Recycled gear and sustainability weren’t a priority in the outdoor industry when Bill Gamber and Len Zanni started Big Agnes in 2001. Although Bill lived off the grid—and still does—in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where Big Agnes is headquartered, he wasn’t thinking about sustainability as a business model. “We started the Read more…
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland has recommended to President Joseph Biden that he restore millions of acres to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah, according to reports Monday in the Washington Post and the New York Times. Former President Donald Trump in 2017 slashed Bears Ears by nearly Read more…
The Biden administration is moving toward restoring environmental protections for Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, one of the world’s largest temperate rain forests. Former President Donald Trump opened about 9 million acres of the nearly 17-million acre forest to logging and construction. It’s not clear how much of the 9 million Read more…
The environmental legacy of coal mining in Appalachia is not pretty. Strip mining sheared mountaintops, polluted waterways, and left scars on the land. An estimated 1.5 million acres of land in seven states—Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and Tennessee—covered by the Appalachian Regional Reforestation Initiative (ARRI) remain barren. Read more…
On Saturday, a crowd of ultraunners set out on the 100k Huanghe Shilin Mountain Marathon. Without warning, weather swept through the mountains. The competitors were dressed in thin shorts and t-shirts, and 21 runners died.
As climate change leaves its imprint nationwide, the National Park Service has embraced a harsh truth: not every forest, animal, or wetland can be saved. Joshua trees could disappear from their namesake Joshua Tree National Park in California by the end of this century. Destructive wildfires in the West open Read more…
More than a year after Covid-19 disrupted hiking along the Appalachian Trail, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy has determined that the conditions it laid out for safe thru-hiking have been met. As a result, the ATC said it would resume its 2,000-Miler program and that it would again distribute 2021 backpack Read more…
The Biden-Harris administration this week laid out a 10-year effort to conserve 30% of public, private, and Tribal lands and waters by 2030, creating jobs, tackling climate change, and addressing inequitable access to the outdoors.
Have you been a trail profile for Backpacking Routes? Here are tips for taking notes during the hike that will make the writeup even easier.
Sixty years in the making, the newly opened Blue Mountains Trail follows a point-to-point path for 530 miles through breathtaking and rugged wilderness in Northeast Oregon. The trail has already been thru-hiked by four people. Whitney “Allgood” LaRuffa, Naomi “The Punisher” Hudetz, and Mike “Iron Mike” Unger finished the trail Read more…