John Long - The Little Book of Outdoor Wisdom: An Adventurers Collection of Anecdotes and Advice

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Copyright 2019 by John Long

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ISBN 978-1-4930-3473-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4930-3474-1 (e-book)

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An editor I work with mentioned that sales for Edward Abbeys Desert Solitaire have remained steady for fifty years. His marketing department deconstructed the text every which way but could never determine what made the book so evergreen, except perhaps Abbeys knack for angering both liberals and rednecks at the same time.

I loved Abbey, wilderness bard and best-selling author of The Money Wrench Gang , which in 1975 thundered through the literary world like chain lightning. Abbey was at his cranky best when hed rant about sons and daughters of The Pioneers. Thats us. Wed gone soft, said Abbey, had lost our sense of the primitive and remote, our hunger for the difficult, the original, the real, none more than Abbeys fellow rangers (circa 1965) at Arches National Park.

Make the bums range, wrote Abbey. Yank them out of air conditioned offices and shiny patrol cars and dump them at the trail head, where they belong, tromping in and out of the wilderness, hiking off that office fat and getting their minds off the other guys wife.

Let them get lost, sunburned, stranded, drowned, eaten by bears, buried under avalanches... the right and privilege of any free American.

He warned about our mania for information, predicted the day, now upon us, where virtual reality could threaten to replace direct experience. We needed to renew old skills: to follow a trail over slickrock, build a fire in the rain, treat snakebite, glissade down a glacier, bury a body, cook a porcupine, or pour piss out of a boot.

This fiery talk plays to the cowboy in many of us, but how many of the young among us would consider getting attacked by bears or buried by avalanche a right and privilege? Probably fewer would equate these things with freedom, as Abbey did. It gets wild out there. You cant control the rain and rattlesnakes. It costs time and moneysometimes a lot of itto get there. Isnt it better to stay closer to home, forget the slickrock, and let Edward bury the body?

Abbeys all-or-nothing approach is uncompromising, and thats the power of the purist. But there are options between a country path winding through Sonoma wine country and the North Face of K2, one of the hardest big mountains in the world.

As renowned alpinist Herman Buhl once said, Tastes differ. So do temperaments and physical capacities. Few people profit from full immersion into the wilderness. It might be good medicine for rangers in national parks, with their training and instruction. Most of the rest of usand the path followed in this bookwill favor a softer approach. A fling with The Remote is better than nothing, but a romance, one that can sustain us, usually takes time.

Nature shows us a nearly infinite patience for things to emerge and develop. It also takes from a little to a lot of equipment, depending on our activity and the given terrain, and a vast array of techniques and practical know-how (read: experience ).

Thing is, outdoor gear is always evolving. The federal Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) says the current outdoor recreation industry comprises 2 percent ($373.7 billion) of the entire US Gross Domestic Product, making it a bigger industry than oil and mining. The competition to get a piece of that pie is fierce, ergo the fantastic array of available gear, much of it unnecessary. Even the wilderness itself, owing to global warming, logging, strip-mining, and so forth, is changing, mostly for the worse. The point is, staying current with equipment, techniques, and topography is an ongoing study; and while we touch on these topics, as needed, the thrust of this book is not about gear, techniques, or geography. A million blogs and websites can keep you current in that, but they can mislead.

A common outdoor myth is that so long as your gear and skill are up to speed, and you understand the given activity and terrain, youre basically good to go. Any experienced outdoors person will tell you this is a mistake. The World Cup skier will want her boards tuned just so before vaulting down the Hahn-enkamm downhill course in the Kitzbhel Alps of Austria, one of the greatest spectacles in outdoor adventure sports; but winning the Hahnenkamm, or even laying down a successful run, always involves more than state- of-the- art skis, honed skill, and courage. It requires developing an approach that puts a person in the best position to thrive. Not in some abstract way, rather one derived from factors and forces as basic as sand. Such an approach is never an equation. Its never simply facts and figures, or bullet points in a web page. It is not easily explained, but the process can be described.

The last few lines in Norman Macleans classic, A River Runs Through It , reads, Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the worlds great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

My hope for this small volume is that their words are echoed throughout these pageswords said to me directly, words I overheard, words I conjured from many years of rubbing elbows, and in some cases sharing a rope, with people for whom the outdoors ran though their veins like a river in flood. Words that take up where gear and skill leave off, and demonstrate an approach to being and acting in the wild places that has stood the test of time.

When heading into the wilds to explore a cave, or just following a dusty trail up a popular peak, how do we appraise and manage potential risks? The intuitive method is a poor choice, but it makes for rich stories. One of my favorites comes from Dave Diegleman, when he, Dale Bard, and the great, late Jim Bridwell were gearing up to climb a big new route in Yosemite Valley.

The morning we set sail on the Sea of Dreams route, said Dave, we got to our fixed ropes at the base of El Capitan and each of us fished around for our harnesses, which wed stashed under rocks the day before. Dale and I quickly found ours and strapped them on, but Jim was farting around in the forest below.

Um, were sorta ready to go, I mumbled, loud enough for the old guy to hear.

I gotta find a stick, Jim snapped. Moments later, unable to see beneath the boulder, he fishes out his harness, and a baby rattlesnake slithers out right after.