Category: Outdoors

  • The Gods Pocket Peak Trail

    Years ago my friend Derek heard that the Jarbidge Wilderness — a remote, mountainous area along the Idaho-Nevada border — is one of the least-visited wilderness areas in the USA, and we’ve wanted to visit since then. There’s little good information about this area online, but a book I had sitting around listed The Gods…

  • Sid’s Mountain Backpacking Loop

    Last fall my friend Brian and I went on a short backpacking trip in the San Rafael Swell. We left SLC early, drove to Ferron Utah, and then followed a high-clearance dirt road to the rim of North Salt Wash, a wide canyon that feeds the San Rafael River. We dropped into this open canyon…

  • Floating the Dirty Devil River

    Floating the Dirty Devil River

    Packrafts are tough, light, individual-sized inflatable boats that people use to put together really amazing wilderness trips by combining rafting, hiking, and sometimes even biking. I’ve had sort of a low-grade obsession with packrafting since 2009 when I ran into some people in Alaska who were on their way to hike up and over the…

  • High Desert Camping

    My brother Eric does a great job in the cool uncle role, whereas I’ve been typecast as the nerdy dad — so my kids were super excited when he decided to join us on a spring break camping trip. As I usually do, I obsessively searched Google Earth for a perfect campsite and ended up…

  • Strange Rocks 2018 Edition

    My family, along with some friends, visited Kanab UT over Presidents’ Day weekend. One day we visited the White Pocket, a few miles south of the Utah/Arizona border. This area had been on my bucket list for a while now, but organizing a visit took time due to the long and punishing drive. An interesting…

  • The Zion Subway

    When Josh, my older son’s best friend’s dad, suggested that we take our combined kids through the Left Fork of North Creek in Zion National Park (more commonly called The Subway), I wasn’t immediately excited. For one thing, it’s a somewhat technical canyon, and for another the permit that we got was for mid-May, towards…

  • Spring 2017

    The hills above Salt Lake City are finally turning green. Earlier in the year my family took a short trip to southeast Utah but it rained so much one day that I didn’t think the dirt roads would be passable, so we visited Ratio, a land art installation near Green River UT. The next day…

  • Elk and Arch

    I wanted to share a few pictures from a long, very cold snowshoe/hike I did in January. The goal was to reach a natural arch that I had previously spotted in upper City Creek Canyon. This was fun to find: I hadn’t realized there was an arch large enough to stand inside within walking distance…

  • Nine Mile Canyon

    One of my boys and I spent Sunday exploring Nine Mile Canyon, in the remote Book Cliffs a few hours drive from Salt Lake City. This canyon is known for its dense collection of rock art and ruins, a lot of which can be seen from the paved road that follows the canyon bottom. This…

  • Zion NP and Environs in Winter

    As we enter faculty and grad recruiting season, I’d like to present a bit of Utah propaganda. No heroics are required to see this stuff: just a few hours driving from Salt Lake City (on pavement) and some mild day hiking. I’ll provide detailed instructions for visiting any of these locations upon request.