A Trail of Ghosts
Note: This piece was part of winning entries in Best of the West (2nd Place) and SPJ Northwest Excellence in Journalist (1st Place). Doan Nguyen was sufficiently “worked up,” as she put it, by the time we reached Nihonmachi (Japantown) Alley, a history-filled thoroughfare in...
‘Nature Keeps Me Grounded’
It’s hard to say how or why Chevon Powell was granted a rebirth so close to the beginning of her life. She was only 5 months old when her family’s Houston apartment burned down. She was rescued after suffering first- and second-degree burns on about...
Taylor Finds Green Orgs Dropping Ball on Diversity
Back in the early 1980s, during an undergraduate environmental studies class, Dorceta Taylor asked a question that would whisk her onto a path leading, in recent years, to groundbreaking research on diversity in environmental organizations. Taylor realized about midway through the course at Northern Illinois...
Long Trails with Liz Thomas
by Liz Thomas for Backpacker Magazine328 pages, paperback: $24.95 Falcon Guides, 2017 We both have Japanese mothers, a love of the outdoors and Ivy League educations. But when I first met Liz “Snorkel” Thomas, I discovered one major difference between us, besides, er, gender: She...
Urban Thru-Hiking Trail Blazer
With the sun about to kiss the horizon, Liz Thomas (trail name: Snorkel) needs the last rays to illuminate her path. She is ascending and descending steps during an urban thru-hike in Seattle, one of the hilliest and most public-staircased cities in the country. This...
Audubon Helps Green a City Girl
I am by nature a city girl. I enjoy bright lights and long walks down populated concrete sidewalks while street musicians fill the air with tunes. I am from Chicago, land of blues and backyard barbecue smells, where as a child I played double-dutch near...