This originally appeared in The Lily, a Washington Post magazine. The rally began at noon with the clamor of dozens of motorcycles, and ended with the release of purple and white balloons into the afternoon sky. On Saturday, hundreds of people gathered in the parking lot of the Walmart at 5655 E. Sam Houston Parkway, the scene of Jazmine Barnes’s […]
This appeared first on The Trek. Eric Heber is an Alabama native who has lived in Louisiana for 18 years. He began hiking just seven years ago in the Kisatchie National Forest, a 604,000-acre wilderness park spanning central and north Louisiana. Quickly enamored, he headed west for more austere trails, eventually making his way to a 13,000-foot summit in Colorado’s Triangle […]
This originally appeared in The Trek. You may see them infrequently. You may wonder at their skill or endurance. If you’re the average AT thru-hiker—young and male—you may worry about their safety and health. Don’t. Women 50 and over have as much strength and determination as any long-distance hiker. Most of them have faced one of the greatest challenges of […]
I hiked with puppies! Excited, yipping, furry balls of fun. Or so I thought. I was on a solo overnight backpacking trip in the Kelly section of the Lone Star Hiking Trail. The Kelly section is in the Sam Houston National Forest, roughly 90 miles north of my home in southeast Houston. My hike had taken me down a singletrack […]
Call me a snowflake. I own it. At some point in the latter days of the 2016 election, some right-wing Twitter users created an artificial identity divide, calling themselves “deplorables” and Trump critics “snowflakes.” If one is a snowflake simply by virtue of anger at injustice, watch me melt. On the evening of November 8, 2016, as commentators on CNN […]
