pulled out half of one of the English muffins. It was about this same time I noticed that my head was feeling very foggy. Not sleepy-foggy; somehow different, as if I was having some kind of allergic reaction to the chemicals in the cooking spray. I took a bite of the English muffin, and found that I could barely keep it down. I tried a couple more very small bites, and I knew there was no way I was going to be able to eat any more of the food I’d brought from the aid station. Between the nausea it caused, and the allergic reaction creating a fogginess in my head, I knew if I continued to eat it, things would not go well for me.

Since I’d vomited everything in my stomach at the aid station, I was starting from a calorie reserve near zero. Not counting the muffins and quesadilla, the only sources of calories I was carrying were a single squeeze pack of yogurt with somewhere between 70 and 90 calories, and a 16-ounce bottle of grape juice that had about 300 calories. I agonized regarding whether I should turn around and go back to the aid station to get food that hadn’t been prepared in the pans, or whether I should keep moving forward. Out of a desire to avoid running unnecessary miles, I convinced myself the grape juice and yogurt would be enough to get me to Twin Sisters aid station 18 miles away, and I pushed onward.

I stopped a few more times over the course of the next couple miles, each time a part of me concerned that continuing to move forward was stupid and would only result in something bad happening as a result of my allergic reaction or, at best, result in me taking an incredibly long time to move through this section exhausted and getting weaker. Balancing this indecision was the fact that each time I stopped to reconsider what I should do, I was even farther from the Klickitat aid station, making the price for turning back even steeper. During one of those stops, I dug through my pack just to make sure there weren’t any other calories I’d forgotten about. And, sure enough, there was a tiny plastic bag with about 18 almonds. Annie had tucked one of those little bags into my pack at just about every aid station, but I’d never actually eaten any of the almonds because they never sounded appealing. Now, with nothing else to eat, they seemed like a Thanksgiving feast. I knew immediately that I would ration them throughout the remainder of the section, because the psychological benefit of having something to eat throughout the route outweighed the short duration shot of calories I’d get from eating them all at once.

My final bout of indecision regarding whether to turn back to Klickitat or to push forward to Twin Sisters occurred about four or five miles into the section, when I actually went so far as to turn around and begin ascending a steep switchback I’d just started to descend. I had to go back, I told myself. My body needed calories to burn. I needed to know this fogginess I’d been experiencing wasn’t something serious. Nothing good would come from trying to press forward another fourteen miles in the growing heat of the day. Moving farther from my closest source of food and assistance made no sense.

Then clarity hit me. Maybe I was snapping myself out of indecisiveness born of too little sleep. Maybe the cooking-spray-fogginess had faded. Either way, I knew I had to keep going forward. My goal was ahead of me, not behind. And, if I was going to go forward, I needed to take an approach that negated the possibility of what I feared most: stumbling eternally along in an exhausted state like I’d done after Chain of Lakes.

I attempted the opposite of stumbling along. I took off like a bat out of hell, deciding I was going to fool my body for as long as possible into believing it actually had energy to burn. Now, taking off like a bat out of hell at mile 165 of a mountainous race looks very different than what you might see when your local sprinting champion takes off like a bat out of hell from the starting blocks of a 100-meter dash, but it felt great nonetheless because it was such a positive action, because it was a refusal to accept the situation I found myself in, and because I was pushing myself absolutely as I hard as I could.

I put my earbuds in, cranked up the music, and I ran. I drove myself forward as fast as I could, no longer worrying about whether I should turn back.

My most vivid image of the race is from this section. I am sprinting along a leftward-curving, gently-descending trail. The ground before me is lush and green with grass and other foliage. There is a thick canopy of branches above me, keeping the air cool and shading me from the bright sunlight. I climb over a narrow log, and over another, and then I am off and sprinting again, running toward the slanted horizon of the mountain’s next bend.

​I didn’t know what was beyond that next bend then, and I don’t remember what was beyond it now. But, when I look back at the race and point to a moment when I was living my dream of pushing harder than I’d ever imagined I could, the bridges burning behind me, retreat impossible, and nowhere to go but forward in the attack, this is the moment I now see. This is why I was running the race.

My burst of emotional and physical energy lasted most of the remaining miles in this section, but it ran out at about the time I hit the base of the ascent that would eventually lead to the Twin Sisters aid station. I’d saved my last few ounces of grape juice for this climb. I took out my bottle, drank the remaining, warm juice, and started ascending the mountain. The first part of the climb was hot and exposed, and it wore on me. When I came across a small pond, I took the long-sleeved shirt that was wrapped around my waist, submerged it in the water, and then wrapped it over my head and tied the sleeves under my chin as if it were a bonnet. I’m sure I looked a little absurd, but it cooled me down, and that’s all that mattered. It worked so well, in fact, that shortly after the trail started winding through a more densely canopied section of the forest, I had to wrap the shirt around my waist again because I was starting to get cold.

I did a combination of walking and running through the rest of the rolling ascent to the aid station. When I finally saw Annie and an aid station volunteer standing beside the trail ahead, I knew I had made it. I was seriously depleted of calories, and I was moving slower than I wanted to be moving. But I was elated because I’d made it, and I was elated because I hadn’t taken the safe option of turning back to Klickitat.

After the race, when I was looking at my actual performance in each section of the race as compared to my planned times for those sections, incredibly, the section from Klickitat to Twin Sisters was by far my best. I completed this section an hour faster than I’d planned. In what could have been my worst moment, I’d found my biggest triumph. Twin Sisters to Owens Creek.  16 miles.  Mile 177.5 to 193.5
As I’ve alluded to before, one of my weaknesses as an ultrarunner is that, if allowed to my own devices, I will linger for too long in the aid stations. Because of this, I always ask my crew to be the enforcers of time limits. Before the race, they have a document that tells them exactly how many minutes I’m allowed at each stop. When I’m getting close to the limit, Becka will step in and gently—or not so gently—encourage me out of the station. As I came into Twin Sisters, I knew the plan was for this to be a brief stop. Ten minutes at most from entry to exit. But that didn’t matter because, after the calorie-deficient run of the last 19.4 miles, any kind of time-restricted stop wasn’t going to work. What I needed was calories, and it didn’t matter if it took one minute or one hour. My body needed something to burn. The muscle I was probably burning as energy in that last section was only going to last so long.

​When I ran past Annie toward the entrance to the aid station, I let her know that I needed a reset for calories, using the word “reset” specifically because she knew the only other time I’d used the term was when I came into Hamburger Rock aid station at the Moab 240 in 2017 after a long section of being under-hydrated, under-fed and under-salted. How that situation came about is a long story I won’t go into here, but in Moab I took an entire hour to consume electrolyte drinks, to eat a burger, and to graze on whatever else Annie set in front of me. Stepping outside of my self-imposed aid station timeline at Moab to truly fix what was going wrong turned around a race that was fast becoming a train wreck. I didn’t quite need that same level of “fixing” here at Twin Sisters, but I knew that if I didn’t get a serious upload of calories, I’d be paying for the previous 19.4 miles with 29 miles of no energy and lethargic running. So, with my declaration of a reset, my crew knew that something was really wrong, and all of the usual time limits were off.

A medical volunteer, Mark, pulled the old moleskin off my feet, popped a blister, and applied new moleskin, a feat requiring not only some good medical know-how, but also a total lack of a sense of smell. Either that, or he possessed an amazing ability to fight on despite the stench of feet that had 178 miles of running on them.
​
At some point, I moved inside the warming tent. It was a hot afternoon, but I sat in there with a propane heater pointed at me and a blanket over my shoulders. Nothing short of that would have prevented the shivers that would have otherwise overtaken me. I ate potato soup, half of a burger, and a bowl of hash browns. I drank cherry juice, orange juice, and milk. I changed clothes: wet shorts, shirt, shoes and socks were all swapped for their drier cousins. In all, I spent about 30 minutes at the aid station. It was a long time to not be moving forward, but I needed it.

When I departed, I didn’t feel as if I was at 100% strength, but I felt significantly better than when I’d arrived. The volunteers had gone out of their way to make me feel welcome when I’d run in. They’d offered everything I needed every moment I was there. I thanked them as I left, then headed out onto the trail.

It was 2.7 miles from Twin Sisters aid station to the turnoff toward Owens Creek. That 2.7 miles was shared by the runners leaving Twin Sisters, and by those runners just coming in. If I could make it to the turnoff before the next runner hit that portion of the trail, I might gain just a little psychological advantage.  If the next runner never saw me before the trail split, he couldn’t be sure just how far ahead of him I was. Granted, at Twin Sisters aid station he’d be able to find out what time I’d departed, but he wouldn’t have any idea if I was slogging painfully along or flying fast on light feet. So, I made it a point to move as fast as I could to the turnoff. When I made that turn without encountering the next runner, I was relieved.

There was one last out-and-back in the race: Pompeii Peak. By the time I was doing the ascent of Pompeii, the sleepiness from the previous night had crept up on me again. I was walking close to cliff faces that would have likely not been life-threatening if I were to fall, but would have certainly ended my race. I couldn’t afford a sleepy misstep. Something needed to change. I realized the smart thing to do might be to take another 5-minute dirt nap even though I was within striking distance of the finish. Once I’d had the thought, there wasn’t even an argument in my mind. I knew I was going to do it.

After summiting Pompeii, I descended a short distance to a flat spot atop the high cliffs overlooking the valley. With a quick glance across the valley, I figured the odds were low that I’d accidently stumble over the edge of the cliff when I got back up, so I laid down on the rocks with my hydration pack as a pillow. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to fall asleep, but I just wanted to close my eyes again.

It was pure bliss.

When I got up five minutes later, I was mildly refreshed. I shrugged my pack onto my shoulders. There was another steep descent, then I was running along a foliage-covered ledge hoping I was awake enough to not slip. Maybe it was the excitement of knowing I was getting close to the end of the race, but the more I ran, the more awake I became, until even the thought of tiredness slipped from my mind altogether.

There were two distinct sections in the final miles before Owens Creek, neither of which I was a big fan of. The first was a trail that seemed to have countless unnecessary twists and turns, and involved climbing over innumerable logs that blocked the path. The second section was a long, gently descending route that had likely been a logging road or fire road at some time in the distant past, but now looked like a never-ending, narrow, grassy meadow. I could make out the signs of a trail through this road-meadow, but it went on far longer than I wanted it to, particularly since I was looking forward to arriving at the final aid station. It was here that a bout of nausea hit me. It stuck with me for a while before temporarily resolving itself with a brief episode of vomiting. A little water to rinse out my mouth, and I was on my way again, although, from that time until the end of the race, I never completely shook the feeling of mild nausea.

A mile later I hit the stream crossing that meant the aid station was just ahead. Owens Creek to the Finish.  13 miles.  Mile 193.5 to 206.5
When I arrived at Owens Creek, I learned that Ryan had gone off course somewhere on the route from Klickitat to Twin Sisters. I didn’t know if he’d been sleepwalking like I’d been doing earlier in the race, or if he’d just gotten turned around, but he ended up being lost for several hours before a team arrived to get him back to race headquarters.

​The section from Owens Creek to the finish was the only portion of the race that I had a pacer. Annie paced me, and, before the start of the race, I’d specifically asked her to not let me take it easy during this section. Whatever pace I wanted to run, I had told her to run faster. And she did. The first three miles were a descent down a dirt road, and Annie set a pace that I didn’t really feel like running. It was exactly what I’d asked her to do. I had to push to keep up with her.

Then we hit the paved road. The rest of the course was essentially flat. There were a number of gently rising hills, but they were so small and so short, that, after everything I’d been through on the Bigfoot course, I was almost embarrassed to call them hills. But, after 196 miles, my willpower wanted to take a little break. As a result, I started walking every uphill and running the flats and downs.

Annie put up with my walking, but every time I started to jog the subsequent descent or flat section, she sped up just a little, forcing me to speed up to keep pace with her. It was starting to irritate me. Did she not realize that, 200 miles ago, when I said I wanted her to push me hard for the last thirteen miles, what I really wanted was for her to coddle me and comfort me and let me be a slacker? Apparently not, because she kept on pushing me faster. And that’s why she’s such a great pacer!

Eventually, I decided walking up these micro-hills was ridiculous, and we started running without taking the unnecessary walk breaks. It felt great to cross the bridge into Randle, and then to turn onto the road that leads to the finish at the high school. Shortly after I made that turn, I glanced at my watch and realized I could come in under 60 hours if I hurried. The adrenaline kicked in, and it was like I was sprinting on fresh legs as I ran down that road. Then around the track and across the finish line 59 hours, 54 minutes and 1 second after starting.

I sat on a camping chair at the finish line for a little while, drinking water and chatting with the people near me. Eventually, Annie and Becka helped me to the nearby sleeping tent where I crawled onto a cot and someone put a blanket over me. 

I had won the Bigfoot 200. It was time to sleep.

Special thanks to my unbelievably wonderful crew of Annie and Becka. They have supported me at almost every one of my 100-mile and 200-mile races. They provide the physical support and care I need along the way: the food, the water, the moleskin application, whatever is needed. And, perhaps more importantly, they are an amazing moral support to me whether I am at the aid station with them or somewhere out on the trail alone. Knowing that I’ll see them again in ten or twenty or forty miles ensures that I always have something to look forward to even when everything else might seem bleak. Thank you, Annie and Becka!

And thanks to the volunteers who cared for me and assisted me at each of the aid stations and at the finish line. You gave a lot to me and to the other runners, and you are appreciated.

Lastly, thanks to the Destination Trail team that puts on such well-organized, fun, challenging events. See you again soon! Wes Ritner in the afterglow of winning the 2018 Bigfoot 200 If you like what we're up to here at Boldly Went, check out our Patreon page and consider joining the small but mighty horde of supporters, and pledging anything from $1/month in order to help make it feasible for us to continue creating the Boldly Went podcast and other online content!​  Become a Patron!

Where's the Money Going?

Hey adventure buddies! Last post we had some discussion about where all of our money comes from in life - including streams of income from this business..

We had a thing happen this weekend, where 5 new Patreon sponsors signed up in a couple of days.

5 might not sound like much to any big name podcasters out there in the audience, but for us it was a jump of 10% in both number of sponsors and total pledged money. 

It was enough to get us thinking, and to spur another money-focused post, about where the money's going when you all support us. Your dollars at work. Thank you for patronizing us. Here at Boldly Went, our most visible "product" is our podcast, but we have a couple of primary ways of making money. Within the flow of the business, ticketing for the events where we gather stories is our primary income source most months, and we get a little bit from event and podcast sponsorship and merchandise sales (thanks Territory Run Co!). And we occasionally take people out on tours around the Seattle area or rent them our kayaks through the Navigator Network.

Beyond those transactional pieces though, we also have a Patreon page where people who believe in what we're doing can pledge monthly, PBS Telethon style, to allow us to keep going.

Because you know those pledges come from pure support, it always feels especially good to get a new one. Selling a ticket is great (and actually amounts to more money into the business a lot of times), but getting a patron subscription feels like more of a personal affirmation that we're on the right track.  

Practically speaking, those pledges are also super helpful because they're stable, in the sense that they don't require ongoing advertising work on our part, and aren't as up in the air as ticket sales. One of the most nerve wracking parts of this whole thing, especially when we're traveling, is wondering whether events will cover the costs of travel for the places we go, and it's great to have that consistent base so we feel like we can take risks on going to smaller towns and places that are more off the beaten path - like Poulsbo, WA, for instance, where we just had a fantastic experience last week.

At the moment of writing, we know a few things about our base of Patreon sponsors. The average pledge for Boldly Went is $10/month, which is 33% higher than the average Patreon account.  We have 53 current patrons, and a decent number of those are friends and family, so that might factor in to the higher than average dollar amount. But I also think that it has to do with what we're up to. A big part of our goal is creating community - which involves making new friends and family. So the support feels warm and personal, and often either springs from, or develops into, real world relationships. People who have supported us on Patreon have also helped us get events organized in their home towns, let us crash on their couches (thanks Callista, and see you tonight, Dan and Stacie!), consulted personally with us on business development, and literally hung out in the woods for days on end. That's the kind of thing we're going for!​ What's the money going towards? We're not a nonprofit, so we don't have an itemized public statement of exactly where the organization's money goes (although Angel has this somewhere because she's on top of all of that stuff in a way that I'm not...), but I can tell you concretely that almost all of the money that comes in to the business goes towards the basic tools of the trade for us. It goes to keep our car running, to pay for insurance, to get gas and food between towns, to keep our technology functional, and occasionally to put a roof over our heads when we're on the road in the winter. We embrace a full-on dirtbag business model, so most of the time we're crashing on couches, in our car, or in a tent, and our tech amounts to a couple of old iPhones (one of which was donated by our friend - thanks Angie!), a couple of old laptops, and a used iPad (which we bought using Patreon money so we could do this more reliably on the road!) 

From the beginning, I'll admit, we've been trying to build this business as a sort of life-hack: an attempt to create something we could get paid for that also grows out of things that we love to do. In Angel's case, traveling around, making new friends, and playing outside, and in my case writing, creating, and trying to help people navigate the thorny hellscape that we call the modern world.

​Because it's so integrated with what we love, we put as much of ourselves into the project as we can - and concretely Patreon sponsorship buys us time and emotional energy to do that. It's letting us live out some dreams, because it's allowing us to spend less time on other work and more time on this project.

I've done a fair amount of fundraising work in the non-profit world, though, and in my experience almost no one gives money to people trying to replace the rear differential on their car or purchase an old iPad on Craigslist. People give to things that they feel personally invested in, causes they believe in, and products and services that they personally benefit from. So, those ideas guide what we're trying to build here. Our goal from the beginning has been to create something using the gifts and interests we've got that is concretely valuable to the world.  So what's the point of all that? The Grand Vision? Where's it all going? That's the stuff that's worthwhile, we think - in terms of our time and your money. The important point isn't the type of recording device we're using. It's what we're using it for - to what end we're employing our time and resources. That's the big picture of what the money that goes into this business goes towards.  That's what's interesting because I think we're creating something pretty unique.

So, what are we providing to the world that we hope is worthy of time, money, and energy? Both our own, and the people who support us?

1) Numbered lists, because people like lists.

2)  A connected outdoor community.

One of the early recognitions we had when we were thinking about business ideas was that there was a niche to be filled in the outdoor community, because even though outdoorsy people have a lot of shared values and commonalities, they don't have many central, social gathering places. We'd said for a couple of years that outdoors-types need a bar in every city to hang out in, the way football fans have sports bars. Storytelling events have been a way to create that in a natural way, and it's been a ton of fun, and a real, unique added value in the outdoor world, we think. The Navigator Network has been one concrete platform to create real world connections through the business outside of events, but more than a few people have also met through events and the podcast, which we think is pretty cool.

3) A platform for stories to be told that wouldn't be normally.

It was also an early recognition that in the outdoor community, there is a particular type of voice that you normally hear at public events - winners, champions, record setters. It's not that we aren't interested in those things. We just also think there's a lot of value in hearing about the losers, oddballs, and also-ran's of the world. And it's been interesting - so many of the stories we've heard at events focus on failure, or things that suck, rather than victories and glory, that it's almost a surprise when someone talks about a big accomplishment. Our events and podcast, we think, create a uniquely robust picture of what the outdoor experience actually is, and what it's actually about, because we give anyone who wants it a voice at the table.

As a related aside, Patreon has been a great support for gathering these types of stories - because it gives us some freedom to go to smaller towns where we aren't likely to make money on events. There are good stories everywhere, in our experience, and our goal is to gather as many of those as we can.

4) A Platform to tell stories that are important.

I will be completely honest in saying that there was no real higher social cause (beyond connecting people who wouldn't otherwise be connected) when we first started developing this idea. What we were envisioning with events and the podcast was essentially lighthearted fun. But pretty much immediately, it became clear that when people came to events, and were given an mic to tell any story they want, most of them talked about reasons that their outdoor experience has mattered. They've either shared about lessons learned, or traumatic events, or ways that playing outside has taught them important lessons about life. Based on the platform, it was maybe inevitable that along with "that funny thing that happened that one time", stories have moved towards the interface of the outdoors and social issues, struggles with mental health, gender and sexuality in the outdoor community, and race in the outdoors, among many other things. 

When we realized that was happening, we embraced it for what it is - a great opportunity to be a platform for people who are telling stories that are important beyond just recreation, and trying to be good stewards of those stories has become a central goal in what we do. That plays to an existing strength in lots of ways - we're healthcare providers, and I have a Masters degree in religion, so life and death, both literally and figuratively, has been our business for most of our adult lives. But at heart, it's a side benefit of the platform. Give people 10 minutes to share who they are, and they will show you something important.

5) A platform to tell stories that are niche but are interesting to the wider world.

As we've branched out, out attempt to connect with a broad community of outdoorspeople has naturally lent itself to stories that are about the way our weird hobbies are relevant to the interests of people of all kinds. As the business has been developing, a fun spin off of that has been that we've been able to attend, and tell stories about events like the Bigfoot and Tahoe 200 Mile Endurance Runs, and Seventy48, a 70 mile endurance paddle, and share them with a world that wouldn't normally have any idea what they're about.

6) Stories from travel and adventure that are helpful.

We've also naturally gravitated towards practicality. For a lot of adventure types, it's natural to want to provide beta when you're telling a story, so that people who want to can repeat your adventure. Because 10 minute stories aren't quite enough time for that, usually, our Field Notes have been a way to dig deeper into experiences in a way that's useful. 

The book I'm working on, "The Dirtbag's Guide to Life", is entirely focused on communicating things we've learned along the way, and will eventually become a real thing you can read. In the meantime, I try to keep this blog primarily useful, because from the beginning we've really wanted to use our platform to make adventure more attainable for more people.
That's a relatively broad list, and while supporting what we're doing, basically, is supporting more events, podcasts, and web content, the important thing we think we're providing are the meaty intangibles - helping people make new friends, providing solid beta, inspiring people to get outside in ways they hadn't thought of, understanding a bit about why all of this madness we engage in on the weekends is important, and how all of it connects us to one another and to the environment we live in. All of that is why we do this, and we hope it's a contribution to the world that those of you supporting us find worthwhile!

Thanks so much for being a part of this thing and helping it continue to grow!
If you're interested in investing in this project with us on Patreon, I wouldn't argue with you, and you can do so by clicking the link below. You get stuff for your sponsorship too, so that's a bonus. Become a Patron!