outsideonline.com

A new book by Yale sociologist Justin Farrell, Billionaire Wilderness, posits that Teton County has become an extreme example of a widespread dynamic in the West, where land protections limit development and drive up prices. Lots of people who commute to the area for work can’t afford to live there: in 2018, the average price for a single-family home in Jackson, the county’s main town, was $2.65 million. Billionaire Wilderness frames Jackson as a microcosm of wealth disparity and inequality driven by peoples’ desire to be near wilderness, regardless of their income, a place where the reality of finite available land bumps up against outdated myths about the ever expanding American West. Jackson’s elite frequently buy land through the Jackson Hole Land Trust, which puts a conservation easement on their purchases.

For the purposes of this article, let’s accept that we’re quantifying a vehicle’s ability off-road by its ability to avoid getting stuck. It’s your vehicle’s approach, breakover, and departure angles, not its outright ground clearance, that grant it the ability to overcome big obstacles. To achieve these extremely low gears while retaining the ability to efficiently drive on-road, any good 4WD vehicle will come with a low-range transfer case which switches between normal and very low gearing. Since modern vehicles already come with the ability to monitor individual wheel speeds and control them with individual brake applications, it’s relatively simple for automakers to extrapolate that into the ability to replicate the function of locking differentials.

They kept up through the winter and spring as we prepped the vehicle for a summerlong road trip that would see us touring the country in a counterclockwise loop, starting and ending at Rachel’s parents’ house outside Philadelphia. I wrote about our proposed trip for a friend’s zine and declared that we would be like William Least Heat-Moon and John Steinbeck, writers on the road, seeking ourselves and America and the Great Truths—seeking, as Steinbeck put it, “bumdum. Maybe because I didn’t like some of what I was reading: the loneliness, the long-drive blues, the scenes of rural emptiness, the despair and squalor of the country’s poor, the empty spaces that made up most of the adventure and left plenty of room for breakdowns of many kinds. And then, after soaking in the mineral baths at Hot Springs, Arkansas, two months and two weeks into the trip, out of money and exhausted and having decided that we would haul ass back to Philly, ending the trip early, the van broke down outside a town called Hazen.

anywhere close to “good at it”—or write for years before they feel like they’ve found their voice, or paint for years, or whatever. oh look, they’re having auditions across the street, I used to sing a little bit in middle school, maybe I’ll get in line and see if I can remember all the lines to “ : Do they look like they spent the past few years sitting on the couch eating Funyuns and playing Call of Duty, but knew a guy who knew a guy who could get them the proper pharmaceuticals to get them on a podium at a cycling race? You want a shortcut, here’s one: Stop believing that anyone who’s successful at anything has some secret other than focus, drive, and a shitload of hard work.