Recently, I rented a pair of backcountry skis and skins, a shovel, beacon and a probe. As a kid in suburban Denver, with parents who weren’t into skiing the way I wanted to be, I always felt like an outsider, pushing in. But now, from my home in Durango, Colorado, I’m regularly out “there,” thanks to increasingly affordable technological advances that are opening the backcountry to more people — making the West’s natural world more accessible. But as more of us push deeper into the backcountry, we disrupt these secluded spaces, both in small ways that we don’t see and in bigger ways we don’t yet fully understand. As tech infiltrates the backcountry, we have a responsibility to consider what that means.
In a package of three reported stories, Editorial Fellow Helen Santoro and writers Christine Peterson and Page Buono examine the unintended impacts of advanced technology on wildlife. Elsewhere in this issue, two essays ponder how technology determines access the natural world. Writer and ornithologist J. Drew Lanham tracks the history of York, the enslaved man who accompanied Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their Westward expedition. Back then, York wandered West on white terms; now, Lanham makes his own journey “out West” and encounters York’s ghost along the way. In her essay, Raksha Vasudevan escapes seasonal depression by snowshoeing, exploring the closed-off world of winter with her family.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Chilling effects.
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