One Thursday in February 2011, I clicked “Publish” on a blog post on my new website, Semi-Rad.com. I shared it with my few hundred friends and followers on Twitter and Facebook, and by the end of the day, my website had a few dozen page views. The next week, I wrote and published a new post, and the next week I published another one. I told myself I’d keep writing one blog post per week until something happened, or I got sick of it. I had paid $15 for the URL, and used free WordPress software and an inexpensive theme to create the blog, so all it was really costing me was my time.
I wanted to be an adventure writer, and had been trying to get a foothold in all the major outdoor magazines since 2004, but hadn’t had much luck. I had a lot of things I wanted to say about what I felt and observed while climbing, backpacking, trail running, and skiing in the Colorado mountains and the desert, but a lot of it was too goofy or out there to pitch to magazine editors. So I started publishing it on my own.
A few months in, I published a semi-facetious guide to how much beer you should buy a friend in exchange for favors related to the outdoors, like borrowing a pair of skis or having someone dig you out of an avalanche. It took off a bit, and a few hundred people visited my website—including Steve Casimiro from Adventure Journal. Steve was the first outdoor media professional to notice, believe in, and then amplify anything about Semi-Rad.com. He republished some of my work, vaulting it into a much bigger arena.
Within a few months, I had written a couple dozen posts, one every week, just like I promised myself—and something was happening. I kept at it, writing what I thought was my best work every week, and gradually other opportunities popped up. I started to get more writing assignments, became a contributing editor at Adventure Journal, then Climbing magazine, and had just enough work coming in to take the leap into full-time freelance writing. One day in August 2012, I sent my work laptop back to my tech company employer, cringing as I slid it across the counter at the shipping office, ending my brief tenure as a well-paid remote copywriter with cushy benefits.
The gamble paid off, and I’ve made a career of telling adventure stories. Over the years, my writing started to make its way into all those magazines I dreamed about working for, the ones I thought would never publish my stuff: Climbing, Outside, Backpacker, Alpinist, Adventure Cyclist, High Country News. But every week, my first priority was to put my best idea on Semi-Rad.com, because I thought and hoped a few hundred people were counting on it every Thursday morning.
In November 2015, my friend Jim Harris sent me a message from a hostel in southern Chile. He had been sitting around a fireplace with a few other people he didn’t know when they started to crack some jokes about the fire, referencing something called “Obsessive Campfire Adjustment Syndrome.” Jim asked, “Are you guys talking about that Semi-Rad blog post?” And they said yes, they were.
“Do You Have Obsessive Campfire Adjustment Syndrome?” didn’t break the internet. It did well and reached a few hundred or a few thousand people, as far as I could tell. It didn’t come close to being the most widely-read blog post on Semi-Rad.com, yet people halfway around the world somehow were laughing at it, months later, in front of a fireplace. I don’t remember having exact goals for my website, but creating a piece of writing that becomes a joke between friends, that lives on in conversation and brings a little bit of joy or fun between complete strangers, is one of the best outcomes possible.
When I started Semi-Rad.com, I just wanted to write about the outdoors. I had some ideas that I thought other people might want to read, and that would make them laugh—hoping they might see some of their own experiences in the things I wrote. I always wanted to write, not about myself or about “them,” the people you make fun of sometimes—but about “us,” outdoorsfolk. And we’re a curious lot. We like to sleep on the ground, stay outside in bad weather, push ourselves physically to the point of near-exhaustion, and in general do a lot of things most of the civilized world thinks are ridiculous. But there’s also meaning in what we do, and humor, and I am grateful that I’ve been able to spend hundreds of hours since 2011 staring at my keyboard trying to tell those stories and put those things down in a few hundred words every week.
This book collects seventy-nine of the most read, most shared, most commented-on pieces that have been published on Semi-Rad.com since it began. I hope they make you laugh, or make you think, or inspire you to call a friend to go do something outside with you.