Thursday, December 12, 2013

Great outdoor adventure writing - by Kearns & Holland & Donnellly

Three recent pieces of outdoor adventure writing struck me as noteworthy with each from a writer I haven't linked to previously.

For Field & Stream, Colin Kearns wrote "Life, Death and Steelhead" about Joe Randolph, a fishing guide in Oregon who took his life in November of 2012. Similar to a feature on Randolph in Outside Magazine a few months ago, the story by Kearns is about both the renowned river guide and the writer fishing with him. It's an excellent portrait that Kearns provides and also interesting to me was seeing a feature story by someone who I'd previously known of as an editor rather than longform writer. I haven't looked to see if he's published many other features, but it was really solid work on Randolph.

The second excellent piece to mention here was also written by someone I was familiar with (in this case as a writer for Outside), Eva Holland. Posted to the AOL Weather site, she did "Chasing Alexander Supertramp" and just as in the piece by Kearns, the writer is in the story as Holland went to the interior of Alaska to write about people taking the oftentimes dangerous path to the abandoned bus where Supertramp died in 1992. Born as Christopher McCandless, his story was told in the 1996 Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild that in 2007 was made into a movie. It's such an interesting piece of writing from Holland in it's portrayal of people connecting with an ideal and the ramifications of that on their safety as well as on other people.

The last outdoor story I found of note lately was more of a straight reported piece rather than narrative, but tremendously interesting nonetheless. For the Detroit News, Francis Donnelly wrote "Michigan hunter survives 7 days in Alaska wilds" about Adrian Knopps and his tale of survival in Southeast Alaska. Just amazing that Knopps made it through and the story was definitely compelling reading.