For a moment I envied the people on the sailboat, silhouetted against the midnight sun. But I quickly realized how silly the thought was. I was standing in what was probably—no, undoubtedly—the most beautiful place I’d ever been, my feet planted in warm Arctic sand, the surf rolling in between two Rocks of Gibraltar.

Norway’s Lofoten Islands are, at times, hard to comprehend. The place is astoundingly beautiful and dramatic. Certain views of its white sand beaches and turquoise waters can easily double for the Caribbean, until you look up and see the towers of rock or feel the iciness of that water. It’s an archipelago risen nearly vertical from the deep blue of the North Atlantic, jutting far to the west of Norway’s eastward-curving Arctic mainland like a giant Viking’s finger pointing to westward voyages of the distant past.

The Lofoten Islands are a clichéd fairy-tale land in a country often described as a fairy tale, with its impossible fjord-side villages and waterfalls around every bend in the road.

This beach between the two Gibraltars can only be reached by foot. The trail started right off the doorstep of an old one-room schoolhouse turned vacation rental. The home faced east over a protected bay with placid waters surrounded by quintessential Norwegian peaks—pointy and green.

The trail led inland from the bay, soon skirting the shore of a freshwater lake graced with a forest of stunted Arctic trees, then up a rocky slope and past a stone shelter to another lake, this one bordered not by trees, but by stark gray and white boulders.

We were crossing at a narrow point in the island over a low saddle between enormous, steep ramps of solid, glacier-polished rock. Our destination was the other shore, opposite the protected waters by the schoolhouse. This other shore was the true coast—land’s end. From there to the west, the next rock would be on Greenland, far, far beyond the horizon.

The shoreline of the second lake was rugged, so we slowly picked our way over and around the gray and white boulders. The rock seemed as hard as diamond, and often equally as smooth along the unbroken surfaces, but sharp along the fracture points. Above the broken rock and upper lake, the trail reappeared through a grassy slope to the final rise of the saddle.

A young Brit stood motionless on that apex next to an expensive camera. We approached quietly with a quick hello just as the view unfolded before us. Then I caught my breath—not from fatigue, but from shock. Shock at the sight before me. My daughter stopped cold as well and managed to let out a whispered, “Whoa...” then stood still as a statue.

Nearing midnight, we peered down the slope at a big sun just grazing a vast ocean horizon behind an expanse of almost-white sand below the verdant hillside. The sandy beach—a half-mile long—was bracketed on both ends by near-vertical walls of that gray and white stone: Gibraltars, both of them. A single sailboat drifted in front of that low and deep-yellow midnight sun.

Shaking off the shock of this most beautiful of sights, we simply gave the Brit a knowing nod as he continued to stare reverently at the scene before seeming to remember his camera at his side.

As rugged as the approach was, the descent was gentle, down through green grass and white wildflowers until finally, at the bottom, the green grass was overtaken by the beach sand.

The Arctic surf boomed in our ears now, and the white foam and mist advanced and retreated on the other side of a hundred meters of sand. With shoes now removed, we ran across that beach and felt the exhilarating cold of surf two hundred miles above the Arctic Circle. That big, rich sun was not setting; it was drifting parallel to the horizon, just teasing a connection to the ocean before beginning its gradual rise again. We could have spent all night there, and one day I will return to this most beautiful of places to do just that.

As we turned to begin the three-mile return hike back over the spine of the island, a marine layer began to roll in, gracing the Gibraltars with skirts of white clouds. And, as we descended along the lakes back to the schoolhouse, a gigantic cloud wave poured beautiful and white over the saddle, drifting past and through us—like the surf of Vestervika Beach taking celestial form and forever enveloping my heart and soul.

Forever I will remember this most beautiful place in the world, Vestervika Beach.

To experience the scale of the cliffs and the sound of the surf at Vestervika, turn on your audio and watch this brief two-minute cinematic look at the trail:

I come from a long lineage of map-gazers. My grandfather, the dreamer—so I was told by my dad—used to lean back in his recliner and read maps for fun, like a good novel. My dad, more the planner, greatly enjoyed the map-reading and map-marking part of family vacation planning. I can still picture us, parked at some interstate rest stop or pulled over on the side of a gravel road in our big green camping van. My dad would sit in the driver’s seat with the engine idling, studying an open map spread out over the steering wheel. In those days, he may have even had an open can of Coors in the dashboard drink holder, his sunburned left arm invariably perched elbow-out through the open window.

He had a distinctive way of tapping the map twice with his pointer finger with much satisfaction when he finally settled on our route to the next destination. “Whad’ya say we take such-and-such pass, come on down through such-and-such town, and then head on over to such-and-such campground,” he would ask my mom, his mind of course already made up. With an affirmative agreement, he would proceed to carefully re-fold his map—always properly—and place it back into his map stash in the driver’s side door.

Just as our map reading progressed from my grandpa’s dreaming recliner to my parents’ big green road trip van, my own affinity evolved toward trail and topographic maps when I discovered my love for the wilderness. My favorites are the National Geographic Trails Illustrated series, but I have many other types as well, collected over the years from various backpacking trips and as-yet-unseen wilderness destinations. I have maybe a couple hundred of them, tucked away in a stack of shoeboxes (shoeboxes are the perfect size for a foldable map collection).

I inherited a half-dozen shoeboxes full of maps from my dad when he passed away in 2014. Over decades of summer family road trips, he had accumulated and reverently tucked away every state road map, every national forest map, and every national park brochure with any kind of map included—all neatly organized by region and often hand-dated. Some of these maps go back more than 60 years now. I believe the collection includes a complete national set of US Forest Service Recreation maps—in my opinion, the best multi-purpose transportation-recreation maps ever produced, and still the best single physical reference for national forest campgrounds available in a single view.

There are just some things a computer screen and the internet can’t replicate, and a good paper map is one of them. They are, however, going out of style. Although I always say it’s essential to carry a paper map on the trail at least as a backup because electronics can always fail, even redundant ones (that’s the Eagle Scout in me), the reality is that for many hiking excursions, paper maps are becoming less essential. There are incredibly accurate and useful mapping applications nowadays that can do way more than any paper map (I use onX Backcountry as my go-to myself). As long as you have a redundant power backup, you can reasonably get by without a paper map these days. But… I will always say it’s better to have that paper backup.

And if you expect to spend much time in the wilderness, you should also know basic map-and-compass orienteering (again, the Scout in me talking). In practice, nothing can really replace the large-format utility of a foldable paper map. A tech app can track your location and progress—and yes, they are much better than paper maps for helping you stay on route and not get lost—but the broad, aerial perspective of a paper map gives you a sense of location within the context of an area. It shows you where the river bends down-trail, or where alternative routes and scenic spur trails might be located.

Besides, there’s something nostalgic about opening up a map at a campsite or in the tent by the light of a headlamp. Perhaps my affinity for paper maps is just my dreaming grandfather smiling down from his recliner. And, like my dad, every map I procure—whether purchased or picked up for free at some trailhead kiosk—goes right into a shoebox in my closet, properly folded and neatly organized by type and location.

Two years ago, Yellow Scene Magazine published my first-place Colorado Press Association award-winning article, “The Colorado Water Emergency.” Predictably, the seven Colorado River basin states still cannot agree on an updated and sustainable water allocation plan to save the river. The ongoing gridlock between the states may soon force the hand of the federal government—all three branches of which are currently controlled by politicians who are often hostile to conservation and environmentally sustainable policies.

As of this writing in June 2026, Lake Mead’s water level sits just nine feet above its all-time record low set in 2022, and is currently projected to smash through that record low by mid-2027. Most of the river’s massive basin is sweltering under moderate to extreme drought conditions following a La Niña-driven, low-snowpack winter. To put it into perspective: the lake is currently at only 35% capacity and heading lower. The last time the water line plummeted this low, long-dead bodies started emerging along the muddy shoreline—unrecovered drowning victims and a Las Vegas mob hit or two.

Upstream of Lake Mead, Lake Powell’s level continues to drop, steadily revealing side canyons and desert land formations drowned long ago by the Glen Canyon Dam.

The fundamental issue here is simple, but the solution is mired in a complex entanglement: managing skyrocketing water demand within an outdated, flawed allocation system, all while a 21st-century Southwestern megadrought drastically reduces the supply. The century-old Colorado River Compact, which originally divided the water rights among the seven basin states, was negotiated during a period of historically high water abundance. As a result, our current allocation model is based on 16.4 million annual acre-feet of water for a river that, over the last quarter-century, has only averaged about 12.4 million acre-feet of water flow annually.

Consumptive use has outpaced the water supply for years, causing the “bank” of water stored in Lakes Mead and Powell to steadily drain. Dishearteningly, the Colorado River now completely dries up long before it can reach its mouth in the Gulf of California in northern Mexico, turning a once-vibrant river delta wetland into a dusty wasteland.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR), Lake Powell is on course to drop below “dead pool”—the point at which the water drops too low to generate hydroelectric power—by October of this year. Preventing this will require massive, emergency water releases from Flaming Gorge Reservoir upstream, combined with drastically reduced releases from Glen Canyon Dam which will accelerate the water level drop downstream in Lake Mead, already critically low. The entire catchment system in the Colorado River Basin is on the brink, threatening the power supply for millions of people in the Upper Basin and risking irrigated crop production farther south in California’s Imperial Valley—one of the nation’s most crucial agricultural lifelines.

But the situation is not hopeless, even if the seven basin states remain gridlocked. While it is convenient to blame the water crisis on extravagant Las Vegas fountains and desert golf courses, the thirstiest sector by far is agriculture. Much of that regional agricultural production is dedicated to growing cattle-feed crops like alfalfa and hay—practices that researchers have consistently determined to be inefficient, non-essential, and increasingly unsustainable in a desert.

At this point, the federal government is still pushing for a consensus among the seven basin states. The USBR has floated five different compromise frameworks, but none have been deemed acceptable by everyone. The core friction remains the traditional split between the Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming) and the Lower Basin states (Arizona, California, and Nevada). It’s a fundamental geographic challenge: the majority of the water demand comes from the Lower Basin, but the water itself flows from the snowpack of the Upper Basin.

Western U.S. water rights law is notoriously complicated because out here, water rights typically go to whoever used the water first, regardless of who owns the land where the water actually flows. There is a fascinating saga that played out near Denver way back in the 1870s that helped codify this “doctrine of prior appropriation.” Basically, a group of Front Range Colorado settlers trekked up into the mountains and altered an entire stream system with an earthen dam to divert water to their farms miles downstream on the Great Plains. While it was an ingenious feat for these Iowa-born ditch diggers, it caused an uproar among the settlers farther north, who woke up one morning to find their own creek completely dry.

Those northern settlers naturally ventured upstream, found the diversion, and promptly blew it up to restore their water. Back and forth they went, rebuilding and blasting, until things escalated into a brief gunfight known locally in Colorado as the “Lefthand Creek Water War.” When the parties finally took the matter to court, a judge ruled in favor of the downstream diversion group based on “first use, first rights.” It was one of the very first major western water rights court battles, establishing the legal blueprint we are still bound by today. The water diversion remains to this day, now managed by the Lefthand Ditch Company.

A similar situation is now playing out a century and a half later on a grand scale. Downstream and off-river water rights holders are locked in legal combat with upstream advocates. To complicate matters further, Mexico holds a stake based on a mid-20th-century treaty that guarantees them a few drops in the bucket of what’s left of the river as it crosses the border near Yuma, Arizona.

The final, vital layer of complication lies in tribal water rights. There are 30 Native American tribes who hold legal, senior rights to divert a combined total of 3.4 million acre-feet of water—approximately a quarter of the river’s current average flow. Collectively, the tribes have only used about half of their recognized rights so far, but major upcoming pipeline projects are expected to increase their usage, further reducing the water available to everyone else.

The dam is about to break on this crisis—pun intended—and that might actually be a good thing. Something has to give. A compromise is the only way forward because the alternative of a reservoir dead pool simply isn’t an option. If the seven basin states cannot come to a collective agreement, the federal government will be forced to step in and dictate a solution soon. The bad news, of course, is that Washington is rarely the best arbiter of local fairness or regional wisdom. Especially, in my humble opinion, under the current administration which is often unfriendly to conservation and environmentally sustainable interests.

Perhaps fortunately, this is one rare case in modern American politics where the battle lines aren’t cleanly partisan. The Lower Basin states are an unlikely alliance of deep-blue California and purple Arizona and Nevada. The Upper Basin is an equally strange pairing of solid-blue Colorado and New Mexico with solid-red Utah and Wyoming. The states aren’t voting party lines; they are looking after their own citizens’ water security. Red, blue, or purple, the states need to get their act together and hammer out a compromise they can all live with before the feds hand down a mandate that none of them like.

For us water consumers, every viable solution requires some form of sacrifice to correct the math of this historic overallocation. Every path forward demands a reduction in use, and that likely means a major disruption to western agriculture—specifically transitioning to less thirsty crops or reducing yields to match a permanently lowered water supply.

The optimist’s perspective is that this problem is entirely solvable if we can just agree to use the river’s water more efficiently and sustainably. But we must get used to a stark new reality: barring a miraculous sustained reversal of the megadrought, Lakes Mead and Powell will not be returning to full pool anytime soon, and California’s Imperial Valley farmers might have to make do with less water flowing through those massive irrigation canals.

Sources:

https://legis1.com/news/colorado-river-water-crisis-deadline-looms-in

https://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/g4000/lakemead_line.pdf

Ahh, the Sunshine Coast. The name alone plucks at our curiosity and paints the mind with something beautiful… something special. Of course, many sun-bathed coastlines around the world could be named as such. But the sunshine along this particular stretch must be something especially wonderful, for this coast sits squarely in one of the rare rain shadows of North America’s great northwest coastal region.

Tucked behind the mountainous spine of vast, forested Vancouver Island and rising above the golden tendrils of a place called Desolation Sound, Canada’s Sunshine Coast represents the southern stretch of a vast, fjord-carved and conifer-clad coastline—the shore of one of the world’s greatest temperate maritime regions, encompassing the coasts of British Columbia and Southeast Alaska.

If you’re familiar with the vernacular of long trails, you’ll know the term “thru-hiking.” Personally, I don’t much care for the term. It originates from the distinction made between hikers completing a full end-to-end trek of a long trail versus the mere “section hikers” who only sample a piece of it. But whatever you choose to call it, Canada’s Sunshine Coast Trail is one trek that is highly accessible to those who can spare just a couple of weeks, want to complete a full end-to-end journey of more than 100 miles on a single mid-trail resupply, appreciate the novelty of a free hut system, and are looking for a lesser-known option compared to the more, let’s say, social and trendy long trails often found to the south in the United States.

The Sunshine Coast Trail is a relatively young one, founded in 1992. But based on its on-trail infrastructure and digital resources, it is exceptionally well-managed and maintained by the qathet Parks and Wilderness Society (qPAWS), a dedicated non-profit organization.

Let’s break down the logistics. The Sunshine Coast Trail is 180 kilometers (approximately 113 miles) long. Its southern terminus is Saltery Bay, its northern terminus is Sarah Point, and the main commerce and supply hub is the coastal town of Powell River. Located roughly at the trail’s midpoint, Powell River makes for a relatively easy mid-hike resupply stop. While it can be hiked in either direction, the route is traditionally designed and intended to be tackled southbound.

To zoom out geographically, this is in southwest British Columbia, on the mainland coast opposite the middle section of Vancouver Island. It’s a four-and-a-half-hour trip north from the city of Vancouver to the southern terminus at Saltery Bay (including a couple of scenic ferry rides). Add another hour to reach the rugged northern trailhead at Sarah Point. Local shuttle and water taxi services are readily available to get you to and from either terminus or any of the over two dozen mid-trail access points.

The trail itself features 14 (with a 15th planned) free, winterized huts alongside a scattering of designated tent camping sites equipped with pit toilets, picnic tables, and fire pits. All campsites and huts operate on a first-come, first-served basis, and each hut can comfortably accommodate up to 12 people. There are no permits or fees required anywhere on this trail, and leashed dogs are welcome to join you. Bear spray, however, is highly recommended.

While the infrastructure makes this trail easy to plan for, that doesn’t mean it’s a walk in the park. The stats show that this is a rugged undertaking with nearly 20,000 feet of cumulative elevation gain. That’s a comparable average gain per mile to our mountainous Colorado Trail, more than both the Pacific Crest and Continental Divide Trails, and only slightly less than the notoriously steep Appalachian Trail. The climbing comes not from epic, sustained alpine ascents, but from the repeated dips down to sea-level coastal bays followed by steep, punchy runs back into the interior mountains, peaks, and ridgelines.

But all those ups and downs ensure the views keep coming. The trail remains beautifully varied as it weaves through majestic old-growth forests, skirts coastal beaches, and follows the banks of pristine freshwater streams and lakes. Given its temperate maritime location, this trail boasts a long, relatively snow-free hiking season. Summer brings the sunniest weather, but it rarely becomes unbearably hot or cold. This classic Salish Sea route delivers evergreen-clad coastal mountain and waterscape views for days. If you’re lucky, you’ll catch some of the most perfect hiking weather on the planet from late spring through autumn.

Only about 500 to 1,000 people complete the entire thru-hike each year, though several thousand more utilize its distinct sections for shorter backpacking trips and day hikes. Most end-to-end hikers take between 10 and 14 days to complete it.

This one is most definitely on my bucket list—and hopefully, sometime soon.

For more maps, hut updates, and planning resources, visit the official Sunshine Coast Trail website at sunshinecoasttrail.com.

Travel writers used to be cool and mysterious. They had tribal connections, paid small bribes for access, and rode on jungle boats in the Amazon looking for lost treasure. Sometimes they dodged bullets in a mud hole. Other times they found a secret Shangri-La paradise out of pure luck.

Okay, a little over the top, maybe. But there’s some truth to the myth of the Indiana Jones-type travel journalist. Before the internet, these were people who sought disconnected adventure in khaki trousers and bucket hats, carrying a beat-up notebook and a keen sense of the boundary between adventure and danger, life and death.

We used to read about their far-away adventures in revered journals like National Geographic—journeys seemingly inaccessible to the common person. Expeditions too financially or logistically out of reach for the mere dreamers in suburbia. These were the intrepid, and they fully experienced their stories in distant lands: the hot and the cold environs, the uncomfortable, sweat-stained mattresses, the bug-swarmed tent lanterns, the glory, the mystery, and the misery altogether.

Experiencing deep travel always makes for the best adventure writing. The experience itself provides the plot, arc, climax, and conclusion. What wonders did you see? What surprises did you learn? How did you negotiate your way out of that tense situation with the locals? How did you talk your way onto a ride into the inner sanctum of someone else’s mysterious world?

Then came the internet and the resulting democratization and saturation of “destination marketing.” A few old-schoolers persisted and wrote for publications like Vice News or the early days of Slate and Matador. But the new fingertip access to geographic data was too powerful, and the travel genre became increasingly saturated with surface-level glossiness. Then came the listicles. Top 10 this, top 20 that, mostly written by people in home offices who had likely never been to these places.

Mobile tech enabled instant (i.e. Instagram) push-button content posting to the world, and the new “travel influencer” added an additional glossy sheen, smoothing over the grittiness that was traditional adventure travel journalism. This created a phenomenon: the popularity funnel. Stunning places became “Instafamous” and overrun with photo-op tourists wanting the selfie first and the experience second—people standing in lines to get the shot of a stunning overlook, careful to crop out the hundred other people standing by to create a false impression of remoteness and solitude. Then they post it to “the Gram” and feed the beast. They hope it goes viral, checking their engagement stats by the minute, and if it does, more people stream into the Instafamous funnel—people seeking to be in the picture they already saw, not venturing to find new secrets and different vantage points, not finding immersion, only seeking b-roll.

And now, there’s artificial intelligence. AI can remove the human from the equation altogether. Listicles previously compiled by deskbound humans are now created by the hundreds with a simple prompt to a synthetic super-brain. “Give me the ten best trails in every Western European country,” and in seconds you have a dozen or more posts ready to go, ready to feed the eternally hungry algorithms.

Feed the beast. More content, more speed, more data. Set the automation. It doesn’t even matter if the human behind the prompt knows the output—just get it out the door, get views, get watch time, get engagement…

But a snapback is happening. It turns out that many people have little patience for superficial AI slop. What was a novelty at first has turned into an annoyance, and it’s now shifting to simmering anger among the masses. The reason is simple: as consumers of adventure journalism, we want to live vicariously through the adventurer. We want to know that there was a human being swatting away those bugs, slogging through the muck, and standing on that stunning Irish sea cliff looking out over the North Atlantic. We want to know that the writer (or videographer or photographer) tasted and gutted that fried fish eyeball at the exotic food market.

People want their travel writing to be experienced and re-told by a human being. We are craving real stories again—stories told by the intrepid with ratty notebooks in hand. Travel, and especially adventure travel, is a human endeavor. If the storyteller didn’t drive the desert road or catch that elusive native trout, then the “story” is hollow. There’s no soul to it. No vibe. No authenticity.

We are craving authenticity in a world suddenly infested and inundated with soulless AI goop. And so, the pushback happening now is creating the beginning of a new golden age for travel writers, especially the more adventurous. A new generation of the intrepid is forming, paying homage to the trailblazers before humanity became enmeshed in the colossal digital web we created. We may use that connectedness to get our stories out, but we know that those stories must be experienced in the raw. We must go and feel that biting wind off the glacier, the spritz of warm saltwater over the reef, the flash of sun off the surf, and the uneasiness of a tent in bear country.

To tell the real travel stories, we must and will touch grass. Welcome to the new golden age of authentic travel journalism.

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