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.

Swell on Wheels: Riding Utah's San Rafael Swell

I was pedaling alone through a deserted corner of Utah, the first stars punching through the dome of the evening sky, when I saw the lion. Or what looked like a lion. It was too shadowy and quick to say for sure, but I feathered my brake levers, which were secured to my handlebars with zip ties and duct tape, and futilely squinted into the dusk. Riding on, faster now, rock walls launched into the sky at my side, their crenelated faces blushing in the day’s last light. I wanted to look up the names of the more dramatic peaks, but I had no map. No matter, it was all achingly beautiful and my smile led the way as I continued on, pedaling hard, further and further into nowhere. 

To understand why I’m streaking down a remote dirt road through failing light into one of the more isolated deserts in America — out of water, without a map, lights, or overnight gear of any kind — you have to know the convoluted history of this star-crossed bike journey into Utah’s San Rafael Swell. 

New published work

Have had a bevy of stories published the last few months. Here's a look at a few of them. 

This feature on lookout towers in Montana ran in the July/August issue of Sierra magazine. You can read it here.

The Clymb launched a magazine-style feature section with a great layout style inspired by this piece on Pitchfork, which is the best feature format on the Web at the moment and clearly the reading experience of the future. They used it to nice effect on my story about going back to Vietnam with my veteran father for his first visit since the war that changed his life forever. You can read it here. 

Award season: Travel Journalist of the Year. Sort of.

It’s been a good year for writing and photography awards, which means I have some new certificates and plaques to figure out what to do with. The biggest plaque came from the Society of American Travel Writer’s Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Awards (three times fast!), the most prestigious in the industry. The SATW were kind enough to give me a bronze award for their 2012 Grand Award — Travel Journalist of the Year. Gray-haired people seem to appreciate this one the most, since they actually know who Lowell Thomas was (in short: the man). Though I submitted skiing, paddling, and non-sporty stories as part of my year’s work, the judges seemed to most appreciate my off-the-beaten path cycling adventures. Here’s what they had to say:

Finding Kishenehn

November’s wan light drained from the sky as I walked alone into a forgotten corner of Glacier National Park. As night grew from the shadows, noises in the forest grew louder. My head jerked at the sound of a branch brushing my pants. A foot of fresh snow obscured the tracks of an oversized carnivore on the trail that led me into dark timber. Everywhere was blackness, the world reduced to my headlamp’s bobbing orb of light. It seemed inevitable it would suddenly be filled by some variety of toothy creature.

I checked the pepper spray canister in my pack’s side pocket. Then I remembered the propellant in pepper spray doesn't work in temperatures below freezing. It was 20 degrees.

"Well, this is exciting," I thought to myself.

Standup Paddleboarding the Great Bear Rainforest

"Whoah! What was that?" Derek Nixon yells, as the telltale pfffft of air blasting from nostrils sounds from somewhere disconcertingly close to us. The rest of our group has stroked ahead to the sheltered waters of a nearby cove, leaving Nixon and me behind on our standup paddleboards, alone on open ocean. We turn toward the noise and see a large brown whiskered head sticking up from the water's surface, maybe 50 feet away. Another pops up beside it.

Steller sea lions. Big ones.

The pair size us up through inscrutable black eyes for a moment before sinking back into the sea.

We pull our paddles from the water and wait for the heads to reappear. Our 14-foot-long boards suddenly seem very small—the only thing between us and the 1,000-foot-deep ocean and the creatures that live in it. The surface is still. The windless air smells of wrack and saltwater. In the distance, a raven cackles; it could be laughing at us, or maybe just warning us to stay away from sea mammals with large brown whiskered heads.

It's the second day of our paddleboard journey into the Great Bear Rainforest, a place that lends itself to magical thinking, and already I'm starting to get the sense that the animals are trying to tell us things.

Ski mountaineering camp, or how I learned to dance with mountain goats

Nothing about a winter at the local ski hill has prepared me for the gut-twisting prospect of launching into thin air off a ridge in Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains. "Ridge" doesn't even do it justice—it's more like the cutting edge of a granite ax. As we nervously remove gear from our packs, Clark Corey, our guide, nods at the exposed face plummeting away behind us and says, "Don't drop anything down there or it's going 3,000 feet." Anxiety drowns our chuckles. Skiing that face would actually be the easy way down. Instead, I've climbed here with four other skiers and snowboarders to descend a couloir called Resurrection, a snow gully that plunges like an elevator shaft between rock cliffs. Couloirs are prized by ski mountaineers, and until three days ago I'd never skied one. In fact, this thin sliver of snow is worlds steeper than anything I've ever skied before, and falling here would mean a long and violent tumble. Which, it turns out, is precisely where I'm headed.

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

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...

Adventures with Dad

The map had lied — there were, in fact, no refreshing creeks on our climb — and now we stood at our drunkenly scenic high-mountain campsite without a drop of water. My Dad and I are pretty big fans of water, especially after turning into giant raisins after sweating out 20 gallons of the stuff while pedaling our bikes up mountainsides in 95° heat. In our subsequent dehydrated quest for liquid gold we had a face-off with a porcupine, got pinned by a biblical thunderstorm, and then, miraculously, found a crystalline mountain spring deep in mountainside forest.

Upon triumphantly returning to camp, a thick, fast-moving cloud swept up from the valley below and engulfed our campsite. "This definitely doesn't have any rain in it," I announced, confident, as always, in my astute meteorological forecasting abilities. In fact, for years my backcountry partners have been able to predict the weather with uncanny accuracy based solely on my forecasts — they simply take whatever I say and expect the exact opposite.

Minutes later, the clouds opened and the rain began.

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...

Osprey pack catalog and the Rattlesnake Wilderness

Osprey used one of my images in their latest pack catalog...

Hard to do the beauty of that creekside campsite justice with all the graphics on top of it. Here's another shot from the same spot:

This was one of my favorite trips of last summer — a four-day bike-and-backpacking adventure into the Rattlesnake Wilderness. My then ten-year-old son, Silas, and I rode from our front door, through the outskirts of town, and into the mountains...

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...

Awards are nice

There are a lot of great ways to start your day, but one of the best I know of is to get an email telling you that you've just won a writing award. This had only happened to me once before — until last Monday. That's when I received word that I'd snagged third place in the Northern Lights Awards for Excellence in Travel Journalism and Photography for my story "Return to the Wildest Valley" which ran in the June issue of Adventure Cyclist magazine.

 

If the importance of writing awards correlates with the length of their title, then I'm set. Screw a Pulitzer Prize — that's only two words. My award has seven words, and that's not even counting the really short words. Heck, my award has so many words in its name I don't even have to count them all.

Staying Alive

I recently finished an article on survival gear for a Montana magazine. In the article, I suggest that every outdoors person carries a "possibilities bag" in their backpack that contains basic survival and emergency gear. Here's mine, exploded for the article.

I've got an emergency bivy sack; tiny headlamp; firestarting tinder in a waterproof bag; a first aid kit in a waterproof bag; a lighter; waterproof matches in a waterproof container; super glue; a multi-tool with pliers, knife, and scissors; pain pills; whistle; compass; duct tape around a pencil; signal mirror; chlorine dioxide water-treatment pills; and a waterproof stuff sack to hold it all together.

Three Cheers For The Brits

The British magazine Singletrack just came out with a story of mine from an ultralight bikepacking trip last summer. I love the layout and the images they chose. Funny captions, headers, and pull quotes, too. Plus, the editor is my man Chipps Chippendale, who has a flat-out classic name. Great working with you guys on the other side of the kiddie pool...

Firsts

First time I've ever had a photograph published in a magazine with Andy Garcia on the cover. So I've got that going for me. Celebrated Living is an airline magazine published by American Airlines for its "premium class passengers." So now we know what they're doing up there when the flight attendants pull the curtain — stretching out in leatherette seats and getting golf tips from actors in yellow slacks.

So, the magazine pretty much celebrates living. Which is good, because if you're not living there's probably a lot less to celebrate. Plus, it's gotta be harder to read magazines. Which makes you realize just how savvy American Airlines was to target the living with this one. Props AA.

Regardless of what you think of their demographic focus on the non-dead, one thing is certain: I've never seen so many ads for watches in my life.

On that note, I'll let Andy take it away...

 

My story in current issue of Mountain Bike magazine

Anyone that has enjoyed my recent posts of bikepacking images might want to head to their local newsstand (assuming they still have a local newsstand) and pick up the current issue of Mountain Bike magazine. It's been out for a while, so may not be on the stands much longer. The story is called "Riding Loaded" and it's about using the latest in ultralight camping equipment to take a five-day, backcountry mountain bike ride in the Canadian Rockies. A shout-out to Jeff Boatman over at Carousel Design Works who was a great riding partner on the trip and who designs the excellent bags we used to carry our gear.

Below are a couple pre-production spreads of the story. To see the entire piece, visit my issuu page here.