Last year, my new year resolution was to go camping at least once every month of the year. I finished just in the nick of time, camping on the night between December 30th and 31st. I am continuing in my quest to perfect sleeping in my car. I am convinced that this is a key part of week night camping. Without the time that is involved in finding a tent pad, setting up the tent, packing everything carefully in a bag the next morning, and other general campsite chores, I think I can spend more time exploring or swimming or skiing or whatever I want to do.

I tested two styles of ice protection two nights ago. For some context, I have slept in my car several times, but I have found that even with cracking the windows open, a lot of condensation accumulates on the windows. In temperatures below 0 C, the moisture freezes, so in the morning it is necessary to scrape the insides of all the windows with a credit card or ski scraper, leaving shavings all over the dashboard and seats. Once the car warms up, this melts and makes everything wet. Boo.

Back to my plan–I brought a small pile of thumb tacks with me. In the back seat, I tacked a bedsheet to the ceiling. The sheet was wide enough that the sheet draped over the windows. My theory is that with some insulation over the windows, the condensation will gather on the sheet rather than on the glass. Additionally, it may serve to keep the inside of the car slightly warmer. The bed sheet was generally unsuccessful. I think there was probably a little less condensation than there would have been normally, but there was still enough that the rear windshield was not clear of ice until after I had been driving down the road for about an hour.

Ice protection type two: fleece tie blanket. The idea is the same. I tacked one edge of the blanket to the ceiling of the car across the front two seats. This separated the cockpit of the car from the sleeping area in the back. The ultimate goal of this was successful: the front three windows were clear of frost when I woke up. However, it was a bit of a struggle to get the blanket to hang up with tacks. It was pretty heavy. I am thinking Velcro may do the trick long term.

Don’t ever let stigma stop you from doing something. You can consider it, but make an independent decision as to whether it is worthwhile or not. Sleeping in a car can be cool.

Now I stand one step closer in my quest for the weeknight camping trip. Try not to get stuck out there, but remember; if you do get stuck, there have been worse things!

Being around a lot of people can get real busy. If you need a break, go outside. There are usually fewer people out there. And more cats. Especially if your family lives on a farm.

As promised in the last post, I went for a run outside (9:00pm, 3 days before the winter solstice) in the dark. It was beautiful.

The Michael mentioned in the last post taught me a wonderful practice called gratitudes. It is as simple as it sounds. Before we eat together, we tell each other something that we are grateful for. It is simple, but there is something powerful about telling somebody what you are grateful for.

To sum up my thoughts from my first night run in Hinckley, I want to send out a couple gratitudes.

1. I am grateful that I can genuinely enjoy running.

2. I am grateful that the moon is bright enough that I didn’t need my headlamp.

3. I am grateful for Lisa, a friend from Norway. I suppose that she learned to love the night out of necessity, living so close to the arctic circle, but for the year that she lived in the states, she was always telling me not to be afraid of the night. She seemed to be bewildered at our American fear of the dark. She was (and is still?) a night owl, and would be ready for anything, regardless of the hour. Anyway, I thought about her and how she isn’t afraid of anything as far as I could see. Thanks for teaching me how to enjoy the world, even if it did take me 6 years to figure out what you were saying!

“It’s strange how you never quite get used to the world at night. I have seen moonlight strong enough to cast shadows any number of times. And the wind is the same wind, rustling the same leaves, night or day. … I always felt like an intruder then, and I still do, as if the darkness had a claim on everything, one that I violated just by stepping out my door.”

-Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

Why are children afraid of the dark? Why is the nighttime so foreboding? I too feel the claim the night holds over the world after dark. I feel more intrusive if I go outside with the intention of simply being outside, rather than making a straight shot for my car. Who teaches that?

One of the biggest challenges I have faced this winter is darkness. I am set to go outside at night. I have a headlamp for running, I have flashing lights on my bike that make me look like a disco party to passers by. But still, here I am, sitting on the floor in my artificially illuminated living room, typing about why I should be outside right now.

It’s dark. It was dark when I biked to work today. It was dark when I biked home today. I haven’t seen natural light except for the moon in over 48 hours. Sometimes it’s real damn tough to keep your head up when it is always dark.

But don’t let that stop you. I am writing this mostly so that when I am done writing, I will be morally forced to get off my lazy bum and go outside for a short run or ride or whatever. We will see just how long the article gets……

Last weekend, I was running at night and saw the orange glow in the sky, saw the cliffs illumined by the city lights bouncing off the clouds, and stopped in my tracks. It was beautiful. After having run that trail many times in the winter and the summer, I realized I had never been to that spot at night. And I was lucky to be there. I knew it. Sometimes I look back at pictures and realize, “wow, that was actually a cool experience. I just thought it was normal back then, but now I understand.” Last weekend, I looked at the world in the dim light, and knew instantly that few people had ever seen Duluth like this.

I called my friend Michael. I knew he was cooling down and about to relax into the couch with a movie after a long day. He deserved that couch, that 90 minutes of relaxation and warmth, and the crackling fire place. I almost didn’t call him. I have been there too. But I called him. He needed to see this (and he had a new cool camera!)

Like the hero that he is, he showed up at the trailhead 20 minutes later, with a stool and 5-gallon bucket to use as a tripod, and camera in hand. I led him through the woods and back to the spot where I had been stopped in my tracks half-an hour before.

Yes, this photo is completely staged. That’s okay. Sometimes photography is about catching the moment, capturing candid photos about what people do in their everyday lives. But sometimes, photography is about showing what can be real. It is about augmenting our realities and proving that the world is beautiful. Even at night.

Although I sometimes feel like an intruder for going outside at night, I also feel like an intruder in some ways when I show up unannounced at my best friend’s house. We are still friends.

Ever since I graduated from college, our family has adopted the tradition of harvesting Christmas trees as a family. Previously, we had received trees from a friend who has a tree farm, and before we met him, we wavered between going to various tree farms and buying them at a place like Menards. It has been a fun way to simply be together as a family, without the logistics of cooking food or cleaning the house. Finally, my mom will relax for a few hours!

The national forest service has a program where you an buy a sticker for $5 and attach it to the tree you cut down for your house. They teach you how to identify spruces and firs, and relevant information about the two (spruces will leave needles all over the place!)

Each year, my sister scans her map of the arrowhead region of northern Minnesota, looking for forest roads with clearings such as logged areas or bogs. We have found these areas preferable because the young trees have sunshine from all sides. In areas where they are part of the underbrush, the trees are often lopsided, tall and scraggly, or have weak limbs due to the lack of wind. This year, we traveled to a road about an hour north of Duluth and drove the truck 20 minutes past where the last snowplow drove to find our trees. The only company we had were the footprints of snowshoe hares, deer mice, and the deer themselves.

The best part of harvesting our trees from the forest: it gives us an excuse to get off the road in the middle of the forest and just wander around the woods for the morning. There are no signs marking spots to stop and no trails to take to where the “right” sized trees are standing. We just drive until we see a grove of short trees, and then look for a spot on the shoulder to pull over. Once parked, we just jump over the ditch and walk through the knee-deep snow (there was only an inch in town!) to find the trees we thought we saw from the road.

One of the essential parts of picking out a tree, whether in a tree farm or in the woods, is to find your tree right away, but then to check every other tree before cutting down the first one you looked at. I’m not sure why, but it always happens this way.

Wandering and looking at all the trees is one of the best parts of the day. I get to practice identifying spruces and firs (starts with letter f, so does the word flat which describes its needles), along with aspen (you can tell it’s an aspen because of the way it is), birch (like paper), red pine (needles in bunches of 2), white pine (needles in bunches of 5), and dogwood (underbrush with bright red bark). Besides trees, there were a couple of other pleasant surprises today: the deer beds and the hoarfrost. In the midst of our wandering, we found some spots where the snow was melted and pressed down where the deer had spent the night. We found two spots near to each other. Also, we found an overlook where the branches were think with the hoarfrost that comes from fog freezing onto the tree branches.

Today was an excellent day to explore the forest (just like every day.) Get out there!

For the first time in my life, I thought to myself, I would love to just run for a whole day. Then I looked in the mirror and asked myself, why would any human even remotely interested in self-preservation have a thought like that?

Hint: it’s not about physical self-preservation.

It’s not as crazy as it may seem at first. Yes, running for an entire day is a bit excessive, but not to the degree that most people think it is. There is no distance requirement, no racing, and probably would be a fair amount of walking. The beauty of ultra-running is that you don’t have to go fast. I like to stop at overlooks and watch the clouds for a few minutes before I keep running. It will take a physical toll on the legs, but I find running 50k easier than trying to push myself to run fast for even 5k.

When I think of doing an ultramarathon, I am not there for the sake of running. To me, it is like driving through a national park, except without the car. I am sightseeing, sharing my day with the land and the trees and listening to the birds.

I placed well at a 50k once, and that was fun, but I don’t think I was near the front because of superior fitness, training, or discipline. I was more relaxed than every other person that I talked to. While the guy I was running next to at mile 15 was worrying about the next big climb, I was enjoying the challenge of jumping over the rocks and around trees to get down the hill. Being relaxed allowed me to live in the present. I was as much a part of the trail as I was a runner on a course. Without having to worry about the time, how fast I am going, or what the next big challenge will be, it was easier to smile and enjoy the snow falling through the cedar trees.

Living in the present is difficult to do. While I am at work, I am constantly thinking about what I will be doing for my next class, which students are missing assignments, how to find a stapler that doesn’t jam every time somebody tries to use it, and so on. It seems impractical to try to be a teacher and live completely in the present. That would require a level of organization that is unrealistic (at least for a second-year teacher).

Running is the reprieve from the chaos of working with 85 people ages 13 to 15. I don’t have to worry about anybody else’s problems. It is just me. I know what my shortcomings are, and they don’t matter when I start to run. When I run, I have one job,—Run.

Although I do work with people all day, solo time is very important to my mental health. On days when the strain of being around 100 different people with needs very different from my own gets overwhelming, its no wonder why I would think to myself–I would like to run for a whole day.

Here is a little background into the life of Nate. I grew up in Duluth, the outdoor-loving, liberal, environmentalist capital of northern Minnesota. I basically only cared for the outdoors as a place to go running or biking during high school. I was that guy–the one who would ride his bike right through the mud puddles and tear up the recently installed mountain biking trails, because I wanted to splash in the mud.

Proceed to college. St Olaf is in close competition with Carleton and Gustavus for the Southern MN hippy crown. Vegetarians and Vegans abound, and nobody stops to consider the strangeness that the “grains” line is longer than the “grill” line in the Caf. I became a Vegetarian-lite when living there, and also launched into an environmental studies degree (almost) after taking Intro to Environmental Studies my first semester there.

That was fine, but my transformation wasn’t complete until I moved west after graduating. I grew my hair out unit it was about 15 inches long. Going into teaching science, I knew that my hippy self was going to save the world with bike lanes, chemistry lessons about greenhouse gasses, and my zero-emission propaganda I ate up from the environmental studies department.

But to improve my odds of getting a job, I cut my hair.

Rural Minnesota doesn’t look like a community of environmentalists, but I have been surprised, My students know way more than I do about the movements of the deer in the area. Some of my co-workers can name every fish that swims in any lake within a 30 mile radius. One of my students is testing the Mississippi River at every major confluence in Minnesota to compare the phosphate and nitrate levels due to agriculture for her science fair project. I may still drive a Prius, but I know not to judge the person who shows up in a ’95 Silverado to go muddin’.

I had never considered four wheeling as a form of conservation before moving here. I frequently was annoyed by the whine of the engine, and the large ruts left in the woods by the machinery during my run, but just as a four wheeler is to a bike, so a bike is to a hiker. Such is a hiker to a deer. What makes the hiker more holy than the four wheeler, when both are equally terrifying to the deer?

Depending on where you live, environmentalism looks different. On the North Shore, the state parks reign supreme. Stay on the trails, and don’t move firewood. At St Olaf, carbon footprints are actually something people talk about. In Hinckley, people take care of the woods so that when hunting season comes around, they have something to bring home on deer day (yes, we get the first Monday of deer season off of school).

As a trail runner and a mountain biker, I have seen the “peacefulness” debate from both sides–I have done more than my fair share of complaining about four wheeler trails and snowmobile trails from my bike because motorized recreation is loud. I didn’t think about my own position in the spectrum of environmental user groups until the Duluth Traverse mountain bike trail was built. In many places, it crowds out the Superior Hiking Trail, bringing with it the clanking of chains, the monotony of needless switchbacks and a general feeling of development in otherwise secluded woods. As a biker, the trail is sweet, but as a hiker, I feel like I have to be much more aware of my surroundings to avoid getting run over by a biker.

In the end, how much different is hiking, biking and four wheeling? If the goal is to conserve the forest and keep the woods woods, then everybody stands on the same side of the debate.

It took a while to get used to the idea that motorized recreation is environmentalism. I experienced superiority complex of coming out from a liberal arts college and into a community that doesn’t have a lot of people walking around in minimalist shoes and buying vegan snacks. I might be the closest thing Hinckley has to a vegetarian. But my minimalist shoes and almost-vegetarian diet aren’t what make me an environmentalist. It’s my interaction with the outdoors that makes me an environmentalist.

My takeaway message is this: regardless of where you are, the best way to take care of the world is to be present in it. If you don’t interact with something, you are not going to prioritize it. The vegan-shake-yoga-every-morning people are no more righteous than the hunters, fishers and dirt-bikers. In fact, if your vegan-shake doesn’t get you outside, then the orange uniform takes the environmentalist title.

When you take a walk in the city park, you are promoting the outdoors. If you ride your bike, you are promoting the outdoors. If you drive your car through a state park or national park, you are promoting the outdoors. If you bring your daughter out hunting with you, you are promoting the outdoors. Get outside and do stuff.

I have recently read a few articles on how to sleep in a car. I have tried it three times before, twice with another person, and now am in the middle of doing it for the fourth time. The verdict so far–a little tight in the headspace compared to a tent, but otherwise great!

I used to be very self-righteous about only camping in the back-country. Staying at a campground wasn’t really camping. Well, I am happy to announce that those days are over! I am shamelessly camping inside of my car tonight, not even setting up the tent that I am laying next to.

Now, I can operate in the backwoods and dirt roads in my “mobile command center!” My car works perfectly for keeping me dry like a tent would, and I don’t have to worry about the roof caving in if I get a significant amount of snow tonight (I might get stuck at this campground, but there have been worse things…).

One of the things that keeps me from camping on occasion is the work I need to get done at home. It has kept me tethered to my desk in my room, or to the library with WiFi. It finally crossed my mind the other day–I don’t even pay for WiFi at my house! Why do I feel like I need to be at a place with WiFi on the weekend to get stuff done? Enter-Mobile Command Center! My Priusmobile can contain all my work needs inside my school backpack in the passenger seat, as well as the hiking/camping/climbing gear that I might need in the back seat! I can do work in a state forest campground!

I am aware that I need to use this new discovery with caution–it could be easy to start bringing work with me on vacation all the time, and that is not the intended outcome. My goal, by implementing the Mobile Command Center, is to let me get outside more than I would have before! I can experience things like what are posted in the photos here on a regular day, possibly even –gasp– a weeknight!

The goal is to get outside and do stuff. People care about the things they interact with, so the more people can interact with the woods, the better it is for the preservation of the woods! Go hunt! Go car camping! Camp in your car if you want! Drive the scenic route. Anything that gets you to enjoy the outdoors!

Happy trails.

Today I struggled.

It’s okay to have a day that you don’t look back to with fondness. Everybody has them. Some people look like they don’t, but they are no exception. They don’t all look the same, and people don’t always respond the same way to them, but the truth is that everybody has struggles.

Today was a day where I was caught in the trap of being unprepared. These days are much more exhausting than the days where I am prepared. Therefore, I tend to label them a “bad day.” Many people fall into this trap including myself, today.

When I started writing this article, I titled it “Bad Days,” but as I wrote about it, I realized that “bad” is a fairly useless adjective. It doesn’t tell you anything about my day, except that I was displeased with it. Exhausting day, or unprepared day, or even I fucked up today are better ways of describing today.

So I offer you this: if you have a “bad” day, write about it. Write on a napkin, in a journal, or on a computer, and then try to decide if your day was really just “bad,” or if there are other words or emotions that you can use to describe how you feel.

Then acknowledge your emotions. I spent the first 20 years of my life trying to hide most of my emotions. Now I am having a really difficult time finding them. As it turns out, I am good at hiding stuff. Each time I can verbalize or describe out loud how I feel, it helps me to deal with that emotion. In a sense, I am making emotions more logical. The scientist in me likes that, because logic is something I am used to dealing with.

I know that emotions are okay to feel, all of them, because otherwise I wouldn’t have them. Positive feelings aren’t superior to negative feelings, they are different. We need the negatives to enjoy the positives, just like we need the clouds to love the sun. The overcast days make the sunny days that much more precious. Each has their own style and beauty, time, and place. Acknowledge them and experience them.

Sometimes it is easiest to start out with “bad,” just to get the ball rolling, but as soon as you are ready, replace “bad” with something you can use to help you. While your at it, try to say something other than “good” next time somebody asks you how your day is.

Post-work and pre-work adventures are the most underrated form of adventure. It seems to be often discredited because of the limited time, the difficulty of getting to a “sublime” location, and the lack of daylight, especially in the northern winters.

Last year, I spent a disproportionate amount of time inside during the winter because I was tired, and had to drive almost 30 minutes to the nearest ski trails. This winter, however, I am starting the season prepared. I come armed with a gravel bike equipped with headlights and taillights, and a headlamp suited for running. I have scoped out the parks near my town, and become familiar with some of the gravel roads nearby.

Getting out during the week also is a way that I use to remind myself about the important things–that is, celebrating the small things. Sometimes, it is the short bike ride during dusk, or the plain flat dirt-road run that allows me to retreat into my thoughts and just enjoy the crisp autumn air.

Just don’t forget, stop and smell the roses, or watch the sunset. It happens everyday; try not to miss it!