Southern Indiana Trails

When I first heard about PürTrek mashing together trekking poles and a water filter into one product, I was intrigued. I’m a big fan of efficiency and having a water filter always at hand when hiking sounded like a great idea. I got one, and after a couple of weeks of use, I believe that some people will love these poles, and others will think they’re dumb and absolutely unnecessary. The dividing line will be how important weight is for you—and then   how absent-minded you are when packing and keeping track of your gear. The PürTreks are heavy: each pole comes in at 1.25 pounds. That’s more than two times heavier than these nice but standard Black Diamond poles we’ve recommended in the past, and more than quadruple the weight of a pair of Black Diamond ultra-light Carbon Z poles . Runners and through-hikers who want to move fast and far in the mountains will certainly think the PürTrek poles are far too heavy and bulky, and instead choose a lightweight pair and a small wa...

If you’re going to use your vehicle in inclement weather, remote areas, or off-road, plan on running into trouble. Fortunately, that trouble gets easier to navigate the more prepared you are. Here are seven things to keep in your vehicle at all times. Tire Repair Kit Tires are the most essential and the most frequently damaged component on any car or truck. But repairing a flat tire is quick and easy , and the equipment required to do so is cheap.   Why shouldn’t you just rely on your spare tire? Many vehicles now come equipped with only a space saver spare tire, which will be smaller, lighter, and provide less traction than a regular tire. If you have to mount one, then you’ll need to reduce your speed, avoid challenging terrain, and return to pavement as soon as possible — where you’ll need to drive straight to a tire repair shop. And that shop could be far away, closed for the night, or may not have a replacement tire in stock. You’ll have to deal with a real hassle, and lik...

Adventure athletes are among the most fearless people in the world—summiting exposed peaks during lightning storms, dropping off cliffs on bikes, and generally pushing the limits of what’s possible outdoors. Growing up, I aspired to nothing less. I skied on a downhill-racing and freeride team, and always felt strangely grounded when scaring myself in the mountains, whether I was dropping into a couloir on my favorite pair of Line skis, jamming down a steep rock garden on my bike, or sleeping in the woods on a camping trip. But as an adult, that courage was altered by a force I wasn’t prepared for: anxiety . Eventually, my grounded feeling in the backcountry was replaced by a tightened throat, a pounding heart, and a spiraling mind. I’d ask myself things like: What if I break my leg and can’t call for help? What if I miss the trail marker and have to spend the night in the freezing cold? Some of these thoughts, I knew, were absurd. But that’s the nature of anxiety—you can’t control it...

Back when I was living in Brooklyn, New York, I would often see Jody Rosen on a bike. I wouldn’t say we were the closest of friends—we went to college together, but now, as then, we moved in slightly different circles. Still, we’d often have a street corner stop and chat, trading the sort of shop-talk only of interest to two full-time Brooklyn journalists. Rosen, typically clad in a newsboy cap, a bag strapped across his shoulder, and   astride a bright red cruiser bike—replete with almost cartoonishly large off-white tires—became a talismanic presence for me on the neighborhood streets. I’d see him taking his son to school on the back of the bike, or coolly navigating the heavy traffic of Court Street at a pace somewhat below the usual frenetic velocity of New York City cyclists. When I didn’t see him, I often saw his bike chained to a parking meter outside a coffee shop or leaning against the natural foods store window. Spotting it became a sort of game for my daughter an...

Let me tell you about my favorite scene from the current season of Alone ,  a reality television show that is supposed to be about wilderness survival. Spoiler alert: my favorite moment has nothing to do with the wilderness or survival. In last week’s episode, cast member Karie Lee Knoke, a 57-year-old primitive skills instructor from Sandpoint, Idaho, sits in her cold shelter, about to hit the sack after another hungry night without dinner. Up to this point in season nine , Knoke has come across as equal parts Daniel Boone and Stevie Nicks, a blend of hardened outdoors person and soulful bard. As she stares into the darkness, alone with her thoughts, Knoke recounts a painful moment from her past, and the life lesson she has tried to learn from it. “When I was 36 years old, and when I was four months pregnant, I ended up having a miscarriage, and that’s pretty late in the game to have a miscarriage,” Knoke says. “I learned that death could happen at any time, and for you to kn...

This story was originally published bu Climbing.com .  Grunting with the weight, we lift heavy packs and inflatable paddleboards onto our backs for the hike into Spain’s Mont-Rebei Gorge. Though it’s still early in the morning, the heat from the surrounding hillsides and cliffs radiates outwards, making us sweat. As we round the first corner, we stop to stare in wonder. Where’s all the water? The Noguera Ribagorçana river, separating Aragon from Catalonia, should be just feet away. Instead it’s far below us. This is going to make scouting for deep water soloing routes incredibly difficult. (Photo: Lisa Paarvio) With no clear path, we have to scramble down a slippery gravel slope, the weight of our packs making foot placement critical. At the bottom, between us and the water, lies another hundred feet of baked and cracked river mud. Our first steps break through the crusty surface, and we repeatedly sink to our knees as we wade toward the channel of water in the receded r...

63 Parks Traveler started with a simple goal: to visit every U.S. national park. Avid backpacker and public-lands nerd Emily Pennington saved up, built out a tiny van to travel and live in, and hit the road, practicing COVID-19 best safety protocols along the way. The parks as we know them are rapidly changing, and she wanted to see them before it’s too late. Mammoth Cave is her 51st park visit. It was raining when I arrived at Mammoth Cave in late October, a cool downpour making its way through the fading orange leaves of the surrounding deciduous forest. The gray Kentucky weather matched my mood perfectly. Exhausted after spending eight months on the road, my lack of sleep had finally caught up to me and dulled my usually cheerful spirit. I was thrilled to indulge my inner emo teenager while visiting a national park for once, embarking on a trip through the world’s longest-known cave system and into the dark bowels of the earth. A small, gentle waterfall dripped into the gapi...

As a Black woman with a complicated upbringing, the mountains of northwest Wyoming weren’t an obvious place for me to find a home. My childhood was a short-lived one—I moved roughly 13 times before I was 13, and what I experienced during those years is an example of the disproportionate rates of abuse and risk that Black and brown children bear in this country and around the world. Still, I was lucky. The hand I was dealt held an exit in the form of well-off grandparents who were willing to raise a troubled teenager. They lived in Jackson, Wyoming, and introduced me to my first mountains, the Teton Range . It was safe and beautiful there; I didn’t want to be anywhere else. Like the moon interlocked with the tide, the pull of mountain living has drawn me in ever since—I drift off and to the high country I return, no matter the days or distance. The mountains and the iconic communities that rest among them are restorative for me. Trust me when I say I know we have it good here, like r...

On Thursday, Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), reached an agreement with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to support an array of spending priorities that the Biden Administration put forward. Dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act, it includes $369 billion in new money to address climate change—the largest investment in emissions reduction ever. But to get Manchin’s approval, the bill’s fine print links any development of renewable energy on federal land to an expansion of oil and gas drilling on those lands. Environmentalists are calling the requirement a “poison pill” and say it defeats the administration’s climate goals.   The House of Representatives passed a bill last year called the Build Back Better Act that included $555 billion in climate investments. But in the evenly divided Senate, where Vice President Kamala Harris’ vote serves as a tiebreaker, and where the GOP remains united in its opposition to pretty much everything, every single Democrat senator needs to suppo...

On July 21 at 10:45 P.M. Pakistan time, five climbers stood on the summit of 28,251-foot K2 . They were the first mountaineers to reach the peak’s top during the 2022 summer climbing season, after spending more than 24 hours battling their way to the summit. For Pasdawa Sherpa, Chhiring Namgyal Sherpa, Siddhi Ghising, Dorjee Gyelzen Sherpa, and Rinji Sherpa, turning around wasn’t an option, as hundreds of climbers further down on the mountain were relying on their work. This team of elite high-altitude workers from Nepal had fixed a series of ropes that would be later used by climbers waiting in cramped tents at Camp 4. By the time the rope fixers began their descent, a hoard of climbers was already working its way towards the summit, leading to what was to become the most crowded day on the peak. One of the climbers ascending the mountain was Nepali guide Mingma Gyalge Sherpa, better known as ‘Mingma G,’ who captured a video on Instagram that was quickly circulated around the globe...

The cattle rancher in the dented red truck laughed when I told him I was looking for someplace new to hike. We had both taken a rugged gravel road, beset by mudholes so deep they made me contemplate crashing asteroids, into the southwestern edge of South Dakota’s  Black Hills National Forest on a toasty day in early July. He was checking the water tanks for a small band of stock roaming the rims of several interlocking canyons, the same land I was looking to walk—if only I could find a path. Leaning from his window, he spread his hands wide and scanned the horizon slowly before turning back to me with a knowing grin. If you’re walking it, he seemed to say silently, it’s all a trail. This, of course, was right: a trail is just a reductive word for someplace other people have already walked, and no one was really going to tell me where not to roam among most of the Black Hills National Forest’s 1.2 million public acres , an area about twice as big as Rhode Island. G...

Being a professional athlete isn’t always easy. In fact, says Canadian Olympic runner Gabriela DeBues-Stafford, it almost never is. Yes, there are the good days—days when being a pro runner feels like pure glory. There’s the fog of your breath on a cold morning and the drumbeat of your footsteps. There’s the taste of salt and the thirst for speed. There’s the burn of lactic acid and the roar of the crowd. There are days when you’re laser-focused on running fast, and nothing else in the world seems to matter. But running fast has never been DeBues-Stafford’s only mission. If you’ve already heard of DeBues-Stafford , a professional middle- and long-distance runner, it might be from her 2021 Olympic showing: she was the only athlete on the track sporting a rainbow-dyed pixie cut. It was a sly way of circumventing the Olympic ban on symbols of personal or political protest—and to show off who she really is. “I’d dyed my hair rainbow for Pride, and I decided to keep it that way for the ...