Ryan Jordan

High Lakes Tenkara

October 3, 2014 Tonight I heated a flat slab of granite in the firepit, then used the rock to plank-cook two salted tenkara-caught cutthroat trout for dinner. // Last night was windy, but the temperature warmed before morning. I didn’t have to sleep with my clothes on all night, and my socks dried out so […]

Finding Lightning

It’s not hard to find something if you know where to look. After all, Lightning Lake is on the map, you can get GPS coordinates for it, and you can see it with Google Earth. However, Lightning Lake has a long and storied history among Golden Trout fishermen and backcountry addicts as being notoriously difficult […]

The Certain Uncertainty of Off-Trail Travel

Planning off-trail travel is sometimes an exercise in theory. You really don’t realize how much of it is entertainment until your feet are on the ground. Much of the time, in rather short order, you ditch your plans, open your eyes, and adapt. If there is ever a time when you go into a route […]

Packrafting the Smith River: Day 4

Packrafting the Smith River: Day 4 Gusty winds blew across the bench above the river where we were camped last night at Rattlesnake Bend. They swirled around unpredictably and I slept with one eye open wondering if one of the big limbs belong to the fir tree sheltering my bivy sack was going to come […]

Packrafting the Smith River: Day 3

I’ve always held fast to the idea that spending time in the wilderness offers the clarity of thought that comes with having to make fewer inane decisions, being insulated from the incessant distractions of information bombardment and technology access, ridding oneself of the trivial urgency that demands the same level of excitement from you as […]