New Website for Family Camping, Hiking, Climbing, and Alpine Adventures!
We hope you enjoy the website!
When I used to teach High Altitude (meaning 15,000 feet and above, up to the 8000 meter giants) at the Colorado Mountain Club, we often had to talk a lot about the tradeoff between the benefit a piece of gear provides and the weight it costs you to carry it. How many times are you going to use that gear? Is it mandatory - like a ladder to lay across a crevasse that can’t otherwise be navigated around - or is it “nice to have” like a full handled snow shovel? You may still want that “nice to have item” if you are planning on digging out a lot of snow platforms, but if you are carrying the shovel as an emergency item for avalanche terrain, a lighter shovel may make more sense.
Well, one thing that never has a weight tradeoff is knowledge. As we began our outdoors endeavors, we were constantly looking for information: information on a location, a route, best-practice techniques, gear, weather… you name it.
It is our hope that this website becomes one of your regular stops as you seek out information. We hope to be empowering, not dogmatic. That’s why you will rarely hear us say anything like ‘you must do this,’ or ‘you must carry that.’ There simply are not very many circumstances in the outdoors that require one way of doing things. Certainly, if something is a best-practice, you will hear us say so, for example, partner checks before you start up a technical climb. But there isn’t one piece of gear, or one location, or season that makes for an enjoyable outdoors experience. We hope to be honest about our family’s approach to the situations and circumstances we find ourselves in, and let those be one data point as you figure out what may be best for you and your family.
To support this - hopefully - free flow of information, it’s our intention to add content to the website that is enriching, not just a restating of what we have already said in the YouTube Channel videos. We hope this short video on the content areas contained within the website helps you more efficiently get to content that is meaningful to you. For some people, you may be looking for our take on a specific piece of equipment while others may ant to see equipment choices across many pieces of gear as they are needed for specific activities. Some people may want insight into our family, our motivations, and the joys we find in nature. Others could probably care less. Some may want help planning their next family adventure, and need to get into the specifics of day planning, gear choices, and techniques. Others already have their adventures planned.
From whatever perspective you are coming at this content, we hope there is an easy enough way for you to get quickly what you are looking for. Sure, it’d be nice if you’d stay and peruse the breath and depth of content we have here. It’s would be wonderful if you made some comments that would enrich a kind of ongoing discussion we can all share in as we share our passion for the outdoors. But, again, we hope to be empowering; we don’t want to trap you here, wondering how to get at that bit of information that you are looking for right now.
So, let us know if you find the site easy to use. Let us know if there is additional content you’d like to see, or navigation suggestions that would help you get more from the site. Let us know if you have something to say about any of the content we post in either the videos or the associated text.
We hope this will become a trusted place for that wonderful information that only costs you the time it takes to gather… and never weighs an ounce in your pack.