Ryan Reed by Randy Dunbar

TRAILHEAD Your Outdoor Guide September 2018

That Arch is Like, SO Delicate J.T. - No Longer Just the Initials of Your Favorite Pop Star

11 Facts About

Texting and Driving

1. 5 seconds is the minimal amount of

attention that a driver who texts takes away from the road. If traveling at 55 mph, this equals driving the length of a football field without looking at the road.

Welcome to DoSomething.org, a global movement of 6 million young people making positive change, online and off! The 11 facts you want are below, and the sources for the facts are at the very bottom of the page. After you learn something, Do Something! Find out how to take action here.

2. Texting makes a crash up to 23 times more likely.

3. Teens who text while driving spend 10% of the time outside of their lane.

4. According to AT&T’s Teen Driver

Survey, 97% of teens agree that texting while driving is dangerous, yet 43% do it anyway.

5. 19% of drivers of all ages admit to surfing the web while driving.

6. 43 states, plus D.C., prohibit all drivers from texting.

Tackle a campaign to make the world suck less.

7. According to CTIA.org, in the month

of June 2011, more than 196 billion text messages were sent or received in the United States, up almost 50% from June 2009.

8. 40% of teens say that they have

been in a car when the driver used a cell phone.

9. The most recent National Occupant

Protection Use Survey finds that women are more likely than men to reach for their cell phones while driving.

10. According to 77% of teens, adults

tell them not to text or email while driving, yet adults do it themselves “all the time.”

11. 9 in 10 teens expect a reply to a

text or email within five minutes or less, which puts pressure on them to respond while driving.

TRAILHEAD On our cover

Delicate Arch at Night by Thomas J. Story

September FEATURES

#8 JUMBLE

This. That. AND the other.

#11 GEAR UP

Get the insights on what is sure to become your new favorite gear.

#13 Frontice

Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve got to see this.

#15

Like SO, Delicate All things Arches National Park.

#23

JT - What Does it Stand For?

Photography by the National Park Service

Justin Timberlake or Joshua Tree... Read to find out.

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TRAILHEAD

Trailhead - 5

Editor in Chief: Ryan Reed Art Director: Ryan Reed Managing Editor: Lindsay Lohan Digital Director: Nicole Polizzi Media Relations: Nicole Richie Copy Editor: John Cena Staff Photographer: Kim Kardashian Advertising Sales: Chip Skylark

TRAILHEAD

Our Staff

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letter from the

EDITOR

My name is Ryan Reed and I am the creator and editor in chief of Trailhead MagazineÂŠ. Trailhead started while I was backpacking in the jungle of the Malaysia and decided I needed to give my life purpose. Trailhead MagazineÂŠ serves as a know all for adventures big and small. Feel free to mail in any advice or ask any of your adventure questions on our social media pages (@trailheadmag). xoxo - Ryan

Trailhead - 7

JUMBLE the

this that & the other

All Your Favorites

Being gorgeous with belly side up scratch me there, elevator butt. Meow in empty rooms

really but gets sypathy) chase imaginary bugs, yet cats secretly make all the worlds muffins.

Backpacks

ccccccccccccaaaaaaaaaaaaa aatttttttttttttttttssssssssssssss ss caticus cuteicus cat is love, cat is life and my left donut is missing, as is my right. Demand to be let outside at once, and expect owner to wait for me as i think about it eat plants, meow, and throw up because i ate plants. Jump five feet high and sideways when a shadow moves stuff and things this cat happen now, it was too purr-fect!!! so make plans to dominate world and then take a nap, roll over and sun my belly adventure always and i cry and cry and cry unless you pet me, and then maybe i cry just for fun. Stuff and things rub whiskers on bare skin act innocent crash against wall but walk away like nothing happened fall over dead (not

cat happen now, it was too purr-fect!!! so make plans to dominate world and then take a nap, roll over and sun my belly adventure always and i cry and cry and cry unless you pet me, and then maybe i cry just for fun. Stuff and things rub whiskers on bare skin act innocent crash against wall but walk away like nothing happened fall over dead (not really but gets sypathy) chase imaginary bugs, yet cats secretly make all the worlds muffins.

A VIEW

meow, and throw up because i ate plants. Jump five feet high and sideways when a shadow moves stuff and things this

Being gorgeous with belly side up scratch me there, elevator butt. Meow in empty rooms cc ccccccccccaaaaaa aaaaaaaaatttttttttttt tttttssssssssssssssss caticus cuteicus cat is love, cat is life and my left donut is missing, as is my right. Demand to be let outside at once, and expect owner to wait for me as i think about it eat plants, meow, and throw up because i ate plants. Jump five feet high and sideways when a shadow moves stuff and things this cat happen now, it was too

purr-fect!!! so make plans to dominate world and then take a nap, roll over and sun my belly adventure always and i

cry and cry and cry unless you pet me, and then maybe i cry just for fun. Stuff and things rub whiskers on bare skin act innocent crash against wall but walk away like nothing happened fall over dead (not really but gets sypathy) chase imaginary bugs, yet cats secretly make all the worlds muffins.

An Up Close Look

Being gorgeous with belly side up scratch me there, elevator butt. Meow in empty rooms ccccccccccccaaaaaaa aaaaaaaatttttttttttttttttsssssss sssssssss caticus cuteicus cat is love, cat is life and my left donut is missing, as is my right. Demand to be let outside at once, and expect owner to wait for me as i think about it eat plants, meow, and throw up because i ate plants. Jump five feet high and sideways when a shadow moves stuff and things this cat happen now, it was too purr-fect!!! so make plans to dominate world and then take a nap, roll over.

JUMBLE

the

this that & the other

The Best Hi Being gorgeous with belly side up scratch me there, elevator butt. Meow in empty rooms ccccc cccccccaaaaaaaaaaaaaaattttttt ttttttttttssssssssssssssss caticus cuteicus cat is love, cat is life and my left donut is missing, as is my right. Demand to be let outside at once, and expect owner to wait for me as i think about it eat plants, meow, and throw up because i ate plants. Jump five feet high and sideways when a shadow moves stuff and things this cat happen now, it was too purr-fect!!! so make plans to dominate world and then take a nap, roll over and sun my belly adventure always and i cry and cry and cry unless you pet me, and then maybe i cry just for fun. Stuff and things rub whiskers on bare skin act innocent crash against wall but walk away like nothing happened fall over dead. ...in California

Being gorgeous with belly side up scratch me there, elevator butt. Meow in empty rooms

...in Colorado

is missing, as is my right. Demand to be let outside at once, and expect owner to wait for me as i think about it eat plants, meow, and throw up because i ate plants. Jump five feet high and sideways when a shadow moves stuff and things this cat happen now, it was too purr-fect!!! so make plans to dominate world and then take a nap, roll over and sun my belly adventure always and i cry and cry and cry unless you pet me, and then maybe i cry just for fun. Stuff and things rub whiskers on bare skin act innocent crash against wall but walk away like nothing happened fall over dead.

...in Montana

plants, meow, and throw up because i ate plants. Jump five feet high and sideways when a shadow moves stuff and things this cat happen now, it was too purr-fect!!! so make plans to dominate world and then take a nap, roll over and sun my belly adventure always and i cry and cry and cry unless you pet me, and then maybe i cry just for fun. Stuff and things rub whiskers on bare skin act innocent crash against wall but walk away like nothing happened fall over dead .

...in Washington

Being gorgeous with belly this cat happen now, it was too purr-fect!!! so make plans to dominate world and then take a nap, roll over and sun my belly adventure always and i cry and cry and cry unless you pet me, and then maybe i cry just for fun. Stuff and things rub whiskers on bare skin act innocent crash against wall but walk away like nothing happened fall over dead. Then maybe I cry and cry and cry unless you pet me. Trailhead - 10

Thermarest Sleeping Pad Super light, self inflating air pad - will make you feel like youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re right at home Osprey Aether 70L Highly prized, trusted pack - brain converts to day pack - many pockets for sleeping bag and other goods

REI Half Dome 2 Plus Easy to carry, lots of headroom - 3 season tent

Patgonia Houdini Jacket Lightweight, packs into itself - weather resistant, 100% nylon

Osprey Packing Cube Set Lightweight, makes packing a breeze Patagonia Baggies 5in Rugged, multifuntional use, 100% nylon

Katadyn Microfilter

GSI Outdoors Soloist Cookset

Best for backpacking - easy set up, light to carry Jet Boil Camping Stove

Aluminum, Nesting style - easy to carry

Your go to camping stove - easy to carry, long lasting to use

REI Igneo 26 Lightweight, 3 season bag - easily packable Trailhead - 12

PROTECT OUR PARKLANDS

DO YOUR PART

That Arch is Like, SO Delicate Once deserted, the now popular Utah Arches National Park enjoys popularity Written by John Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Connor Photos by Neal Herber

Turret Arch at Night

s always, I arrived too late. The time to be here, the real sweet spot? I missed it. Try a good halfcentury ago, I was told by locals, before the place was discovered by the outside world, back when it was still Arches National Monument and not yet a designated park, just a dusty backwater in southeast Utah inhabited by a few old cowboys, desert castaways, Latter-Day seekers, and a handful of tourists who’d perhaps made a wrong turn somewhere. The roads — a pure, unpaved hell — tended to discourage folks. Fifty, maybe 60, people a day made the four-mile drive from the highway to the front gate, where many simply turned around and headed back the way they came. (By contrast, 4,000 visitors now amount to a slow day at Arches.) The mid-1950s was a time when one could plausibly claim to be the “sole inhabitant, usufructuary, observer and custodian” of Arches, as Edward Abbey did in “Desert Solitaire,” his classic 1968 account of two seasons spent as a park ranger there. A “rather personal demesne,” he called it, with “league on league of red cliff and arid tablelands, extending through purple haze over the bulging curve of the planet to the ranges of Colorado — a sea of desert.” All of it, he wrote, “lies beyond the end of the roads.” Abbey, who died in 1989, more than admired Arches’ beauty. He considered its remoteness an antidote to the everyday drudgery of civilization, a vital means of “[c]utting the bloody cord” of briefly abandoning our homebound lives, our sunup-to-sundown errand running, for the thrill of the wild. “We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope,” he wrote in “Desert Solitaire.” Keeping Arches wild was, for him, a matter of our collective sanity. I happened to be standing on Abbey’s old house trailer site at Arches, now a cluster of blackbrush and cliffrose in spring bloom, and gazing across his “33,000-acre terrace,” a windless, sun-warped sprawl of red spires and orange buttes rising and falling to the horizon like a city of dust and stone. Below me was a freshly paved road crawling with weekend traffic — a frightening number of R.V.s and S.U.V.s and double-decker tour buses, their windows sealed tight, and a column of grumbling Harleys — and beyond that, through the heat glare, the soaring, extraterrestrial monolith of Balanced Rock.

“Actually, I could imagine it, but barely. Over our shoulders lay Salt Valley, a vast, wandering expanse of sagebrush and tumbleweeds, as empty as the moon. But the procession of vehicles below us achieved a kind of gyroscope effect, whirring and flashing.”

I tried to picture things as Abbey might have seen them, minus the motorized din and the crowds fanning-out around Balanced Rock’s knobby pedestal, striking selfie poses. Sitting in his doorway here watching sunsets “that test a man’s credulity — great gory improvisations in scarlet and gold,” Abbey often found himself utterly, blissfully, alone. “Can you imagine?” said Matt Smith, an Arches ranger, squinting next to me in the morning sun. “Not a lot going on here back then.” Actually, I could imagine it, but barely. Over our shoulders lay Salt Valley, a vast, wandering expanse of sagebrush and tumbleweeds, as empty as the moon. But the procession of vehicles below us achieved a kind of gyroscope effect, whirring and flashing. “You might expect this at Walmart, but not here,” Mr. Smith said, nodding toward the road. Somewhere a car horn blew. And blew. And blew. LIKE SO MANY OTHERS, I came here because of him. It was only a couple of years ago when I’d first read “Desert Solitaire” and been floored by Abbey’s barreling prose, his joy and petulance, his pre-Gonzo Gonzoness: “[F]or godsake folks get out of them there machines, take off those [expletive] sunglasses and unpeel both eyeballs, look around; throw away those goddamned idiotic cameras!” he wrote. “[R]oll that window down! You can’t see the desert if you can’t smell it.” Exhilarating, hard-shelled, unforgettable stuff. So I was surprised to learn that Abbey considered “Desert Solitaire” — his most famous and lucrative work — to be a curse. Published in 1968 to resounding indifference, it soon gained the cultish following of countless half-read books, turned Abbey into a desert sage and, in a cruel twist, “launched thousands of maniacs into the empty ground” of Arches, as his friend and biographer, Charles Bowden, put it. Unwittingly, Abbey helped entrench these red rock canyonlands in the popular imagination as a proto-hippie zone of spiritual transcendence, and he never quite forgave himself. According to Bowden, a “Dead Ed Industry” in the nearby tourist boomtown of Moab, Utah, still traffics heavily in Abbey’s legend. Of course, no book can account for what has happened at Arches in the past halfcentury (it was designated a park in 1971, when it more than doubled in size, to 76,679 acres). This year, Mr. Smith said, the park was on track for a record 1.8 million visitors, up from about 25,000 in Abbey’s day, a 7,000 percent increase. Trailhead - 18

Turret Arch

â&#x20AC;&#x153;A trip to Arches is like visiting another world.â&#x20AC;?

“melee” at Delicate Arch, a popular sunset spot, with hundreds of tourists jockeying for primo viewing along a sandstone promontory. In 2015, on Memorial Day traffic was backed up for a mile outside the main entrance onto Highway 191, resulting in the park’s first ever emergency closure. “It’s loud, it’s busy,” Mr. Smith said. “People are running over blackbrush shrubs that might be 600 years old. There’s a fragile biological crust that grows over the surface of the soil here, and they’re tramping on it because they don’t want to walk from the road to the trailhead.” Other national parks are facing similar attendance crunches — the beneficiaries (some might say casualties) of the Park Service’s wildly successful “Find Your Park” advertising campaign — but none more so than Utah’s Zion National Park, 300 miles from Arches, saw a record 4.5 million visitors last year, the same number as Yosemite, a park five times its size.

“Standing there, gaping at this monstrous and inhumane spectacle of rock and cloud and sky and space, I feel a ridiculous greed and possessiveness come over me. I want to know it all, posess it all, embrace the entire scene intimately, deeply, totally...” - Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire It’s a familiar story. I live 15 minutes from Walden Pond, Thoreau’s old hideaway, which I dare you to visit on a summer weekend. Americans, as well as an increasing number of Germans, Japanese, and Scandinavians, are rediscovering our national landscapes, not altogether a bad thing in an age of general estrangement from the outdoors, when parents like me worry about their kids having nature-deficit disorder. It was probably inevitable that future generations would unearth the Arches and Waldens of the world. And you can hardly blame us. On our little rise above Balanced Rock, Mr. Smith and I had front-row seats to an ancient bedrock cataclysm: pinwheeling stone staircases, lagertinted turrets and weird, fanged crags poised over petrified sand dunes, and farther off, the La Sal Mountains — loping green knuckles streaked with old snow. “No end of blessings from heaven and earth,” in Abbey words. We were on a roll, Mr. Smith and I, jawing about the good old days. I was egging him on when he said, “You can trace human habitation here back 14,000 years. That might’ve been a golden age, too.” But despite the crowds, Arches was still Abbey Country, he said. Peace and quiet could be had, if you were willing to put in the work. Most visitors to Arches stay for less than two hours — about how long it takes to drive from the entrance to the turnaround at Devil’s Garden and back, with a few selfie breaks in between. Less than one percent of visitors, Mr. Smith said, venture into the backcountry. A trip to Arches is like visiting another world. Sure to be a sight not seen anywehere before. Trailhead - 21

National Parks and Monuments in Utah • Arches National Park • Bryce Canyon National Park • Canyonlands National Park • Capitol Reef National Park • Cedar Breaks National Monument • Dinosaur National Monument • Glen Canyon Recreational Area • Hovenweep National Monument • Natural Bridges National Monument • Rainbow Bridge National Monument • Zion National Park

Under Double Arch at Night

Joshua Tree National Park Not Just The Initials of Your Favorite Popstar

Written by: Geoff Manaugh Images by: Philip Montgomery

Location: California Established: October 31, 1994 Size: 794,000 acres Two desert systems, the Mojave and the Colorado, abut within Joshua Tree, dividing California’s southernmost national park into two arid ecosystems of profoundly contrasting appearance. The key to their differences is elevation. The Colorado, the western reach of the vast Sonoran Desert, thrives below 3,000 feet on the park’s gently declining eastern flank, where temperatures are usually higher. Considered “low desert,” compared to the loftier, wetter, and more vegetated Mojave “high desert,” the Colorado seems sparse and forbidding. It begins at the park’s midsection, sweeping east across empty basins stubbled with creosote bushes. Occasionally decorated by “gardens” of flowering ocotillo and cholla cactus, it runs across arid Pinto Basin into a parched wilderness of broken rock in the Eagle and Coxcomb Mountains. Many newcomers among the 1.3 million visitors who pass through each year are surprised by the abrupt transition between the Colorado and Mojave ecosystems. Above 3,000 feet, the Mojave section claims the park’s western half, where giant branching yuccas thrive on sandy plains studded by massive granite monoliths and rock piles. These are among the most intriguing and photogenic geological phenomena found in California’s many desert regions. Joshua Tree’s human history commenced sometime after the last ice age with the arrival of the Pinto people, hunter-gatherers who may have been part of the Southwest’s earliest cultures. They lived in Pinto Trailhead - 25

Basin, which though inhospitably arid today, had a wet climate and was crossed by a sluggish river some 5,000 to 7,000 years ago. Nomadic groups of Indians seasonally inhabited the region when harvests of pinyon nuts, mesquite beans, acorns, and cactus fruit offered sustenance. Bedrock mortars—holes ground into solid rock and used to pulverize seeds during food preparation—are scattered throughout the Wonderland of Rocks area south of the Indian Cove camping site. A flurry of late 19th-century gold-mining ventures left ruins; some are accessible by hiking trails, or unmaintained roads suited only to four-wheel-drive vehicles and mountain bikes.

When to Go

All-year park. Temperatures are most comfortable in the spring and fall, with an average high and low of 85°F and 50°F. Winter brings cooler days, around 60°F, and freezing nights. Summers are hot, with midday temperatures frequently above 100°F, and ground temperatures reaching 180°F. The Mojave Desert zone on the park’s western half is on average 11 degrees cooler than the Colorado. In winter, snow may blanket the Mojave’s higher elevations. Spring blooming periods vary according to winter precipitation and spring temperatures, usually beginning in February at lower elevations and peaking park-wide in March and April, although cactuses may bloom into June. The park’s premier attractions, forests of giant branching yuccas known as Joshua trees, massive rock formations, fan palm oases, and seasonal gardens of cholla and ocotillo, can be enjoyed on a

leisurely half-day auto tour that includes both “high” and “low” desert zones— although most of your time will be spent in your car. Scenic paved roads lead to viewpoints, all campgrounds, and trailheads. Roadside interpretive exhibits have pull-outs and parking areas, and offer insights into the region’s complex desert ecology, wildlife, and human history. If you plan to explore the park by mountain bike, you would be wise to avoid the main paved roads, which are narrow and without shoulders. You’ll find far greater solitude and safety cycling the park’s backcountry dirt roads, many of which, like those in Queen Valley, date from the area’s 19th-century homestead and goldmining era. Be sure to acquire reliable information from headquarters about your route, however, as soft sand and occasional steep climbs can make for arduous pedaling. For a half-day visit starting from the park’s northern boundary, take the Park Boulevard loop either from the town of Joshua Tree through the West Entrance Station, or from Twentynine Palms, by way of the North Entrance Station. If the air is clear (ask at the entrance about haze conditions), take the 20-minute side trip to 5,185-foothigh Keys View, which overlooks a vast panorama of arid desert basin and range stretching south into Mexico. If you are starting from Joshua Tree, return to Park Boulevard and continue east over Sheep Pass to Jumbo Rocks, turning right (south) onto Pinto Basin Road for the drive down into long vistas in the Colorado Desert zone. Be sure to stroll the self-guided nature trails through the Cholla Cactus Garden and the Ocotillo Patch.

Skull Rock

A “Joshua Tree” at Dusk

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Photo by the National Park Service