Navigation goes wrong slowly. Almost nobody takes one dramatic wrong turn. What happens is that you stop paying attention on an obvious path, the cloud comes down, and twenty minutes later you are standing somewhere that does not match anything on the map, with…
The forecast on your phone is for the town at the bottom. It is not wrong, it is just answering a different question. A summit two thousand feet above that town can be ten degrees colder, in cloud, and carrying three times the wind…
Ask around about why a jacket stopped working, or why a sleeping bag that used to be warm no longer is, and the answers rarely involve the outdoors at all. The jacket was washed with regular detergent, or never washed. The bag lived compressed…
Camp cooking is mostly a solved problem until the weather turns. Then the differences between stoves stop being preferences and start being the reason you get a hot drink or don't. Cold drops the pressure in a gas canister. Wind carries away most of…
The first winter trip most people take is up a hill they already know. That is a reasonable instinct and it is also where the trouble starts, because the route in your head is the summer one. The grassy shoulder you strolled up in…