Outdoors Right about now, Josh Burnim, a 27-year-old environmental activist with an Abraham Lincoln beard and a backpack stuffed with oatmeal and dried hummus, is bushwhacking his way toward Porcupine Lake ...   More

Outdoors The other day, I wandered over to the corner of West Burnside Street and Northwest 17th Avenue to look at the Tanner Creek Interpretive Center, otherwise known as A-Ball Plumbing Supply. Opposite ...   More

Outdoors On a recent Saturday morning, I set out on the Warrior Rock Lighthouse Trail with an immensely pregnant wife and a blackberry-ravenous 2-year-old boy. According to my guidebook, the three-mile str ...   More

Outdoors You're sealed inside the nose cone of your homemade rocket ship, Earthstar One, wearing a used Russian space suit, staring wide-eyed at the digital clock on the instrument panel. Outside, in the m ...   More

Outdoors When a veteran railbiker invited me for a ride in southern California last spring, here's what I had to do: Fly to Spokane. Rent a truck. Drive to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Disassemble and box a pedal ...   More

Outdoors The old nostrum "pack it in, pack it out" takes on a new dimension when one member of your backcountry party happens to wear Pampers--and hasn't yet learned to crawl, much less carry his own pack. ...   More

Outdoors A few summers ago, I took the train to Montana's Glacier National Park, intending to spend a full week in the backcountry. But when I arrived in West Glacier, there was a line wrapped around the r ...   More

Outdoors I've never been to Rock City, Wall Drug or the Corn Palace. I'm pretty sure those who frequent such roadside tourist traps are the same backcountry-averse sloths who drive all the way to Crater La ...   More

Outdoors With federal timber sales in Oregon at a virtual standstill, you might want to pay homage to the place that appears to have put your local Forest Service out of the wholesale logging business: Opa ...   More

Outdoors At the tail end of the last Ice Age 14,000 years ago--a heartbeat in geological time--the southernmost tendrils of the Cordilleran ice sheet marched into Idaho and sealed the Clark Fork Valley wit ...   More