Modern Hiker Newsletter

Bundy during the armed occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016 // OPB You may remember Ammon Bundy from co-leading an armed resistance against the Bureau of Land Management in Nevada in 2014 after his family failed to follow mandated regulations (for two decades). Or perhaps you remember when he led an armed occupation of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge for six weeks in 2016, leaving a rancher dead.

I just dodged the bullet. I scrambled to get my renewed America the Beautiful request in before the end of 2025 and received my updated card with a photo of a lovely roseate spoonbill by Michael Zheng on it. If you’re updating after that, you may not be so lucky. Instead, you will be subjected to looking at one of the worst people the country has ever created each time you want to enjoy this nation’s public lands.

Well, I popped back into online newsletter existence recently to just dip my toes into the cesspool of bummer news items about the outdoors, and almost immediately after my newsletter was sent out to inboxes, the government shut down. Again.

Um … hello? Yeah, it’s been … a while. It’s been so long that a reader reached out to me via email to ask if I was OK, which I really appreciate and also, because I was raised Catholic in New England, feel so guilty about. So … the good news is, I’m fine! Everything is good over here, and in many ways it’s great, although I am putting a lot of thought into what the future holds on a lot of fronts.

Hello, all! Wow, it’s been a minute, huh? Well, I guess I should catch y’all up on some things. It has been an incredibly hectic few weeks. There has been a whole lot of shakeup around, some of it good—some of it a little less good. I successfully pulled off a surprise 40th birthday party for my husband that I’d been planning for six months, and that happened just a week and a half after my own birthday. It was a blast but a lot of work and I’m still sort of recovering.

Well … it didn’t take long for the privatization-kinksters in Congress to set their sights fully on the country’s public lands. Last week, Republicans in the House of Representatives added a last-minute provision to the upcoming budget proposal that would allow the government to sell federally held public lands in Utah and Nevada.

One of the most challenging aspects of trying to keep up with outdoor news right now is how depressing it can all be. Amidst a round of indiscriminate and uninformed budget cuts and firings, the administration has already fast-tracked extractive and destructive industries on public lands, opened up huge swaths of National Forests to logging, and started a “review” of national monuments in an effort to shrink their boundaries again.

Hey everybody. Sorry for the delay on this issue of the newsletter. Part of it was due to some work-related madness. Part of it was planning for a trip down to Los Angeles for a poetry conference this week (!), and honestly probably the biggest part of the delay was ::gestures broadly at the country:: I probably don’t need to tell you that reading the news—even just news focused on the outdoors—has been a major bummer lately … but I’m going to do my best to find a silver lining here for you.

I first noticed Josh Jackson on his Instagram account, Forgotten Lands Project. Back when Instagram was focused on actual photography, Josh’s eye for the beauty of natural places was captivating—but so were his stories about all of these places. It helped, too, that he was focusing on Bureau of Land Management lands within the state of California—places that tend to fly under the radar of folks who tend to target national and state parks first.

A few weeks ago, I spent a few days up in beautiful British Columbia for some skiing at Whistler. If you’ve been reading for a while, you know this is a fairly big leap in my “Learning How to Ski as an Adult” journey, which really only began in earnest about five years ago. Skiing has become a new way for me to get outside (and get some sunshine) in the Northwest’s dark winter months.