I think ego is a dangerous but necessary partner for a journalist. Too much of it makes you careless, leads you to make dangerous errors, and generally strips you of the self-awareness necessary to function as a respectable human being. But show me a member of the media who says they don’t get a sense of satisfaction from seeing their byline in print or their face on screen, and I’ll show you a liar.
Too, a little bit of ego can be an inoculation against quitting when the going gets hard. And I think that for almost all of us in the profession, the going in 2025 was hard indeed. While there are some bright spots, journalism has felt like it’s been under almost constant existential threat since the mid-to-late aughts, when the digital media boom cooled. Add in the rise of AI slop, a difficult economy made more difficult by tariffs, a political environment that’s hostile, among many, many other things, to the basic idea of the press, and the mental health hazard inherent in a job that requires you to mainline the world’s worst news almost nonstop, and you can start to see why the journalists you know are, well, the way we are.
So go easy on me if I take what opportunities I can to brag a bit: By the numbers, 2025 was my most successful year ever as a writer. While I can’t share internal metrics here, suffice to say that the number of visitors who read something I wrote for Backpacker this year was larger than the populations of all but a small handful of American cities.
Many of those stories were fairly ordinary, workmanlike ones, the kind of service that has to get written at a magazine. (Among other things, I’m the author of our regular Deal of the Week posts.) But while I’m happy to have done all of them, there are a few stories I’m especially proud of—deeply reported, carefully written stories I’ll be returning to long after this year. These are my favorite outdoor stories I wrote in 2025.
“I’m Afraid People Will Die Because of This”: Rangers Sound the Alarm Over Mass Firings
In February, the federal government faced a self-inflicted crisis as the self-dubbed Department of Government Efficiency enacted sweeping and sometimes legally questionable cuts across it. America’s public lands infrastructure was especially hard-hit, with both the National Park Service and the Department of Agriculture–home of the Forest Service–losing roughly a fifth of their full-time staff. I put out a call for fired and current government workers to tell me about their jobs and their fears about the knock-on effects of the losses. Nearly twenty, representing everything from front-line rangers and technicians to a lawyer who investigated waste and corruption in the Interior Department, did.
“The Only Thought in My Mind Was to Survive”: Hiker Recounts Narrow Escape from Los Angeles Wildfire
When the Palisades Fire, one of the costliest in California history, struck in January, some of the few witnesses were a small group of hikers who were in Temescal Canyon when the smoke started and caught their escape on video. Kai Cranmore shared the story of one of the closest calls to come out of the disaster.
Land Snorkeling Is the New Trend That’s Taking Hikers Deeper
Never heard of land snorkeling? Neither had I, until a pitch about it from American Prairie landed in my inbox. Regardless, you’re probably an old hand at it. The basic idea: Rather than hiking a predetermined route with an objective in kind, you wander overland, paying close attention to the plants, animals, and geological features that surround you, as a snorkeler might on a reef. Sounds simple, but in an era where toxic productivity is invading our leisure time, could it be the shot of mindfulness we need?
New Tariffs Could Hike Prices on Your Favorite Ultralight Backpacking Gear
Debate over tariffs and their overall effect on the US economy have been a major theme this year. For almost all outdoor brands, the new charges were a challenge. But for small, independent ones, they were an existential threat. I spoke to the CEO of Garage Grown Gear, the founder of Durston, the solo maker behind Wild Brush, and more about what the tariffs and what they could mean for their businesses.
Bonus: Adam Pivots to Video
When I was told at the beginning of this year that Backpacker would need to start regularly producing our own video, I was apprehensive. But shockingly, over the course of 2025, I’ve grown to enjoy being on camera. More than anything, that’s down to practice—I host a handful of videos every month, which has both helped me sharpen my process and just get more comfortable riffing on video. (It’s also helped that we have a fantastic in-house video team that frequently shows up to direct us; I’ve tried to learn as much from them as I can.)
Some of my favorites: I went to the Outside Gear Lab on the campus of CU Denver and shot a series of humorous and (hopefully) informative explainer videos with my colleague Adam Trenkamp, including this one on how hiking shoe tread works. I hosted a trivia game show that pitted a Backpacker editor against one of our colleagues from the dev team. And I shot more hours of GoPro footage than I can count en route to creating this short portrait of a float trip down the Northwest Territories’ Nahanni River.