Thats the Wild West Relay race in a nutshell. Pain, suffering and blisters are guaranteed, new shoes after the race are optional. The pain is made easier by the fact that the Wild West is a relay. That means that youll get some sleep. Youll be able to share your suffering with others.

While it’s too late to get involved with the Wild West Relay this year, you can ink in the event for next year. Learn more at wildwestrelay. com, where you can also sign up as a runner or team for next year’s event, see course maps and descriptions and learn more about how to get involved with both racing or volunteering via Volunteers For A Cause.

You’ve poached the concerts with picnic in tow at Chautauqua, but couldn’t see the band, stuck outside with the rest of the freeloaders. You’ve hung out in the alley while the neighbor’s party kicked off with live tunes (shouldn’t have kicked his dog, he would have invited you).

If you want to get close with rural Chile, the road to Ski Arpa is the place to do it. The drive traverses hidden vineyards, microscopic villages and rumbling creeks before climbing up a lost valley toward the final destination: Ski Arpa, South Americas only cat-skiing operation.

In Green River, Utah, the Colorado River runs through a vacant landscape of piñon, rock spires and empty salt flats, the water a cool thought as the sun bakes down on dusty earth, grit blowing in the wind. The shade of a cottonwood provides small relief.

The bar wasn’t much. It was cramped and crowded and stunk of stale beer. Outside, the rain spit and swirled in the wind, a summer storm that had left three days of puddles on the sidewalks and wasn’t about to relent. But inside we were warm, fattening up on wings washed down with cold beverages.

The trail was rocky. And steep and nasty and hard. And my pack was heavy — too heavy. It might have been the two bottles of wine stuffed in there, but the wine was essential gear. And everyone knows you shouldn’t go heading into the wilderness without taking all the essentials.

It draws the eye in a sinuous line, plunging off the summit, a throat-wrenching vertical elevator that spills into a large snow-filled basin. It’s steep, and it’s scary, and you can’t help but want to ride it, even though it looks as if a fall would send you tumbling to your death.

Curnow’s lonely existence, on the fringes of civilization, is the stuff that dreams — or nightmares — are made of. It was an existence born from the terrible flames of summer — a vain attempt by humans to stop the fires that sweep through the West every year, denuding mountainsides and turning the sunsets red as blood.

For most of the individuals I write about and photograph, hiking alone in a remote canyon, even if it involved a couple of rappels, wouldn’t give them a second thought. The level of perceived risk for these folks, even traveling solo and without leaving an itinerary, is negligible.