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Why “Make Every Moment Count” is Terrible Advice

  A few years ago my best friend and I decided to take a vacation together. We had always talked about maybe doing a literary tour of England (because we’re…

Summer of Stone and Surf: Solo Hiking and Imaginary Cougars (or how I was not the girl from Wild)

  A blue bird had been flying ahead of me on the trail for a good few kilometres, flitting to the next branch whenever I got too close….

Summer of Stone and Surf: On Trust

On my third day in Canmore, I was lucky enough to climb Eeyore’s Tail, a 10 pitch, 355 meter route up the face of East End of Rundle…

Summer of Stone and Surf: Having New Eyes

  Two days ago, at a bookstore/cafe in Golden, I opened a book about “vital energy” to discover a quote by Proust: “The voyage of discovery is not…

Dreamscape Scampering, or How a Summer Was Planned

I got the idea, not surprisingly, during a mountain film fest climbing night that started out as a first date, and became (also not surprisingly) a reunion. One of…

Inspiration

Has this ever happened to you: you are hiking, or climbing, or kayaking. You are surrounded by natural beauty and the majesty of the mountains/ocean/vast landscape all around…

Go (Farther) West, Young Woman

I live in Vancouver, and I love it here. I love that I live two blocks from the beach, that I can walk beside the ocean every day,…

Mountain Tragedies and Secondhand Grief

Two weeks ago, three people died climbing Joffre Peak, north of Pemberton. I didn’t know them. Usually, that’s enough for me. Not often, but not so rarely, a…

Bad Trip

Every attempt to explain this will be clumsy. There are stories that will never be graceful, but these are sometimes the ones that most need to be told….

Just a Moment

Today’s adventure was going to be “Dance Class With a Bum Knee”. That’s still happening, but something else happened today that was way cooler. In teacher’s college, they…