A uniformed policeman with slick, coiffed hair combed straight up in the Iraqi style came into the waiting room and said, “Anna! Please come.” He held a sheaf of papers in front of him and I could see they included our visa applications. I jumped out of my chair and hurried to the front of the room. “Karen! Ina!” he continued. We gathered in front of him. “We need original,” he said. I didn’t understand at first. Original? Original what? Karen got it first. “Hotel reservation?” she asked. He nodded. Karen messaged Haidar, our guide, who was waiting for us outside the Basra airport. I wondered what would have happened if we didn’t have Haidar. How could we possibly get an original copy of our hotel reservation if we couldn’t get out of the airport? We sat back down to wait the half hour Haidar said it would take for…
Breakfast in the basement of our Mazar i Sharif guesthouse felt like a celebratory reunion. I hugged Robyn and Matt, whom I hadn’t seen in over a year,…
“We should have brought snowshoes,” I gasped as I climbed over another deadfall and plunged into the snow on the other side. “Yeah, I know,” said Mark, sheepishly.…
The piercing tone of a cell phone text message woke me from a dead sleep. I peered at the clock; 3:15 am. That could only be a rescue…
March 11, 2020, Las Vegas, Nevada I bumped elbows with my colleague Cliff Dickinson and we laughed. It was the fourth or fifth time someone had bumped elbows…
It seems everyone is doing Zoom social hours now. As the Covid-19 lockdowns began, Zoom socializing was a lot of fun for me. Now, two months into it,…
Most articles you read about virtual conferencing, whether for video conferencing or just audio conferencing, advise you to use the mute function when you’re not speaking. If the…
I have long advocated that remote or partially remote teams build virtual water cooler time into their meetings: five to ten minutes of unstructured check-in time in which…
March 15, 2002 I saw Bob fishtailing in front of me. I had no idea why; there didn’t appear to be anything in front of us. He’d been…
“Since this is our first night for the whole group to be together, let’s go around the table,” our Inertia trip leader TK said. “Let’s each tell about…how…
I expected the Yemeni border to be scarier. Even the Oman border, where two of my travelmates were abruptly interrogated about why they had Afghanistan stamps in their…
In September of 2018, I traveled to Tasmania to volunteer with Wombat Rescue Tasmania, a group working to combat mange. The following article was written about one small…
I arrived at the Way Inn after nine hours of flying, seven hours on a bus and a 40-minute taxi ride. The setting was magnificent; at 12,000 feet,…
If you were given a choice between breaking your arm in a mountain bike crash, having your fingernails pulled out by a foreign interrogator, or racing in Primal…
On Monday, two hikers from Michigan went missing on Mount Holy Cross, near Vail Resort. They were last seen at an altitude of 13,300 feet, close to the…
Originally published as a bi-weekly blog series on the Subaru Primal Quest website in 2005 and 2006 December 4, 2005 Ask adventure racers why they do it, and…
The kitchen of the Medicine Buddha Monastery was like everything else in Bhutan: simple, traditional, immaculate, but with occasional and startling touches of the contemporary. The wood stove…
I stood in the deep, untracked snow between the edge of the snowmobile road and Turkey Creek ravine, because from there I could see everything: the crew on…
December, 2001 I arrived on the South Island of New Zealand almost a month ago, flying into Christchurch from Australia via Auckland. My first stop was the mountainous…
I have never been a fan of science fiction, so on the surface it seems strange that I should love Netflix’s Sense8 so much. To quote the television…