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I used to subscribe to Outdoor Life . It's still a bag-em and mount-em magazine, but there has been some effort to balance that with how-to articles and features on non-game wildlife. I really liked an article a couple of years ago about the world's most deadly snakes. I like stories about encounters with dangerous critters in which both man and beast walk away unscathed. Too many chewbacco and whisky adds give this mag a redneck flavor.
Outside is a fun read, but the focus seems to be on elite-level adventuring. An article about lesbians running the Colorado River a couple of years ago turned me off somewhat to this mag. Yes, people have sex in the wilds, but do I want to read about it?
Backpacking does a good job of covering the gear, but they're too green and too political in my opinion.
My favorite is National Geographic Explorer . They've got good coverage of gear, how-tos, maps, weekend trips, and elite-level adventuring.
What's your favorite adventure mag?
Posts: 2655 | Registered: Feb 2004
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posted
What's wrong with that? Well, I can understand resistance to packing poop, but no one advocates that.
I spent a month in Yosemite this summer, cleaning up after people who weren't "green". This included packing out their toilet paper (though after a while, there was so much of it that I left it, I'm ashamed to say), a used tampon applicator, a ton of aluminum foil, lots of food wrappers, and a bunch of really random trash people had left. I even buried someone else's poop once. Now I don't know about you, but those aren't the kinds of things I want to see when I go camping.
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I'll second Nat'l Geographic Adventure. The only down side is that it sometimes focuses on the exotic, but overall it gives lots of great reasonable recommendations as well.
Posts: 995 | Registered: May 2003
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Oops, you're right peterh. It is Adventure . I confused that with the name of the National Geographic TV program.
I read an article in Backpacking that got into extremely low-impact backpacking. They said that ideally people don't belong in wild, pristine places, but if you insist on going, you ought to... And then they pretty much attacked everything that even good Boy Scouts do: no fires of any kind; no disposing of apple cores or other biodegradables; no cat holes; no walking on grass, plants or cryptobiotic soils (hop from one large rock to another if you can); don't make trails by following in the steps of others; don't move anything; don't touch anything; don't stress the animals with your presence; pack out everything that you packed in.
After reading that article I started to see a pattern in the magazine that was pretty much anti-people.
Then you've got the elite-level adventurers depicted in Outside who leave their oxygen bottles scattered all over Everest, and who have covered El Capitan with urine.
I prefer a good, middle of the road adventure mag that encourages you to get out of the house, sets you up with the right gear, and teaches you how to survive and tread lightly without going to extremes.
I think our Yosemite litterbugs are just people who didn't know what to pack. I've seen Boy Scouts do the same thing. They bring all their cotton clothing; it gets wet; they build a fire to dry it out; the clothing never dries; they leave their wet socks and underwear behind because they're too lazy to pack the disgusting stuff out. They bring a pack full of canned sodas and don't want to pack out the empty cans. They bring disposable plastic plates, utensils, and cups and don't re-use them. They bring a cheap, blow up air mattress that gets a hole the first night, and then they want to throw it on the fire. They forget to bring a shovel and then leave their doodles and paper laying about. Candy wrappers.
I want to tell my scouts to read a good adventure magazine. People will always be slobs if they've got something in their packs that they don't want to carry, but after taking the advice of a few good articles they'll only have the necessities in their packs. They'll have a bit of pride invested in the gear they've acquired. They'll know the benefit of packing lightly and eliminating unnecessary packaging and containers. They'll know how to purify water. They'll know what foods add the least weight to their packs but yield the most energy. They'll know what clothes stay dry and keep them warmest.
A good adventure magazine doesn't need to mount an ultra green, anti-people campaign to preserve the wild places, it just needs to tell people what stuff to bring, how to use the stuff, and what to leave home.
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