I blogged more or less steadily at this site from 2009 to 2016. It then became dormant when I started making videos of my adventures. And then in mid-2019, I accidentally let thealoof.com (the domain name where this blog was hosted) lapse because I forgot to renew it. It ended up on […]
Earlier this week I went for a long hike up in the mountains east of Kaysville, Utah. The goal of the hike was to get to one of the Smith Creek Lakes (there are three of them in a chain) and bust out my $16 budget packraft for a quick little paddle. […]
My goal was to climb Willard Peak, the tallest mountain in Utah’s northern Wasatch Range and the highest point in Weber County. The easiest way up the mountain is to drive up a rough dirt road until you’re about 1000 feet below the summit and then make your way for less than a mile and a half up to the top from there. I wasn’t interested in driving the rough road, so I looked at other options. I decided that the best route would be to climb up Ben Lomond (the mountain about 2 miles south of Willard Peak) and then traverse north to Willard Peak. […]
If you’re not into climbing county highpoints, it’s pretty unlikely that you’ve ever heard of the Raft River Mountains. I certainly hadn’t before deciding I’d climb the highest point in each of Utah’s 29 counties. The Raft Rivers are an east-west-trending mountain range in the extreme northwest corner of Utah, just a few miles south of the Idaho border. The highest point in the range, which also happens to be the highest point in Box Elder County, is Bull Mountain. You can drive to the top of Bull Mountain if you have a 4WD vehicle (I do), but I figured I might as well hike up the thing. I’d seen the pictures of the beautiful cirque up near the top of the mountain, and it alone seemed worth the hike. […]
The purpose for this trip was threefold: (1) to go on my first “microadventure,” (2) to climb and spend the night on top of a nearby mountain I was unfamiliar with, and (3) see how light I can get my overnight backpacking kit down to. […]
I only spent a couple of days in western Arizona’s Kofa Mountains (named for the King of Arizona (KofA) Mine that ran from 1896 to 1910), but it is definitely one of the more spectacular mountain ranges around. I’d never even heard of the range (located in Kofa National Wildlife Refuge) before seeing it on a map in my Arizona state atlas, but a quick online search showed a remote area with crazy-looking mountains and rock formations. […]
The plan was to hike up Sugarloaf Peak (11,051 feet/3,368 meters) and Mt. Baldy (11,068 feet/3,374 meters), two 11,000-foot mountains above the ski resort Alta in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains. I hadn’t climbed either. It was the end of June, and the road all the way into Albion Basin (the easiest/closest access point for these peaks) was closed until July 1, so I had to park at Alta and hike in from there. I hiked up the Upper Albion Meadows Trail (1.5 miles) to the Cecret Lake Interpretive Trail (.75 miles), which took me to pretty little Cecret Lake. […]
Big Bend is a spectacular park in the northern part of the Chihuahuan Desert in far west Texas. Emory Peak (7,825 feet/2,385 meters) is the highest mountain in the Park’s Chisos Mountains. The South Rim Loop is a spectacular loop trail that leads to Grand Canyon-esque views. I combined the two into a 16.4-mile hike with ~3,000 feet of elevation gain. […]
My book Annapurna Pilgrim: A Solo Trek of Nepal’s Annapurna Circuit in Winter is out and FREE for the next few days. Check it out, download it, and leave a review.
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California has nine national parks: Death Valley, Channel Islands, Joshua Tree, Redwoods, Lassen Volcanic, Pinnacles, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, and Yosemite. Yesterday I went to Pinnacles for the first time and hiked the two highest mountains in the park. […]
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