There's a few great pieces I've seen lately from Outside Magazine, with two personal essays from the "Guide to Life" October issue and a feature story that will be in the upcoming November issue.
The first piece to note here was by Hampton Sides with "Wake-Up Call: Surviving an Attack by Fresh-Eating Bacteria." It was about his brush with calamity and also included a very cool paragraph about past travel adventures done by the 51-year-old Sides and his family...
"In our late thirties and early forties, Anne, the boys, and I spent as much time as we could traveling as a family to unfamiliar places: Costa Rica, Japan, Kauai, a fish camp in Montana, an off-the-grid spot on Andros Island in the Bahamas. We rafted the Gunnison, Dolores, and Rogue Rivers and put in some quality time at the summer ski camps at Whistler and Mount Hood. Maybe it was the Guinness, but for me, our time of deepest bliss was the four months we lived in a thatch-roof house beside a castle on the west coast of Ireland, in a limestone paradise called the Burren."
The second excellent personal essay from this issue was from Mark Jenkins, a guy whose writing I like quite a bit and have posted on a few times previously. Jenkins recounts his spur of the moment unplanned "dirtbag road-trip" at the age of 48 and the message of "How to Get Up and Go" could very much be taken as an encouragement to not let excuses get in the way of doing the things you want to do.
The last piece to mention here was the feature "19: The True Story of the Yarnell Fire" by Kyle Dickman. It follows up on writing I posted on and linked to a few months ago about hotshot firefighters and the tragedy in Prescott, AZ and is a really thorough look at the events of that day.
