There's been three pieces of outdoor related writing I'm seen recently that I found particularly good and each from a writer I hadn't been familiar with.
I tend to link to and write about posts from a fairly small group of writers (as they're people who write for magazines I subscribe to, have twitter feeds I follow and whose writing I particularly like) so I enjoy reading something excellent from a writer who's new to me.
From the April issue of GQ was a feature by Bucky McMahon with "Heart of Sharkness" on surfers and sharks in the waters of Reunion Island off the coast of Africa. It was a solid piece that made me think of John Jeremiah Sullivan and his 2008 GQ story "Violence of the Lambs" (which was also included in his excellent book Pulphead that I wrote about here).
Two pieces from the May issue of Outside Magazine also stood out with one being a book excerpt about a 1983 whitewater rafting adventure and one a first person account of long-distance horse racing in Mongolia. The excerpt was by Kevin Fedarko with "Rocketing Into the Grand Canyon's Great Unknown" from his book The Emerald Mile and it struck me as compelling story of a near-death trip. The horse racing feature was an interesting one by Will Grant with "All the Jittery Horses: Racing the Mongol Derby" about Grant participating in a 9 day race across 1,000 kilometers of the land traveled by Genghis Khan.
