A different thread

 

Beaver Creek, Alaska, on Dec. 30, 2024. Temperature -34F.

Hello 2025! Later this year, this blog will turn 20 years old. Twenty! I was just a few years older than that when I started writing here. If you still venture back to this cobwebbed corner of the Internet, you may have noticed that I haven't posted in some time. Although I hadn't intended to abandon this site, I now post most of my adventure stories on my Substack:

https://jilloutside.substack.com/

I originally launched the Substack as a reliable archive of a writing project that I thought ... hoped ... no one would read about an old trunk full of mementos I wanted to archive in the digital realm. Thus the name that I should probably change but haven't, "Adventure Unpacked." I haven't changed the name because the essays are still about "unpacking" adventure, in the sense of analyzing something into its component elements. 

There is still so much that intrigues me about putting my body in a difficult environment and grinding away at a physical challenge — emotion, relationships, identity, spirituality, physiology, psychology, philosophy, the list goes on — that I still haven't stepped away from writing about it after all of these years.

In 2023, I grew increasingly frustrated with this ancient platform — Blogger.com — and Google's refusal to support it. I was inundated with Spam comments that I couldn't moderate despite putting restrictions on commenting. Meanwhile, the real traffic to my site had slowed to a trickle. Social media killed the blogging star, and the once-rich landscape swiftly became a wasteland. The communities we built up in the early days of blogging disintegrated, and social media algorithms so deftly hid links that even my family members didn't realize I was still posting missives to "Jill Outside."

Then Substack came along to take a form of online communication even older than blogging — the newsletter — and revived a new golden age of long-form writing online. People could subscribe to a newsletter and receive it directly in their inbox, which meant actually reaching the people who want to read your stuff. Even if only five people subscribed, it was still a boon compared to the struggling storefront in a nearly abandoned shopping mall that Blogger had become. 

Since I migrated to Substack, I've been thrilled about the space. All the people who miss the Golden Age of Blogging, and all those who aren't even old enough to have experienced the wonder years of the 2000s, are finding a similarly rich community of writers putting their best work out into the world and striving to connect with others. It helps that Substack has developed a subscription model that helps writers feel like they're "creating for a purpose" — even if it is just five subscribers, such metrics mean the world to writers who, like nearly everyone, just want to be heard.

The model has its problems, of course. Most everyone has subscription fatigue these days. I subscribe to the digital content of four daily newspapers and that alone leaves me glowering at my credit card statement each month. People have to subscribe to multiple streaming services just to watch everyday shows, Spotify just to listen to music and podcasts, Amazon Prime to read books, the list goes on. Paying a monthly fee to individual bloggers on top of that is, frankly, absurd. 

And yet ... as I said ... it means so much to us. I cherish every person who registered for a paid subscription to my Substack. Still, I don't intend to put my content behind a paywall. If you are interested in reading missives about cold places, mountainous adventures, trail running, and bikepacking, I hope you'll sign up for a free subscription here:

 

Thank you for reading.