Hiking, backpacking, and mountaineering trips require a lot of gear as well as gear for which airline security policies add complication. As COVID restrictions ease up and trips for outdoor adventures become plausible, again, we provide five tips to make your air travel in-country or abroad more manageable and less stressful.

Hiking, Backpacking, and Mountaineering trips can cover a lot of ground, and the longer the trip the more likely that contingencies will arise that force us to adjust. In those circumstances, having gone through the process of making my own topographic route map helps me better know options and recognize landmarks once I am out in the field. Here's the why and how of making your own maps.

I carry a camp pillow when mountaineering, backpacking, or alpine climbing at altitude. There are multiple reasons. One reason is that at high altitudes I can become susceptible to Cheyne-Stokes breathing, an apnea that impacts my ability to sleep. Find out why plenty of people get Cheyne-Stokes at altitude, and how a simple item like a camp pillow can alleviate this condition. Also discover how a camp pillow may contribute to a warmer and lighter sleep system, overall.

Winter hiking, backpacking, camping, and alpine climbing can create challenging conditions for keeping your hands and feet warm. And for your feet, then you need to add in the need to also not get blisters. I've used the Lorpen T3+ Inferno Expedition and the T3+ Trekking Expedition socks for several winter seasons, now, and I offer my long term review of what is the best winter sock I have ever put on.

Going on a backpacking, multi-day climbing, mountaineering, hiking, or a camping trip during the dry, winter months can lead to split fingertips. The dry air and other conditions of winter just make it more likely. Those wounds can make using your hands painful. Here's how I help prevent those splits from happening as well as how I deal with the injury if I don't follow my own advice well enough!

The boys wanted to go on a "mini" expedition, complete with backpacking, camping, moving camps, and a mildly technical climb to a summit. But as the trip started, I received notice that one of my climbing friends and mentors was succumbing to cancer. As My trip ended, I received notice that she was gone. It struck me as fitting that, while all of this was happening, the lessons she taught me were being passed on to my boys. I dedicate this short film to Deb as a testament to a life well lived, full of impact which will carry on.

I enjoy camping, hiking, backpacking, and alpine climbing, and I enjoy doing all of these things in all seasons. It is always a challenge to find clothing layers that can handle the different activities and conditions I face. This is a review of the Outdoor Vitals Ventus Active Hoodie. Can it handle all of the variables I throw at it?

If you are going to get into alpine climbing, you need to be able to handle the variable conditions which mountains present to us. So, beyond snow and rock, one may need to contend with ice. You may love ice climbing, like my kids and I do, or you may grudgingly pursue it, but it is a necessary set of skills to have for mountaineering. Last video, we talked about good footwork. Today we talking about making efficient swings and combining all the individual techniques into a full movement sequence.

If you are going to get into alpine climbing, you need to be able to handle the variable conditions which mountains present to us. So, beyond snow and rock, one may need to contend with ice. You may love ice climbing, like my kids and I do, or you may grudgingly pursue it, but it is a necessary set of skills to have for mountaineering. Because all technical climbing starts with good footwork, in this video we go over the basics of proper footwork for ice climbing. Next week's video will cover using ice tools and the complete sequence of movement.

Sitting in the snow and adjusting your crampons to your boots is hard to do with winter gloves and is a good way to make yourself cold. That's why I pre-fit my crampons to my boots before I ever leave the house for every ice climbing, alpine climbing, or mountaineering trip. This opens up all of the options to move heel and toe bails and fine-tune the crampon fit to maximize the likelihood that the crampon will stay on as well as the performance of the crampon for my climb. Here's how I go about pre-fitting crampons for each of the three crampon types: full strap, step-in, and hybrid.

One half of our seven-year-old twins, Connor, and I went on a winter training hike as he progresses towards his first winter ascent of a Colorado 14er and starts to ready himself for true mountaineering. Hiking and scrambling on snow makes everything just a little bit harder, so it was nice to see his determination and sense of accomplishment. Unlike most of our videos, this one isn't instructional, it's just a short film to celebrate the joy my family and I find in the outdoors.

My twin seven-year-olds love mountaineering, climbing, hiking, and camping. But making sure we have all the right gear for winter trips comes with larger consequences for getting it wrong. Here is a load out video of what we take for a winter day-trip in snowy, cold conditions.

Being someone who goes to high and cold places on mountaineering, winter backpacking, and backcountry winter camping adventures, I need a sleep system that can handle severe temperatures (below 0 Fahrenheit or below -18 Celsius) but also not fill up my pack and break my back with weight. Here's my personal journey from nearly 4.5 down to 3.0 pounds (1.4 kg) for a winter bag and sleeping pads along with the gear changes I made to get there.

I've seen extreme temperature ranges in the winter. So, when I head out for a winter climbing, backpacking, hiking, or camping, I need to have the right clothing layers. And the same clothing that works for 50 degrees (10 Celsius) doesn't work for -35 degrees (-37 Celsius). And if I always have a down jacket and rain shell, then the difference in clothing needs to be made up by the baselayer and midlayer. Here's my four favorite baselayer and midlayer combinations I use to adjust to progressively colder days in the winter.

Camping in winter - either for its own enjoyment or as part of a climbing, backpacking, or mountaineering adventure - can be done warmly. There are lots of little things you can and should do to keep everyone in your group comfortable as possible. But if you were to only do three things, I would make these three things the ones to do, as I have found they have had the biggest impact on my ability to control my temperature at night and make for a good night's sleep.

Either poor vision, like me, or sun reflection off of the snow may drive the need for wearing glasses or goggles in the winter on hikes, climbs, while backpacking, and even camping. Unfortunately, glasses and goggles tend to fog up, as your breath and body heat mix with the cold air. Here is my journey of various attempts to solve this issue, moving from marginally effectively solutions to something that has finally worked for me on even the coldest mountaineering expeditions.

I started getting into the outdoors by hiking to summits. Eventually, I got into technical climbing and mountaineering. The gear I bought for the hikes didn't quite cut it when it came to the climbs. So, for any budding mountaineers and alpinists, here's what I've come to value most in design of various insulating jackets. If you can buy with your future outdoors activities in mind, you can save the money I didn't save. Learn from my mistakes!

After teaching high altitude climbing to lots and lots of different people, here are the four most common (behavioral) reasons I see people get cold hands in the mountains along with what to do about it.

In this fifth and final video of the Cold! Series, we talk about keeping morale up. How do we keep our team - whether that team be our climbing partners, our life partners, or our kids - in a frame of mind to be proactive and to enjoy their time outside, even when harsh conditions set in?

This is the fourth video in the Cold! series and it's about a potentially serious issue: avalanches. Avalanches are a complicated topic, and this video can not be an end point to anyone's education, but it can and does introduce the basic principles and provide resources to learn more.