My Rescue in the
Gifford-Pinchot Wilderness
Late summer backpacking in a Southwest Washington national forest ends in my terrifying rescue. Includes an interview on trail safety with mountain rescuer Lauren Dawkins.
Notes from the Road
Imagine that you're careening through the city on an old bus, and you find a notebook wedged in the corner of the seat. Open it up. Dusty sketches of swampy backwaters, photographs of foreign lands, illustrations of exotic foods. No destination reviews, no top 10 lists and no industry guest posts. It appears to be written merely for the joy of curious explorers and travelers.
This was the reason I set out to create Notes from the Road in 1999. If you enjoy reading about travel, dive in: Notes from the Road rewards readers who enjoy digging deep and exploring even while surfing the web. Check out my Roam section, where I write about everything from organizing for travel, to the importance of science to travel bloggers, to traveling through the deserts of Mexico and the fight to save the marine wilderness of Guana Cay.
Recent Travel Notes
2020 Travel Blogger of the Year
A story about finding your own road, rather than chasing a destination, won travel writer Erik Gauger the title of Terra Incognita’s Travel Blogger of the Year competition.
My fellow winners in this competition include Ayoku Oyebamiji, a Nigerian Wildlife and Ecotourism Management undergraduate student, ornithologist and conservationist who wrote about a UNESCO world heritage site in Nigeria and Seventeen-year-old Rhianyon Larson, who won the Travel Blogger of the Year Judges’ Choice Youth competition for a piece on Glacier National Park and climate change.
About Erik Gauger
You can learn more about me and the history of Notes from the Road in the about section. You can also catch up with my radio interview, where I talk about experimental travel writing, the future of travel blogging and my lessons on learning to travel. I also keep a list of great imrprovised road trip music from the Grateful Dead and Phish.
"Be Inspired!" – Lonely Planet
"Unexpected frontier of the travel blogosphere" – Boston Globe
"Sumptuous Site" – Time Magazine
"The Best Looking Blog We've Seen" – Forbes Magazine
"Best of the Travel Blogs" – National Geographic Traveller
"Stands out for Hard Journalism" – Lowell Thomas Awards in 2012
Travel Sketches & Maps
I illustrate my travel blog with sketches in marker, watercolor, pen and pencil. Travel sketches and travel journals have a way of capturing a place in a way that travel photographs cannot. And they can illustrate a particular thing about a place from the subjective mood and perspective of the traveler. If you're interested in creating your own travel sketchbook, here is a post on creating lightweight travel sketchbook supplies. You can also check out my travel maps, like my West Indies Map, my Portugal map, my Nicaragua map, or my Salton Sea map.
Doors and Windows of the World
I am collecting a gallery of photos of doors, windows and door details from my travels. Take a look.
Online Travel Blog
I don't like to tell people how to travel, how to pack or where to go. But, I think we can learn from each other when we share how we do things. Below are some of my most recent stories on how I organize for travel. Also, Notes from the Road features the Guana Cay Blog, which focuses on a specific example of how megadevelopments can play a negative role in travel destinations. I also keep notes on my bird life list, butterfly life list, reptile life list, dragonflies and damselflies list and amphibian life list.
"Beautiful, Edge to edge."
- Craig Federighi, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, at the 2017 Apple Keynote Address.
Apple featured Notes from the Road to introduce the Apple iPhone X, another example of how we have been innovating the look and feel of the future of the web here at our little travel blog. I encourage you to take a look at the site, coded by hand by my brother and fellow traveler, Hans Gauger, on a high-resolution screen. My photographs and illustrations are meant to viewed in a horizontal format on smartphones.
More Travelogue Notes
Did you know that I created Notes from the Road before the phrase 'travel blog' even existed? In 1999, when I started writing this blog while traveling on a shoestring budget, they called travel blogs, 'online travelogues.'
