An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

Foxes have a cry that sounds a lot like a small child in great pain. They seem to particularly love letting loose with this cry in the middle of the night. At 2 AM I popped awake to the sounds of screaming, spent a little while listening intently for footsteps, in case the madman who was torturing children in the woods was coming for me next (BTW, there's always  the noise of something rustling about in the woods at night, and it's very easy to convince oneself that it's a madman coming for you). After a few minutes I managed to get my adrenaline level down and realize nothing was amiss, but it still took me a while to fall back asleep. At one point I tried one of the insomnia remedies I use at home, which was to listen to nature sounds through headphones, but it turned out that really wasn't an appropriate approach when the thing that had startled me in the first place was nature sounds. Instead I put on a podcast - my other nighttime balm dating back to the sleepless ...

Over the years I’ve backpacked, kayak camped, and car camped, but I’ve never tried bikepacking - that is, a camping trip by bicycle. I did do a couple of American Youth Hostels trips back in the 70’s, but those were hostel to hostel, not tent camping. Plus, they were such disasters that I don’t like thinking about them even today.   I have a goal of riding the entire Great Allegheny Passage (GAP) trail, which runs 150 miles from Cumberland, MD to Pittsburgh. Under normal circumstances the logistics of this trail are pretty easy - there are lots of towns along the way with services catering to trail users. Food and lodging abound. Unfortunately, right now is not normal circumstances, and any trip along the GAP would have to be much more self-sustained - tent camping rather than inns, and less reliance on restaurants. Things might get easier over time, but in the immediate term in the world of coronavirus, some of the more civilized options, which means more contact with peopl...