Travel Writer of the Year

Good news: I've been named 2016 Travel Writer of the Year by the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation. Which is pretty cool. Actually, they call it Travel Journalist of the Year, but even though I sometimes do journalist-y things, I like to imagine I'm more writer than reporter. Humor me, okay?

The judges, professors from the esteemed Missouri School of Journalism, said this about my work: "His stories are expertly crafted to capture the tension and the scenes. His readers ride with him. His stories are narratives with character, tension and resolution."

Thanks guys. I work hard on my stories to do just that. And publishers take note — readers want stories with personality and verve. They want to hear the writer's voice. They want to be transported and be in the story as they read.

Big thanks to Sierra, National Geographic Adventure, National Geographic Traveler, Adventure Cyclist, SUP, and The Clymb for giving me the platforms to tell the stories that won this award. A special shout-out to Sierra for their partnership the last few years and for the great editors I work with there, with a special nod to Reed McManus, who skillfully edited my stories on dancing with wolves in Glacier Park and climate change's affect on skiing shortly before passing away of a heart attack in early January. His untimely departure is a reminder for all of us to enjoy our lives while we're here. Let's get out there, have fun, help people whenever possible, and explore this amazing world while we're able.

Here are some of the stories that won me travel writing's highest honor.

"The Wildest Valley," Sierra magazine, Nov/Dec 2015

"Circling the Volcanoes, One Family Circumnavigates Nicaragua's Ometepe by Bike," Adventure Cyclist, May 2015

"North of the Border, A Family Explore Alberta by SUP," SUP the Mag, Summer 2015

"How to Become an Outdoor Writer and Photographer," The Clymb blog

"Worlds Most Unexpected Ski Areas," National Geographic Adventure

Lastly, you may have noticed, or maybe you didn't, ahem, that this blog has gone fallow. With the uninspiring Blogger design and fact that I'm busy with paying work, I wouldn't expect it to come alive with new posts anytime soon. If I do get inspired to write something without a paycheck (seriously, I spend enough time sweating blood at my desk as it is, and I'm also working on a book, which pays squat for the time being), it will probably be at Medium where I can make things more engaging and prettier. 

In the meantime, feel free to follow my professional page on Facebook and turn notifications on so you don't miss it when I post images like this, from my upcoming story on grizzly bears. And, yeah, my camera now has teeth marks on it.

One family goes big

High in a remote corner of the Swan Valley we roll around a bend in the trail — 11-year-old Silas, 7-year-old Jonah, and me on one colossal mountain bike we call the Teasdale Train — when suddenly it’s there, not more than 30 feet away: a grizzly bear on its hind legs. I grab the brake levers of our rolling 200-pound behemoth and, in a motion practiced countless times, whip bear spray out of my pack’s side pocket the instant my feet hit the ground. As the boys would later revel in telling friends and family members, “Then dad said the ‘S’ word!”

The bear, it turns out, is tiny — which is even scarier than being huge. As the kids stare wide-eyed at the bruin, I twist my neck from side to side and scan the greenery for sound or movement. There is only one electric thought in my mind: Where’s mom?

Spring update

It's been an action-packed last few months here at Teasdale HQ, leaving precious little time for bloggerating. But rest assured that all is well, though future posts may be "skinnier" than the epics I was posting for a while there. 

Anyone interested in seeing my latest story from British Columbia's fanged and furry Flathead Valley should head on over to Sierra magazine's website (or buy the current issue, May/June 2011, at your neighborhood newsstand, assuming you still have one). 

www.sierraclub.org/sierra/201105/flathead-guardians.aspx

A friend and I biked and packrafted the valley, then climbed a mountain at the river's headwaters that was threatened with mountaintop-removal mining and slept bare on its summit (you can read more about that adventure here: aaronteasdale.blogspot.com/2010/02/flathead-celebration.html).

My sons and I are also featured in the current (May) issue of Outside magazine, in their guide to fatherhood. In it, I dispense what they call "essential advice for adventurous fathers." Which I guess means that if you're an adventurous father you'd better read it. Or you could just take your kids into the woods. That's my essential advice: get out there, as often as possible.

The article and images also live online here:

http://outsideonline.com/adventure/travel-ga-201106-kids-adventure-travel-sidwcmdev_156151.html

A bike ride in Switzerland, part II

We pedaled out from the town of Livigno, Italy under heavy skies and snow-cloaked summits. Mick waited impatiently while I stopped to chat with a fisherman along the river at the edge of town. He was anxious to get over Chaschauna Pass before the predicted afternoon storms arrived, but I wasn't in a hurry. The way the churlish clouds were descending I figured we were getting clobbered no matter what.

Of course, there are many ways to get clobbered. Besides mountain storms and snow-choked passes, another good way is to push your bike up savagely steep mountains trails for 3,000 feet...

A bike ride in Switzerland

Recently got back from a week riding bikes in Switzerland and have to admit something: I totally underestimated the Alps.

When I heard last spring that the Swiss had developed a new 400-mile, nation-spanning mountain bike route, I knew I had to check it out. Then I learned that the organization behind it, Swiss Trails, would haul your luggage for you each day. You book your trip, they make your hotel reservations, send you a custom itinerary with maps, and, kazow, you're ready to go. All you do is show up and ride. Piece of cake. As someone used to doing self-contained wilderness trips, this sounded like a relaxing change of pace. Leisurely, even. 

Which just goes to show how clueless I was about Switzerland. I mean, there's a reason people call places with steep, gigantic mountains "the Alps of ... (insert name of place with steep, gigantic mountains here)."

Mick and I realized this as soon as we stepped off the train in Scuol, a mountain village tucked into a far eastern finger of the country near the Austrian and Italian borders.

"Are we riding over those?" Mick said, pointing up at the snow-covered wall of mountains rising 5,000 feet from the valley floor.

"I have no idea," I said, spinning around and taking in the view, "but we're going over something big."

Of this there was no doubt. Sky-scratching peaks loomed in every direction, so it really didn't matter that I had no idea where we going. One way or the other we were riding over the Alps, and by the looks of things it would be anything but leisurely.

Riding for our lives in Trempealeau County

While I was gallivanting through the wilderness this summer, Adventure Cyclist published a story of mine about riding the Trempealeau, Wisconsin area, which quietly has some of the best road riding in the country. Normally I try to avoid riding paved roads, with their rush of hurtling metal death traps, but I'd go back to ride Trempealeau in a heartbeat. (The cover shot was one of only a few dirt patches of the trip — a service road through the Trempealeau National Wildlife Refuge at sunset.) Most roads there are beautifully paved, roller-coaster rides through impossibly idyllic countryside. It's all bluffs, farms, and narrow river valleys. The roads are more like bike paths — narrow and twisty with barely a car to be seen. I might even start riding them if more roads were like that.

So Trempealeau County is not only one of the best kept secrets in American cycling, but it also happens to be where my father's ancestry comes from. So we went there together to ride and explore the landscapes of our past.

Ended up writing a story about mortality, which I then had to turn into a cycling story. I was a little worried when I first sent it in. It was a relief when the editor said he liked it; I half expected him to call and say, What the hell is this bizarre thing you've sent me and where's your real story? I suspect it's not often people send in stories that open in cemeteries...

How We Did It

Since we've been back from our big ride, tons of people (okay, a couple people) have asked how we managed to mountain bike through the wilderness with our kids and camping gear for five weeks. After all, we're not exactly Herculean athletes. I'll be writing stories about this, but for now I put together a quick overview for anyone thinking about doing anything similar. This was originally written for The Adventure Life, but since I haven't had a chance to update my own blog for a bit, I thought I'd post it here as well...

Tips for dragging your children, literally, on extended bike adventures in the boonies

Alive!

Well, that was something.

We made it back from the big trip. A monumental undertaking, I dragged my two boys for six weeks through some of most glorious wilderness still left in this world. We had a few challenges, but everyone is alive and has all of their important limbs still attached.

Five weeks in the boonies!

I'll be out of radio contact for the next five weeks or so as I ride this behemoth of a bicycle with my two sons (we call it the Teasdale Train) from Glacier Park in Montana to Banff National Park in Alberta. We'll be accompanied by my lovely wife Jacqueline, who is also being kind enough to tow a BOB trailer packed with camping provisions.

Cover nostalgia and a farewell

For the last few years I've worked as an editor and photo editor for the Adventure Cycling Association. It's been a lot of fun, but recently I decided it was time to return to the freelance life. Last week was my last at Adventure Cycling. While I'm looking forward to spending more time outside and on my own stories, I'll miss putting together the publications with the crew over at ACA. As a farewell, here's a ride back through a few more of the covers I had the pleasure of creating (to see my earlier post on covers, go here)...

This is one of my all-time favorite covers from one of my all-time favorite adventure photographers, Cass Gilbert. My jaw dropped when I first saw the original image of Cara Coolbaugh riding a "road" high in the Indian Himalayas, and I was thrilled when it translated perfectly to a cover, even if I hated to crop the larger image. This was taken just over Sach Pass and was the beginning of a two-day, 11,000 foot descent. That, my friends, is epic...

Wend magazine and Bicycle Times

Wend magazine (www.wendmag.com) ran a few of my images in a photo essay on bikepacking in their current issue. Wend is a great, independent magazine for environmentally aware adventure lovers. You can get a copy at REI, newsstands, or check out a digital version on their website. Here's what they ran, plus my intro text for the piece...

If you’ve ridden a bicycle you’ve felt it — the magnetic pull of the open road or trail. Whether you are 3 or 93, there’s something inherent in riding a bike that makes you want to explore, to see what’s around the block, in the next town, over the far mountains. It’s no surprise that shortly after the bicycle’s invention, cyclist Thomas Stevens became the first person to chase the horizon around the entire planet, circumnavigating the globe in 1886.

But while road cyclists with panniers and trailers have been indulging their wanderlust and rambling freely over the Earth for over a century, mountain bikers have been more or less limited to day rides, forced to return to civilization each night. Sure, there are dirt roads, but the wild trails leading into the backcountry, the mountains, the alpine, were out of reach for multi-day riding.

Until now. 

Thanks to gear breakthroughs in the ultralight backpacking world, it’s now possible to carry a complete camping setup into the backcountry that weighs ten pounds or less. For the last few years a fringe group of mountain bikers in the Rocky Mountain West have been experimenting with this gear, riding for days at a time into some of our wildest mountainscapes with everything they need on their bikes and backs. 

It’s called bikepacking, and this is what it looks like.

More: 

www.bikepacking.net

www.adventurecycling.org/ultralight

www.carouseldesignworks.com

Behind the covers

Besides being a freelance outdoor writer/photographer, I work a few days a week for Adventure Cyclist magazine as an editor/photo editor. (Was there full time for a couple years, but a full-time office job, even one as cool as that, was entirely too office-y for an outdoor junkie like me.) So I manage most of the photography for Adventure Cycling and one of my favorite things to do is put together the covers of both Adventure Cyclist and Cyclosource, a gear catalog also published by the Adventure Cycling Association. There are some brilliant photographers out there traveling in remote corners of the planet on bicycles and I love going through their best work to find striking covers that convey the majesty and daring of their journeys.

Here's a look at some of my favorite recent covers and the original shots that birthed them. I often see a cover in a horizontal shot and then crop it to fit. A perfect example of this is the cover of the April issue, which we just sent to the printer (Adventure Cycling members can expect it in their mailboxes in about three weeks). Here's the cover...

Flathead Grizzlies

Continuing my celebration of British Columbia's Flathead Valley, I'm posting some images from a trip I took there two summers ago with my father and our friend Ron. My story from that trip can be checked out here. An excerpt to accompany the images follows...

still more campfires of 2009

This is John Stamstad and Todd Tanner attempting to dry out their feet around the fire. We'd crossed approximately 5,000 bone-freezing creeks that day and were seriously wet. Which is yet another example of how campfires are both hypnotic and practical.

If you're curious about our trip, you can read the article from Mountain Bike magazine here.

Hurling from great heights in Idaho

Did a five-day family bike ride with my son Silas on the world-class rail-trails in northern Idaho last year and came across these teenagers who were jumping from an old railroad bridge into a deep pool in the river below. As the kids on our ride gathered to watch, the bravest leaper offered to climb to the top of the 80-foot bridge and hurl himself off. Then we all watched in disbelief as he did just that.

It was a pretty great jump. You may have seen this image in various magazines as the fun-loving guys over at Big Agnes have been using it in their ads all year.

A few more images from the rest of our ride follow, including a couple from the magnificent Route of the Hiawatha, a jaw-dropping rail-trail on the Idaho / Montana border that features a series of high trestles. Plus, a couple from a mine tour we took just outside the old mining town of Wallace.

To see a few more images from the Hiawatha, including a couple from its huge tunnels, check out my post over on the Freeman Blog. If you crave still more munchkins-on-rail-trails action, head over here to read my story on the trip.