Wildlife
River Otters on the Trinity
A morning with a small volunteer otter survey on the upper Trinity River of northern California, where the species' return continues to outpace official monitoring.
Gear editor
Tomas Lendvai
Tomas Lendvai has been testing outdoor equipment, professionally and otherwise, since 1998. He owns sixty-one pairs of boots.
Beats
Published in Field Lantern
Skills
The Art of the Rest Step
On the steep upper third of Mount Hood's south side route in late May, Tomas Lendvai climbed for ninety minutes without stopping. He used the rest step on every footfall.
Gear Tested
Two knives on the Pacific Crest Trail, three hundred miles
Tomas Lendvai carried a small folding knife and a fixed-blade bushcraft knife for 300 miles of the southern PCT. One did most of the work. The other paid for its weight on a single afternoon.
Weather
Lightning on the Alpine Ridge
What lightning actually does on exposed terrain, and the small set of practices that reliably reduce the risk.
Maps & Routes
What GPX Files Leave Out
The GPX file format has, in twenty years, become the universal currency of digital route sharing. It also flattens the experience of a route into a thin sequence of points that omits most of what a good route description would carry.
Skills
Field-Repairing a Broken Trekking Pole
On a long carry out of the Wind River Range in September, Tomas Lendvai spent forty minutes splinting a snapped carbon pole with a tent stake, a strip of Tyvek, and four feet of duct tape.
Gear Tested
Trail-running shoes on wet New England rock, six months
Six months of slate, gneiss, and wet leaf litter across four pairs of low-drop trail shoes in the Berkshires and the Whites. What stuck. What slid. What came apart at the heel cup.