Issue 220 - The One With Your New Adventure Travel Bucket List

December 22, 2020

Kirsten Mills

Dec 22, 2020

Hope you’re taking a break this holiday week! Last issue for the year is tomorrow.

- Kirsten

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Final Poll Of 2020:

What is your favourite Holiday movie?

🚐 National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
🔫 Die Hard
🏚 Home Alone
🧝 Elf
📖 A Christmas Story
🎅 A Christmas Carol

Leave a comment below if you have another favourite…I can only fit 6 on the list!

Results on Wednesday.

Play More: Your New Adventure Travel Bucket List

Map with adventure travel items on it. Camera, notebook, magnifying glass — Photo by Dariusz Sankowski on Unsplash

The vaccine is finally here! I can’t wait to get poked! 😳 That’s not what I meant.

We can finally “for real” start to plan our travel adventures again. Hopefully, by 2022, we will be flying to exotic places, repelling into active Hawaiian volcanoes, surfing Asian tsunamis and van-life-ing it across Central America.

This post from Outside Online is a good starting place for inspiration with 23 ideas to get our creative travel juices flowing. They seem to be all in the U.S., but depending on how things unfold with the vaccine, we may have to stick closer to home in 2021 and then really break out in 2022. We Canadians are very creative, so we should have no trouble finding the North of the Border alternative to each of the adventures listed. (13 min read)

As always, I give you my favourite:

#16 Cross a Mountain Range on a Bike: There’s something so satisfying about a point-to-point mountain-bike ride, especially when it takes you over a massive range. We recommend the 36-mile ride from Rollinsville, Colorado (about 22 miles west of Boulder), across the Continental Divide and into the ski town of Winter Park. You’ll ascend a pleasantly steady 3,200 feet up an old railroad grade, peaking out around 11,700 feet and taking in classic high-alpine views. Traverse a dramatic set of trestles near the top, then descend a dirt road (with the option to jump onto singletrack) into Winter Park on the other side.

Let me know your fav through the comments below.

Do Better: The Search Engine That Plants Trees

I was listening to a new podcast (new to me, but they’ve been recording it since August) called How To Save The Planet and they started talking about my treehugger search engine that I posted about way back in Issue 191.

Have a listen to the December 17th episode, where they investigate the truth behind the search engine called Ecosia. It’s essentially just a Chrome extension that replaces Google as your search engine and ultimately plants trees from the ad revenue generated when you use it (I’ve planted 8 so far!). In the podcast, they determined that Ecosia is on the “up and up”…they plant trees all over the world and give away almost all of their profit for the climate cause. Glad to hear!

From MTN Impact (then we were called TDT) Issue 191: How many Google searches do you do a day? Me? I am an obsessive Googler (is that a word?) because I always need to know the answer immediately, so maybe 100? That would plant two trees per day if I switched my search engine to Ecosia. They use ad revenue from searches to plant trees. (2 min Read)

Good Links 🔗

Recreation Controversy: US Senate Considers Bill Ending Ban on Mountain Bikes in Wilderness Areas (4 min read)

Stay Fit: 10 Ways to Take Your Workout Outdoors (4 min read)

Coffee Break Video: Called “Freeze”, the freeski athlete Tobi Tritscher and filmmaker Björn Hunger decided to produce a tribute to the most important element of life: water. (3 min watch)

People and Places: Ski Towns and the Ski Bums Who Staff Them, Ponder The Strangest Season. (8 min read)

Food: My Five Favorite Hiking Foods That I Eat Every Day. (4 min read)

How To: Winter Biking: An In-Depth Guide To Biking In Cold Weather. (11 min read)

Coffee Break Video: This is a must-see…Stunning glacier cave in Iceland. (20 sec Reddit video)

People: Viv has a big cat for us:

Viv K @viv_iam

Here are some pics of who belonged to the tracks from my last post. He was not lingering, hence the less than sharp images. My guess is a male, but 🤷🏻‍♀️. Only passed one camera even tho he meandered a lot (right beside cabin). #mountainlion #cougar #albertawildlife 🦁🐾💪

Deals: 5 Cozy Deals from Gear Junkie…Greg recommends the Teva Ember Moc Slippers as a camping shoe - 20% off. (2 min read)

Gear: The KORE Initiative is a strategy to attract gear builders, designers and creators in the outdoor recreation industry to BC's Kootenay area…that’s where we live! See them on Instagram and Twitter below.