Leonard - Bears Dont Care About Your Problems

BEARS
DONT
CARE

ABOUT YOUR PROBLEMS

BEARS
DONT
CARE

ABOUT YOUR PROBLEMS

MORE FUNNY SHIT

IN THE WOODS

FROM SEMI-RAD.COM

MOUNTAINEERS BOOKS is the publishing division of The Mountaineers, an organization founded in 1906 and dedicated to the exploration, preservation, and enjoyment of outdoor and wilderness areas.

1001 SW Klickitat Way, Suite 201 Seattle, WA 98134

800.553.4453 www.mountaineersbooks.org

Copyright 2019 by Brendan Leonard

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Mountaineers Books and its colophon are registered trademarks of The Mountaineers organization.

Printed in China

Distributed in the United Kingdom by Cordee, www.cordee.co.uk

22 21 20 191 2 3 4 5

Copyeditor: Erin Moore

Design and layout: Heidi Smets

All illustrations by the author

Cover art by the author

These essays and many of the accompanying illustrations originally appeared on Semi-Rad.com. A version of the story The Greatest Mountaineering Survival Story Never Told appeared in the Mountain Gazette in 2009.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file for this title at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018056006.

Mountaineers Books titles may be purchased for corporate, educational, or other promotional sales, and our authors are available for a wide range of events. For information on special discounts or booking an author, contact our customer service at 800-553-4453 or .

Printed on FSC-certified materials

ISBN (paperback): 978-1-68051-270-0

ISBN (ebook): 978-1-68051-271-7

One fine spring night in Utahs San Rafael Swell, about twelve hours before the wind came up and howled ceaselessly for days, I piloted my truck through a crosshatched maze of dirt roads, looking for the one that would bring me, with luck, to the campsite of Brendan Leonard. It was the farthest camp on the farthest track, hidden in the sage and juniper, out of reach of map or GPS, and I was searching for it through bleary eyes after fourteen hours of driving. Well after midnight, my headlights glinted hopefully on the bumper of a vehicle, a tent crouched in the shadows behind. I unwound my stiff limbs, climbed out of my rig, and peered through the windshield of this parked and dusty SUV. There, perched on the dash, was an extra large pizza box with greasy fingerprints all over it, its lid askew. Yes. Id found him.

In 2010 or thereabouts, I was just beginning to put the pieces in place to build Adventure Journal from a personal blog to a commercial publishing house, and my life was very much that of a digital hunter and gatherer. I spent my days online searching for story ideas and voices that could convey the uniqueness of the outdoor adventure culture in creative and credible ways. Despite it being the boom years of blogging, though, there wasnt much to hunt or gather, just a whole lot of people saying a whole lot of not much. But then I stumbled upon Semi-Rad.

Everything I was doing that day came screeching to a halt like the Road Runner digging in its heels at the edge of cliff. Wait, what? Semi-what? Who was this guy? The words were wry, the narrative paths were unexpected, the lessons heartfelt. Holy smokes, I thought, this dude can writeonly I didnt say smokes. By the end of the day, Id found a mutual friend, got an introduction, and talked Brendan into lending his talents to AJ.

Every generation of outdoor folk has its leading voice. In the 1970s, it was Colin Fletcher, father of the backpacking revolution. In the 1980s, there was Tim Cahill, off having adventures in which he barely survived due to mishap (wild exaggeration being part of the fun). In the 1990s, we had Mark Jenkins, who wrote a column called The Hard Way and who, the first time I hiked with him, stuck his leg into a frigid Iceland creek so he could compare the performance of each of his boots. Today, in this post-millennial, rapidly changing, pre-who-knows-what era, there is Brendan Leonardself-deprecating, open-hearted, considerate, and respectful, the voice of humility and optimism and stoke. No writer I knowand I know a lot of thembetter conveys the pleasures and pains, the risks and rewards, and, perhaps most of all, the wonderful absurdities of the outdoor culture.

In these pages, you will find stories about bears, and poop, and love, and inspiration, and you will meet a guide and companion worthy of any adventure, anywhere. If your idea of perfection is a breakfast of cold pizza and hot coffee shared with a friend on the edge of a canyon after a long night of driving, its exactly the book for you.

Steve Casimiro
March 2019

One Thursday in February 2011, I clicked Publish on a blog post on my new website, Semi-Rad.com. I shared it with my few hundred friends and followers on Twitter and Facebook, and by the end of the day, my website had a few dozen page views. The next week, I wrote and published a new post, and the next week I published another one. I told myself Id keep writing one blog post per week until something happened, or I got sick of it. I had paid $15 for the URL, and used free WordPress software and an inexpensive theme to create the blog, so all it was really costing me was my time.

I wanted to be an adventure writer, and had been trying to get a foothold in all the major outdoor magazines since 2004, but hadnt had much luck. I had a lot of things I wanted to say about what I felt and observed while climbing, backpacking, trail running, and skiing in the Colorado mountains and the desert, but a lot of it was too goofy or out there to pitch to magazine editors. So I started publishing it on my own.

A few months in, I published a semi-facetious guide to how much beer you should buy a friend in exchange for favors related to the outdoors, like borrowing a pair of skis or having someone dig you out of an avalanche. It took off a bit, and a few hundred people visited my websiteincluding Steve Casimiro from Adventure Journal. Steve was the first outdoor media professional to notice, believe in, and then amplify anything about Semi-Rad.com. He republished some of my work, vaulting it into a much bigger arena.

Within a few months, I had written a couple dozen posts, one every week, just like I promised myselfand something was happening. I kept at it, writing what I thought was my best work every week, and gradually other opportunities popped up. I started to get more writing assignments, became a contributing editor at Adventure Journal, then Climbing magazine, and had just enough work coming in to take the leap into full-time freelance writing. One day in August 2012, I sent my work laptop back to my tech company employer, cringing as I slid it across the counter at the shipping office, ending my brief tenure as a well-paid remote copywriter with cushy benefits.