Maddie is a Master’s student in the Environmental Humanities. They grew up in Virginia but (literally) stumbled into their love of the outdoors in college in South Africa when a bad ankle injury took them out to the trails for rehabilitation. After graduating, they returned to the United States and have since thru-hiked the Pacific Crest, Colorado, and Arizona Trails. They are also a professional scuba diver and are becoming increasingly interested in trying to understand western landscapes and environmental issues from under the water. An avid reader and long-time nomad, they are most often found with a backpack, a book, and takeaway dumplings on a train going somewhere.
Growing up, one of my family’s favorite puzzles was a map of the United States. Each piece was one of the fifty states that fit neatly inside the outline of the country’s political boundaries. Alaska...
It is the summer of 2021. I’m half asleep, nestled into the small bow of a speedboat with good friends, while the boat courses through water so turquoise, with corals underneath so bright and teeming...
“I travel in wild country a great deal, often alone, and my friends find this to be fatally eccentric, although they use the more polite term ‘stupid.’ They feel sorry for me because I miss the fun...
On November 19, I navigated my old Rav4 (Delilah) across the bumpy, half-frozen mud that led to Meadow Hot Springs in central Utah. Steam rose into the early winter air, framed by the ridgeline of the...
Darkness settled over Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. A light night-time breeze cut through the heat and humidity of the day and the moon cast a lovely glow over the neighborhood’s famous colonial architecture....
I’m with a group of high school students from the United States somewhere in the mountains of the northeast corner of Yunnan province in southwest China. We’ve set up camp in what appears to be a deep...
When I started my thru-hike on the Pacific Crest Trail at the Mexican border east of San Diego on May 2, 2018, I'd only been backpacking a couple of times before. I'd never hiked more than ten miles in...
In scuba diving, the most important rule is this: do not hold your breath.
Why? Water pressure. Drop 10 meters below the surface and the pressure is twice that at sea level. Double pressure means half...
“I have a soft spot for cute girls in canyons,” I write to my new match on Tinder. Her first photo in a series of eight shows her grinning between the narrow walls of a slot canyon. Of the rest, three...
