Failure I’ve been thinking a lot recently about failure. At the end of June 2025, I intently followed two incredible forays in the mountains. The first was an attempt at a fastest known time on the mighty Appalachian Trail; the second was the annual Western States Endurance Run, a 100-mile jaunt through the Sierra Nevada and, […]
Karamazov Walk “From the house of my childhood I have brought nothing but precious memories, for there are no memories more precious than those of early childhood in one’s first home. And that is almost always so if there is any love and harmony in the family at all. Indeed, precious memories may remain even
The Loneliest Road in America “It’s totally empty. There are no points of interest. We don’t recommend it. We warn all motorists not to drive there unless they’re confident of their survival skills.” — Unnamed AAA Representative U.S. Route 50 stretches over 3,000 miles across the nation, from Sacramento, California, to Ocean City, Maryland. In July
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The Great North American Eclipse On 21 August 2017, around 2:30 in the afternoon, I sat in a baking parking lot at The Ohio State University. It was a Monday, and my wife had emerged from the Mathematics Tower to join me during a break between teaching classes. Wispy clouds hung in the sky but did
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A Rocky Remembrance written by Brianna S. The mountains were NOT calling. At least not to me. Each summer, I would see the shimmer in my brother’s eyes as we began preparations for our yearly trip to Maine. Even my father’s countenance, normally grumpy and stoic, would give off a gleeful hum –
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Nature FOMO As hard as it is to believe, the era of social media is already 20 years old. Life before (the)Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and MySpace seems a distant past. Two decades is more than enough to have shown us that the technology is a mixed bag. It has an undeniable allure and
Timeline of the Far Future This article features the first new content for this project after its fourth birthday. Anniversaries inherently elicit exercises in tense: Where have we been? Where are we now? Where are we going? I tried to envision what an episode of The Mountains Are Calling might look like in a year or five.
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Reduce Your Usage Without a doubt, plastics have revolutionized engineering, medicine, packaging, and numerous other milieu across the globe. The first human-made polymer is generally considered to be Parkesine, which was created by Alexander Parkes in 1855. Parkesine was composed of cellulose, a natural component of plant cell walls. By 1907, the first synthetic plastic
Skunk Runs I loathe running without a sporting objective. And, by sporting objective, I don’t mean setting a personal record in the mile or seeing how much distance I can cover before I drop. I can run all day if you add soccer, tennis, basketball, or another game. Without those goals, there are few things
The Beach Primeval Members of my family have spent holidays at the New Jersey shore for at least 70 years, likely longer. My mother and her siblings traveled with their elders to the boroughs of Seaside Heights and Seaside Park, which sit on a strip that locals call “the barrier island.” The Barnegat Peninsula, also
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