I’ve been keeping a journal of my outdoor trips since before 1976, the year I through hiked the Appalachian Trail. As of 2020, this collection included a bundle of loose notebooks for early trips, a computer file containing trip reports as word docs, and a collection of 32+ field notebooks. I’ve also got 10 notebooks of numbered and captioned color slides from the 70’s to the early 2000’s, and a later well-organized “my pictures” folder on my laptop for my digital images starting in 2005. My map collection is reasonably organized, with both a set of hard copies often marked with my completed routes, and TOPO! maps on my NatGeo software for trips since ~ the mid-2000s.
This obsessive record keeping has proven a welcome gift from my younger self to my retired self. An after retirement project to clean out my map files in the garage brought back memories of trips I’d almost forgotten. I sorted through much of the material, taking the time to remark many of the maps where my long ago route was starting to fade away. Around the same time my friend Art gave me his no longer used, high quality scanner. Combining my maps and journals with a long stalled project to digitize some of my old slides gave me a chance to relive a lot of adventures that I don’t think I could repeat today. Though this was all interesting to me, would it be so to anyone else?
Since my time in South Dakota in the early 1990s I’ve kept up a side hobby as an outdoor writer. To date I’ve published books on North Dakota and the Maah Daah Hey Trail (Bower House), 50 Hikes in Hiking Kentucky, Backroad Biking in the Smokies and Blue Ridge (both from Countryman Press), and the Black Hills and Badlands (out of print). These books were successes, with all but the biking book going through multiple printings and fully revised second editions. I’ve also published a few dozen magazine articles, including a brief period as a regular contributor to Backpacker Magazine. I am not looking to reuse the material from these guides, but rather document other adventures.
Following a couple blogs from friends, I noticed that blogs could now be ad free, and didn’t need to contain the “comments” sections that could require watching and editing. I asked for recommendations, and then decided to use the blog format to store some of my old reports. If some people read them for entertainment, that would be great, but the process of compiling them would allow me to relive some almost forgotten adventures. But the main purpose of the blog would be to get my information out in the record and to serve as an electronic backup to my paper data. I’ve posted the blogs by trip date, not posted date, so blog entries now go back to he early 1980s.
I’ve tried to prioritize posting trips that might be interesting, unusual, or helpful to others. For example, a few of trips exploring off trail, or on foot, in the Black Hills, Smokies, and Cumberlands might be significant in they may be “firsts”, or “onlys”. I’ve also tagged each post by activity (running, hiking, and biking) and also by area to help keep things organized. Many of these blogs will be written from notes taken immediately after a trip. My notes are always a little heavy on descriptions of the route, but that should be expected from a part time guidebook writer. This blog description covers a lot of ground, but here a few of my main planned topics.
Smokies Off-trail Hikes, or “Rhodo Never Sleeps: Dreams and Nightmares from Off Trail Hiking”. There seems to be a huge appetite for off-trail hiking info in the Smokies. Jenny Bennett’s blog still lives on, and there is still useful info in the “Go Smokies” site, but I’ll be including some of my own off trail favorites. I’ll post maps for some of these trips, but not those for which trip maps are not already posted online.
Hiking the Big South Fork is less popular both on and off trail vs the Smokies, but probably has greater potential for doing new things, so I’ll include trips from there and elsewhere in the Cumberlands in the blog.
In the early 2000s I did some great mountain biking trips in the Cumberlands and the Appalachians, inspired by the routes on Tom Dunigan’s “East Tennessee Mountain Bike” website. My write-ups are now almost as outdated now as his were then, but these trips could be a good resource for anyone interested in exploring these areas on a bike.
I’ve been lucky to explore many of great ranges of the Northern Rockies; the Wind Rivers, the Bighorns, the Beartooth, the Pintlers, Glacier, Yellowstone, and the Tetons. I’ll add some stories on exploring in these ranges, particularly things out of the range of typical first time visitor.
As time allows I hope to add write ups from trips in the four corners/desert southwest, the Pacific Coast, and for significant events such as completing maps, peak lists, ultramarathons, or other races.
What’s not here; Some of the best times I’ve had in the mountains have been associated with the infamous Barkley Marathons. However, don’t look here for Barkley race reports, BFC race reports, or other reports or details of exploration of areas immediately around Frozen Head State Park. Barkley information as always been closely held, and I’m not about to break that tradition. Much info from my trips is still too sensitive to get released, and could hamper park efforts to develop this area safely.
The purpose of this blog is not to promote my guidebook writing. I’ll include write ups from trips to these areas, but not in the same format as in the guidebooks.
