A year ago, after living for eight years out west, I drove from the Pacific Ocean to Vermont, my home. Within two days of arriving, I was on the Long Trail, backpacking south from the Québec border through low gray clouds and swirling rainbow leaves. The trip lasted 20 days, culminating at the Massachusetts border in a snowstorm. Its ending was the beginning of something much bigger.... Read more

Searching the crawl space beneath a friend’s New Jersey beach house, I find two foam boogie boards. One is powder blue with the name “Wave Princess” printed on it in a curly font. The other is yellow, a bit thicker, labeled “Mach 7-7.” I’m drawn to Wave Princess — she seems a more appealing traveling companion for what’s sure to be a long and intimate journey. But I have some doubts about her buoyancy.... Read more

It was Friday night, and my dad, whom I hadn’t seen since we’d come off the river a week earlier, was in a cheeky mood. All twinkle-eyed, he kept saying, “I don’t want to influence the article you’re writing about our trip, but you might consider throwing in phrases like ‘handsome bowman,’ ‘fit and dedicated 61-year-old father,’ or even something as simple as ‘excellent paddle buddy.’”... Read more

I offered my name, but he did not reciprocate. I asked if this was private land or a national forest campground, then stood there in my padded Spandex bike shorts, cold and tired and increasingly nervous, waiting for an answer. I asked again. He stared. It was a blank stare — not mean or malicious, just blank. The kind of stare a cinder block would give you if a cinder block had eyes. And if a cinder block were drunk.... Read more

We’d skied over nearly 300 miles of rock, dirt, leaves, moss, ice, crust, apples, slush, logs, lakes, creeks, roads, railways, fairways, snowmobile highways, stubble corn, corn snow, groomed snow crap snow, coyote-scat-stained snow and easy, white rolling trail. We’d suffered, enjoyed and generally endured “the length of Vermont on skis,” as The Catamount Trail Guidebook puts it. Twenty days on the longest cross-country ski trail in the country — we were doing it! We’d almost done it!... Read more

It was a December morning, all blue sky, bright sun and shining white snow, the kind of brilliant, dry-cold morning that tempts some of us to quit our jobs, abandon our possessions and trot out unencumbered into the world. I wasn’t completely unencumbered myself, but I was “going light,” and certainly feeling my freedom as I approached the mailbox at the end of my driveway in Ferrisburgh and walked on past.... Read more

Leath Tonino was born and raised in the Champlain Valley. When he was 16, he hiked the entire Long Trail over 22 days. He later left the state to attend college in Colorado; one summer back home, he built a small raft and rowed, sailed and drifted the length of Lake Champlain. This fall, Tonino walked the length of the Long Trail again — 10 years after the first hike.... Read more