Surf Station: Mid-Summer Check-In

While everybody’s been hitting the links recently, we’ve been creating them. Here’s a quick recap of what we’ve been up to the last couple of months. Read on to get over those Monday morning back-to-work blues.

For starters, we’re psyched that our “‘Sup With Island Climbing” piece was featured in the summer issue of Wild Northeast. The Hingham Harbor-Langlee Island paddling-climbing combo is one of our favorite trips (especially when Luke Foley tags along) and everybody should try it at least once. If you can’t find a copy at your local gear shop, you can still check it out by signing up for a free digital subscription. It’s really easy to do and the article makes it totally worth the effort (in my totally unbiased view).

We’ve continued to stay busy over on goEast as well, writing about everything from SUPsand headlamps to mountain biking and the Northeast’s most sought after FKTs. Among the pieces we wrote, I really enjoyed this one about the Catskills’ two 4,000-footers—Hunter and Slide. We hiked the peaks back-to-back and the post-doubleheader Trilliums really hit the spot after 4,000+ feet of elevation gain. That said, I was disappointed that I couldn’t convince a slightly-buzzed Tim to stick around for the next two days to climb with me in the Gunks. (In his defense though, on the first day the bugs were terrible and on the second we got rained out way too early.)

We both also really enjoyed writing this goEast opinion piece. Between the two of us, we own more obnoxiously colored outerwear than anybody we know, so we just had to come to the defense of brightly colored outdoor wardrobes. Hopefully, friend-of-TWR Scott Peters takes the advice in there to heart and starts branching into other colors on the spectrum besides black before we head out again to climb Rumney’s awesome multi-pitch moderates.

It was also great to revisit two of New Hampshire’s classic peaks as we put together these goEast Alpha Guides on Mt. Monadnock’s White Dot and White Cross trails and Mt. Washington day hikes. Although I’ve put in a lot of mileage on the “rock pile” recently, I’d last hiked Monadnock a few Novembers ago for my mother’s 60th birthday. That trip was a slow go because, among other things, the trail was already icy. This lap, by contrast, went by in a flash, even with a long summit siesta included. We’ll hopefully be heading back to southern New Hampshire soon for another writing project so I can get another hit of this must-do classic New England day hike.

Another fun goEast endeavor was this listicle on reasons you should use trekking poles. What I really appreciated was the irony that for our first hike after the piece posted, Tim forgot his trekking poles. Of course, it really shouldn’t have been a surprise; he forgets everything!

Finally, back on this site, we just hit our 30th TWR piece with a quick-hitter about My Go-To Climbing Gear. We’ve posted a lot of content since our last update, with pieces covering everything from Tips for Beating the Heat to a really enjoyable reflection by Tim about how Kingdom Trails has changed since he started biking there 15 years ago. Make sure to give them a click if you missed them the first time.

Now, off to the basement to do some training on the home wall.