This article first appeared in the Winter 2020 issue of Backcountry Journal. Join BHA to get 4 issues a year in your mailbox.  By Lukas Leaf I grew up on the ice, listening to the lake thunder and crack as it constantly expands and shifts. Frankly, you either love it or hate it. Fortunately for me, it’s the former, and I’ve been pursuing everything from walleye to lake trout since I was able to fall through a tip-up hole. It’s a Midwest outdoor tradition filled with eelpout festivals, giant ...

Nothing makes me feel richer than eating foods historically made by the poor: soups, stews, organs, ferments, sinewy cuts of meat, unrefined grains and fats and sugars. Most peasant foods are born from a combination of necessity, accessibility, and a little of what we in Maine call “redneck ingenuity.” You take what you have and use what you know to turn it into something more. The ancestral need to feed ourselves in lean times has led to methods of preparation and preservation that yield ...

  By Tristan Henry   In Oregon’s scenic Central Cascades, the undulating terrain that bisects east from misty west has drawn growing crowds of backcountry travelers, summer after summer. Here, admiration and idolization of our peaks and forests have outpaced our ability to manage them according to their land-use designation. As trails are beaten wide and begin to braid, a subsequent slew of consequences ranging from ecological to political erupt into public discourse. Viewed within the ...

 

“Photosynthesis puts things together. Fire takes them apart.” – Dr. Stephen J. Pyne. While many people talk of the “Anthropocene” – the age of humankind, when nearly every natural process seems to be affected by the actions of billions of individual people – Stephen Pyne reminds us that we also are living in the Pyrocene, the age of fire, and that the history of humankind is inextricable from the history of fire, the most elemental and implacable force on this planet. Join Hal in Queen ...