Pure Outside

Some days you go skiing and the snow is terrible. It’s far from the light fluffy amazingness that you can find on the best days. Some days you go hiking and it’s pissing down rain. It’s far from the bright warm sunshine that follows you around on the good days. Some days you go sailing [...]

Today my friend Jessica Glendinning lends her writing and outdoor skills to the blog. I first met Jessica at a conference in Portland called the World Domination Summit. Cool name right? Lots of cool people too. We got talking about the outdoors and I found out she co-owns an outdoor cooperative in Virigina. I had [...]

I’ve been following Lainy’s photography for a little while now and I’ve been impressed with what she’s come up with in a short amount of time. A few weeks ago I asked her if she would do a photo essay on the fall colours walking close to her home. You don’t have to go far [...]

I had the chance recently to try out Hi-Tec’s newest light hiking boots, the Sierra Lite I WP. My marketing spiel for them would be  something they, “pull together Hi-Tec’s advanced technology into comfortable, rugged, light-weight hiker.” Or something like that. Hiking boots are such a personal thing that I’m not going to say this boot is perfect [...]

Back in April some friends and I spent a few days out in the Carmanah Walbran Valley. These are some of the photos from the trip. Our first day we headed upstream from the campsite to do some exploring. There are massive trees everywhere. Particularly were the Three Sisters just feet from each other. There [...]

So you you’re thinking about going for a hike and you get excited. But then you start thinking about everything you need to find out. Where’s the best place to hike? How do I get there? Are there any important things I should know about the trail before I go? I’ve created a bit of a checklist [...]

There are so many terms out there to do with hiking. This is my stab at listing them all with a short description of what they mean. If you notice one is missing, please let me know in the comments at the bottom! The Hiking Glossary Alpine: Roughly the area on a mountain above the treeline. [...]

How closely do you time your runs? If you’re like me, up to year and a bit ago I never timed anything. I’d run a distance I thought was close to when I should run and call it a day. I didn’t really measure much. I guess that’s why my results were less than stellar [...]

When I first found the Julbo Nomad sunglasses I was a little skeptical. They were from a french company that I had never heard of, they were expensive, and they were a little different style than I was used to wearing. I was actually looking for some big white sunglasses at the time, so I [...]

The first thing I will say about this backpack is that if I had one for every adventure I’m doing right now it would be this one. That’s a pretty tall order for a backpack. It’s only a 33 litre bag so it’s not going to fit tons and tons of stuff for overnight hikes [...]