One fine spring night in Utah’s San Rafael Swell, about twelve hours before the wind came up and howled ceaselessly for days, I piloted my truck through a crosshatched maze of dirt roads, looking for the one that would bring me, with luck, to the campsite of Brendan Leonard. It was the farthest camp on the farthest track, hidden in the sage and juniper, out of reach of map or GPS, and I was searching for it through bleary eyes after fourteen hours of driving. Well after midnight, my headlights glinted hopefully on the bumper of a vehicle, a tent crouched in the shadows behind. I unwound my stiff limbs, climbed out of my rig, and peered through the windshield of this parked and dusty SUV. There, perched on the dash, was an extra large pizza box with greasy fingerprints all over it, its lid askew. Yes. I’d found him.
In 2010 or thereabouts, I was just beginning to put the pieces in place to build Adventure Journal from a personal blog to a commercial publishing house, and my life was very much that of a digital hunter and gatherer. I spent my days online searching for story ideas and voices that could convey the uniqueness of the outdoor adventure culture in creative and credible ways. Despite it being the boom years of blogging, though, there wasn’t much to hunt or gather, just a whole lot of people saying a whole lot of not much. But then I stumbled upon Semi-Rad.
Everything I was doing that day came screeching to a halt like the Road Runner digging in its heels at the edge of cliff. Wait, what? Semi-what? Who was this guy? The words were wry, the narrative paths were unexpected, the lessons heartfelt. Holy smokes, I thought, this dude can write—only I didn’t say smokes. By the end of the day, I’d found a mutual friend, got an introduction, and talked Brendan into lending his talents to AJ.
Every generation of outdoor folk has its leading voice. In the 1970s, it was Colin Fletcher, father of the backpacking revolution. In the 1980s, there was Tim Cahill, off having adventures in which he barely survived due to mishap (wild exaggeration being part of the fun). In the 1990s, we had Mark Jenkins, who wrote a column called The Hard Way and who, the first time I hiked with him, stuck his leg into a frigid Iceland creek so he could compare the performance of each of his boots. Today, in this post-millennial, rapidly changing, pre-who-knows-what era, there is Brendan Leonard—self-deprecating, open-hearted, considerate, and respectful, the voice of humility and optimism and stoke. No writer I know—and I know a lot of them—better conveys the pleasures and pains, the risks and rewards, and, perhaps most of all, the wonderful absurdities of the outdoor culture.
In these pages, you will find stories about bears, and poop, and love, and inspiration, and you will meet a guide and companion worthy of any adventure, anywhere. If your idea of perfection is a breakfast of cold pizza and hot coffee shared with a friend on the edge of a canyon after a long night of driving, it’s exactly the book for you.
—Steve Casimiro
March 2019