Dedication of the 3-mile loop to Winston Walker comes after a push to make national parks more inclusive
As a nature loving little girl, Jessica Newton never understood why the faces on information boards in the state and national parks she visited looked nothing like her.
“My parents would take me to these places and the platforms would tell you about a trail, or a person, but I’d never see anyone that looks remotely close to my color,” she said.
Continue reading...Rewilding has become a mantra in one Cairngorms glen – but some see initiatives to restore its forestland as a threat
Glen Feshie is one of the magnificent valleys on the north-west side of the Cairngorm massif where the forest has been released from the tyranny of grouse and deer. During the deer-stalking centuries of the 1800s and 1900s, there were 50 deer per square kilometre. Now there are one or two, and the critically endangered capercaillie are coming back. This is the place, I’ve heard, to look for the natural treeline in Scotland.
I arrive in the evening, the day before midsummer, and pitch my tent by the river. Scotland’s right to roam allows wild camping to an extent those south of the border can only dream of. The brown water is dark in the depths under the bridge, and cold. In the still-bright sunlight I walk up the valley and come to a spot where the path widens and a vista of sheer grey hills opens out. This was the setting for The Monarch of the Glen, a famous painting by Landseer of a princely 12-point stag framed by the crags above the valley.
Continue reading...The warm living room of Tété-Michel Kpomassie’s otherwise neat Parisian home has a coffee table in the middle of it piled high with keepsakes – a mountain of black and white pictures, letters and handwritten diaries. It’s an archive of one remarkable man’s intrepidly adventurous and unconventional life to date. Balanced on top of the overloaded files and folders sits a tattered book, its pages faded. On its cover is a portrait of an Inuit in a sealskin jacket, standing next to an icy shore. The title reads Les Esquimaux du Groenland à l’Alaska (The Eskimos from Greenland to Alaska). It’s a 1947 work of nonfiction authored by French anthropologist Robert Gessain.
Decades may have passed since the day Kpomassie first set his teenage eyes upon this image in his native Togo, but the 80-year-old remembers the precise moment as if it had happened just minutes before. How could he not? What he found inside has, since that day, consumed him entirely, shaping every chapter of his own story. He ran away from home at 16 to embark on an epic cross-continental mission that delivered him to Greenland, the world’s northernmost country. He was the first African man to set foot there. The adventure resulted in a travelogue, return visits and countless speaking invitations, and, more recently, a rather acrimonious divorce. Now, his very own sealskin jacket hangs by the door to his home in pride of place.
Continue reading...For bikers, combustive power is one of the thrills of a long-haul trip. But flat batteries and charging points will just become part of exciting new journeys
A full tank of gas, a twist of the wrist, the roar of the exhaust as you speed towards the horizon … These are the visceral touchstones of the motorcycling experience, and all are a direct product of petrol-fuelled power, as is much of the biker’s lexicon: “open it up”, “give it some gas”, “go full throttle”. For a motorcycle rider, as opposed to the modern car driver, the journey is a full-body communication game, constantly applying judgment, skill and nerve to control the thousands of explosions that are happening between your thighs in order to transport yourself, upright and in one piece, to your destination.
Yet the days of the internal combustion engine are numbered. By 2050 the European Commission aims to have cut transport emissions by 90%, and electric vehicle technology is striding ahead for cars, trucks, buses and even aircraft. But where does this leave the motorcycle? Can this romantic form of transport and its subcultures survive the end of the petrol age?
Continue reading...Armed with long experience, our writer gives the lowdown on getting there, the best equipment and picking your spot for a great night in the wild
When I bivvy I’m not in search of sleep. I know I’ll wake up frequently, feeling restricted by my sleeping bag. Bivvying is camping at its simplest: sleeping outside without a tent and minimal gear.
It isn’t about a comfortable night’s rest. It’s about squeezing an adventure into a humdrum week; it’s about being in nature, hearing hedgehogs snuffling and waking to the dawn chorus. It’s a short, sharp dose of escapism that has become even more restorative in the past 15 months. And, while I’ve bivvyed on Dartmoor, on Scotland’s west coast and in places in-between, most of the time I’ve been within 10 miles of my home in Bournemouth.
Continue reading...As a government civil servant, I was burnt out from working on Brexit and Covid and needed a change of scene. Trekking the length of Britain is just the tonic
It’s 7.30pm on 29 April and I’m standing alone on the highest hill in this part of Cornwall. The sun is bright and eager, dancing with dainty flashes on the waves west towards Newquay. But I’m wrapped in everything I have – two pairs of thick socks, leggings, trousers, T-shirt, two long-sleeved T-shirts, jumper, fleece, jacket, snood, hat – and still the wind reaches its long fingers down my neck to grip my spine. It is one degree above freezing; in less than a week it will snow on Dartmoor.
In fact, this is more than a hill. This is Castle an Dinas, one of those iron age forts to which schoolchildren are taken to be underwhelmed by ditches and mounds. The dog walkers who came up earlier weren’t cowed by antiquity: each allowed their charges to mess, tongues wagging. Watching the deposits stirs in me something I was repressing. For the four days I’ve been on the road, public toilets have been there when needed. A threshold is about to be crossed. I’m going wild.
Continue reading...Monisha Rajesh had a complex relationship with her parents’ homeland, until she saw all of Indian life played out on the country’s railway
Six-people deep, and growing by the second, the crowd tensed. A single knuckle pressed into my back and betel-nut breath filled my nostrils as a steady beat rose above the din. Against the peach pink of Mumbai’s evening skies, the commuter service curled into view, passengers hanging from the sides like moving livery. Braking with a wail and grind of metal, the train slowed into the station and I braced against the surge of bodies from behind. Like relay runners, they began to move before the train had stopped, reaching over my head at the same time as a torrent of polyester shirts and satchels thundered down from the open doorways.
A slice of papaya in one hand my bag gripped with the other, I battled through elbows, meaty shoulders and thick plaits slicked with coconut oil. In the crush the papaya was knocked to the ground and my sandal came off, but I made it on board and fell sideways into a seat as the train jerked away from the platform. Wiping someone else’s sweat from my arm, I watched fellow travellers scrabble for handholds, adjust saris and pull out phones before relaxing into the ride with a mix of relief and pride. I’d survived my first experience on the infamous Mumbai “locals”.
Continue reading...In an extract from her new book, the Kenyan writer reflects on how guidebooks to Africa, with their warnings of danger, instilled fear in her – until a solo trip to Burkina Faso
The pitch-black night of the Sahara does not yield to the sunlight until it is good and ready, and when it does, it flees so fast you would think the place is constantly bathed in blinding light. Stark sunrises turn the giant dunes dull brown for a scant few seconds; for a handful of minutes, as the sun is creeping up the sky, the sand glows.
Then the sky cracks open and turns brilliant blue, and everything around you will shimmer in response. Until that moment when the blue scares off the dark, the dusty roads leading from Gorom-Gorom to Oursi, a small town outside a small town in northern Burkina Faso, are shrouded in the desert’s secrecy, blanketed by inscrutable darkness and breathtaking silence. Six nights a week, that is.
Continue reading...Mountaineering is a physical pursuit demanding an affinity for suffering. Where it is cerebral is in its requirement of good judgment, most importantly in extreme situations when the mind is most clouded and consequences of bad decision-making tend to multiply.
Considering risks requires being honest with yourself. At what climbers call the objective level, that involves assessing dangers you may encounter – weather, avalanches, poor rock, even whether there will be overcrowding on your route.
Continue reading...