As a teenager, I struggled with alcohol addiction. I was able to find my healing by going back to what my Nipmuc ancestors called the Original Instructions. These are the teachings that instill our sacred…
Read More
How to Love Winter
The first snow has fallen. Temperatures are dropping. For many people, this time of year comes with a low-key sense of dread. You bundle yourself into thick layers, dig out the ice scraper and shovel,...
Read more
The Swiss Miss Fire started on a hot August day in 2017. Deep in the 100-Mile Wilderness, 300 feet from the Appalachian Trail, someone had stopped to make cocoa on Columbus Mountain. “It was in…
Read More
It’s a cold, sparklingly clear day in March, and the White Mountains are filled with hikers, skiers, and snowshoers, each leaving distinctive tracks in the piles of late-spring powder. It seems like everyone is chattering…
Read More
I. One of my oldest memories survives from an unknown year in the early 1980s, when I was 6 or 7, and takes place near the top of a long-since-forgotten mountain in Acadia National Park….
Read More
During years of appointments, my doctor and I have spent as much time talking about our hiking trips as about my age and medical diagnoses. A while ago, he casually said, “People who have the…
Read More
This is an excerpt of a story that was originally published in the Winter/Spring 2016 issue of Appalachia Journal. This is a love story. Its background contains a wife and husband; its foreground features a…
Read More
What follows is an excerpt from Desperate Steps: Life, Death, and Choices Made in the Mountains of the Northeast, available now from AMC Books. The screen door on the ranger’s cabin slammed hard in the…
Read More
Afoot and afloat in Maine’s most beguiling backcountry My introduction to Maine’s famed 100-Mile Wilderness region came in early July of 1974, when a junior high school friend and I concocted a plan to hike…
Read More