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Essays

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published in Outside Magazine (2024)

On the morning of Monday, May 6, the air on the Cumbrian Coast was 58 degrees Fahrenheit and very damp.  The tide was neither in nor out, and the surface of the Irish Sea looked like a restless version of the paved parking lot where my wife and I stood. Before descending to the beach, I loosened my shoelaces, jogged a few experimental steps, and tightened the laces again. Emma was stretching her quads and fiddling with the nozzle of her water bladder. We had giddy prerace feelings, though this was not a race, or even a run, and we’d come to England because we wanted to slow down.

Above the beach, a muddy path crept up a green sheep pasture to the top of St. Bees Head, a 300-foot sandstone sea cliff teeming with birds and mist. We knew from maps and books and online research that the Coast to Coast Walk, which we were there to do, traversed the mesa-like head for four and a half miles before veering eastward for another 188.

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published in ASCENT (2024)

On a bleak, gray evening in March 2007, during a poorly planned off-season pilgrimage to Rifle, Colorado, my friend Scottie and I, driving aimlessly through the darkening canyon, noticed a lone Tacoma parked at the Skull Cave. It was raining, but there was still snow on the ground, and the dirt road was a mess of ruts and puddles. Scottie and I had driven 2,000 miles to escape New Hampshire’s no-more-dismal late winter, and in the week we’d been in Rifle, we hadn’t seen another person, let alone another climber. The sight of a strange truck on this grimmest of days was shocking enough to make me stop my Honda Element in the middle of the road and peer up toward the cave’s leering mouth, where a solitary headlamp was fencing with the semi-darkness.

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published in Adirondack Life (2024)

Brandreth Park—also occasionally known as Brandreth, B-town, the lake, and camp—has never been an easy place for me to describe. When speaking to strangers, people to whom I feel no special obligation, I say that it’s a large family property I’ve been visiting my whole life, a bit like you would a beach house. Then I try to route the conversation toward the stranger’s job or their hobbies or the weather.

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published in ASCENT (2022)

In July 2006, the summer before our senior year in high school, my friend Scottie and I spent five days climbing—or, in my case, falling off—Rifle, Colorado’s easiest climbs. 

 

Scottie was one of those preternaturally developed high-schoolers, big shouldered, red-bearded, an Ivy-bound acer of the SAT who’d just been elected student-body president of our rheumy New Hampshire boarding school. For those five days in Rifle Mountain Park, I watched him climb more and better than he’d ever climbed, while I—his short, plump foil—whipped off everything.

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