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The Joy Trip Project

The Joy Trip Project

The Joy Trip Project

Reporting on the Business, Art and Culture of the Active Lifestyle

The Unhidden Minute

The Joy Trip Project

The Joy Trip Project

Reporting on the Business, Art and Culture of the Active Lifestyle

by James Edward Mills

Parks Paid Forward

Parks Paid Forward

Black Waters

Everest Gateway

Creatives of Color

JTP VW Images 001

Sponsored by Volkswagen of America

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Adventure Film, Alpinist, Appalachian Trail, Climbing, Diversity, Essays, Film Festival, Film Review / 13.10.2017

After a long day of watching movies and a late night of drinking, I slept with a man I love. Certainly no lapse of judgement, my friend Jeremy Collins invited me to share his bed in the Boulder Adventure Lodge at 1AM rather than drive twenty miles back to Golden through a sloppy storm of rain, sleet and snow. A few weeks earlier at another one of the many film festival events that we attend together, he joked with a crowd during a Q&A that we had shared...

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Capitol Christmas Tree, Charitable Giving, Joy To America, Special Events, U.S. Forest Service / 02.10.2017

Every year the U.S. Forest Service is charged with delivering an 80-foot evergreen tree to the American people to serve as the U.S. Capitol Christmas Tree. Chosen from a national forest somewhere in country the tree, commonly called the People's Tree is a symbol of our great national heritage of environmental conservation and preservation. For the past three years it has been my piviledge and honor to accompany the People's tree from the site of its harvest across the country to where it is delivered to the grounds of...

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Commentary, Diversity, Fly Fishing / 19.09.2017

On my 51st birthday, Chad Brown, a friend and colleague, took me fly fishing on the Clackamas River in the pouring rain. Two days earlier I saw the forecast for showers in the city of Portland, Oregon. It didn’t look good, but I hoped for the best. At 5AM Chad arrived at my hotel with his chocolate lab named Ax. The handsome dog lifted his head for a quick scratch behind his ears as I ignored the bright orange sign on his tactical harness that said, “DO NOT PET”....

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Commentary, Diversity, Photography / 01.09.2017

A recent blog post described me as “a champion in the effort to bring more diversity to the outdoors.” As much as I appreciate the compliment, the statement appears as the cutline to a photograph at the head of an article that goes on never to mention anything that I might have done to earn the title of “champion”. The author never contacted me for a quote or even referenced a single one of the 800+ stories published on this blog or the scores of magazine articles, radio...

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Commentary, Hiking, Madison, Photography, Walking, Wisconsin / 15.08.2017

On Sunday August 13, 2017 community organizers in Madison, Wisconsin gathered citizens together at the State Capitol to stand up against a climate of hate. The day before in Charlottesville, Virginia a group of white supremacists lead a march to protest the removal of a monument to the Confederate Army General Robert E. Lee. The event tragically resulted in the deaths of two Virginia State Troopers Berke M.M. Bates and H. Jay Cullen, whose helicopter crashed while providing public safety assistance when the demonstration became violent. Heather D....

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#ORSummer, Charitable Giving, National Parks, philanthropy / 30.07.2017

The most exciting thing I saw this year at the Outdoor Retailer Summer Market was an old fashioned outhouse. That’s right. Surrounded by aisle after aisle of the latest in camping equipment, technical clothing, action footwear and flashy accessories, this sturdy wooden structure with a crescent moon carved into its door, set my mind and heart racing as I imagined all that it might accomplish. In a prominent spot at the Outdoor Research booth this no-tech privy was a display that symbolized the company’s efforts to do good things...

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