The holidays are finally over, as is our family month on the road.  There’s a lot to do around here, and a lot of good resources and experiences to share, so it’s time to get on with it.  A new feature of the blog is quotations from some of the outdoor books I’ve read over the years.  I’ll start it with the quotation from which I derived our motto – “The More You Carry In Your Head,  The Less You Carry On Your Back.”  I’ve seen versions of this attributed to a wide variety of outdoor personalities, but I trace them all back to Kephart before it was made popular:

The less a man caries in his pack, the more he must carry in his head.  A camper cannot go by recipe alone.  It is best for him to carry sound general principles in his head, and recipes in his pocket.  The simpler the outfit, the more skill it takes to manage it, and the more pleasure one gets in his achievements.
– Horace Kephart, foreword to Camp Cookery, 1946