Backcountry Trip USA · 2024

January 31, 2025

“What kind of weird photo is that?” I complain to my husband. We're in Sequoia National Park in California, the epicenter for thousand-year-old redwoods. To better illustrate the immensity of the trees, I wanted my hubby to take a photo of me next to one of them from trunk to crown. Great. Now it's just me and a tree trunk!

“Sarah,” he explains to me in his imperturbable calm, which is often the water to my fire. “I'm already at full max wide-angle, more than the bottom of the trunk won't fit in the frame. The tree is far too big. But isn't that exactly what you wanted to show?” 

We are car camping from Wyoming through Utah to California. Four national parks, canyons, deserts, ancient forests, and landscapes so massive that make you shrink to the size of an ant in your mind. Two-and-a-half weeks of camping in a tent outside without solid walls, electricity only from solar panels and a rechargeable battery, water from a container in the back of the car, and food cooked on a portable gas stove. From over-tourism and comets to burning trees and tents in the snow. Let's go!

July 28, 2024

The sun is shining as we unload our “lockers” at the trailhead parking lot at Lone Star Geyser. The “lockers” are our 27-pound packs containing all of our gear for the next three days. We are hiking and camping in the backcountry of Yellowstone National Park.

Where access is only by foot, where drinking water is available only by filtering river or lake water, and toilets are available only by shoveling out your own hole into the ground.

Today the forecast seems pleasant, calling for clear to cloudy skies. Well, a scattered thunderstorm may pass through later, but the ranger blows it off: “That's just a brief Yellowstone thunderstorm. It'll be over again in a few minutes.”

Anyone familiar with this blog will know that all does not go as planned. Like us, for example, six hours later, standing under a pine tree in soaking rain jackets and staring at a geyser that won't erupt; while dramatic, dark cumulonimbus storm clouds cover us, heavy, wind-blown horizontal rain pelts us, and three-pronged lightning bolts strike around us. And then there's the thing with the flood, the bears, the snowfields, and a phenomenal evening in golden light.

Pack your lightning rods—here we go!