The Backcountry of Outdoor Media

In 2025, The Westrn is rewilding the outdoor media landscape.

Print Excerpt: The Spring Issue
Author: Katie Hill

The first time I felt doomed about my future as an outdoor writer, I wasn’t perched in front of my laptop, or glued to my phone screen, or sitting at some conference listening to a keynote speaker talk about brand innovation or social media strategy.

Instead, I was in my friend Emily’s off-grid ranch house in Pinedale, Wyoming over the summer. Propane lamps burned overhead and steak from her family’s ranch wafted in from the grill outside. 

I was on vacation, and so was the part of my brain most prone to spiraling about work. I loosely daydreamed about what Emily would do if I raced one of her horses into some hidden corner of the ranch property and refused to emerge until she promised to let me move in with her. Then, I noticed the pile of old Wyoming Wildlife magazines stacked on her kitchen table. They were in pristine condition, their faded paper jackets still intact. I plucked one off the top of the pile. It was the August 1994 issue. A mature merganser and two roly-poly chicks floated across the cover. 

In a month, the issue would turn 30 years old.

A timeless photo by LuRay Parker of a pheasant hunter in Sheridan, Wyoming, from a 1994 issue of Wyoming Wildlife.

So struck the same chest pains and insistent yearning that all old magazines and newspapers give me, that “writing was so cool back then and no one even knew it” feeling. It’s the same feeling I imagine vinyl record junkies, baseball card fanatics, comic book stans, first-edition chasers, and other scavengers of epic old shit feel when they hit a motherlode in a thrift store. This periodical was a treasure. A little ditty from Mother Nature’s grand literary canon. Opening the front page felt like turning the lock on a time capsule and unsealing its rubbery perimeter. I asked Emily where she found the collection. I would have bet my life savings on her answer: the antique mall.

By the time I reached the end of the table of contents, I had to wipe a stray string of drool from my chin. Kathy Etling reported on how to support single moms in their outdoor pursuits with their children. In a first-person essay, Marine veteran Galen Geer reflected on bird hunting for the first time since developing PTSD in Vietnam. For all the word nerds out there, Scott Skinner covered various terms of venery and their origins. (For all the non-word nerds out there, a “term of venery” refers to a “murder” of crows, a “gang” of elk, and other “nouns of assemblage.”)

I felt doomed because I realized how rare this type of outdoor writing had become — outdoor writing that stands up to all the same tests of quality and originality that other, less niche types of writing face. This was writing from that magic place where the complexities of being human and the complexities of being part of the natural world run into one another. And whether it’s for a lack of supply or a lack of demand, outdoor writing like this seems rare today.

The editor’s note didn’t stem my slobbering. In it, Chris Madson recalls two anecdotes from his years of adventure. One time, a pothole on a neglected road broke four lug nuts on one of his rims, ruining a day of fishing. Another time, a trip over a particularly rutted gravel two-track left his sleeping bag coated in a thin film of cooking oil. He shook his fist at the sky both times, cursing the gods of backcountry accessibility. 

At the time of publication, the Wyoming Department of Transportation was preparing to work on these two problematic roads. The improvements — bound to increase crowding in both areas — made Madson’s older, more reclusive soul as angry as the crappy roads once made his younger, excitable self. The gods of backcountry accessibility had granted his wishes. Now, he hated them for it.

Usually, retrospective complaining grates on me. Whether it’s gas prices, rockstars, or the number of trucks parked at a trailhead, I get really sick of hearing that everything was better before I started experiencing it, including the Sisyphean task of writing for a living. I laugh when people say “I hate to break it to you.” They’re more likely to be the 736th person to warn me about the downward trajectory of my dream industry than the first.

But Madson’s voice in his editor’s note was warm. He wasn’t griping about changes to a society that felt increasingly foreign. He was atoning for the short-sightedness of his younger self while making an appeal for some preservation of the old ways — because some things were actually better back then. He glimpsed the future and saw signs of degradation. So he reached back for a version of the past, potholes and all.

Maybe he’s onto something — something that all us anxiety-ridden digital media professionals should pay attention to.

What would happen if we went back in time?

Tales From the Golden Era

As he puts it, Madson didn’t learn to write in a college classroom. He has two wildlife science degrees and only took an editorial job after a year of post-graduation job hunting proved unfruitful. He first became the editor of the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks’ magazine, then jumped to Wyoming Wildlife at the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, where he worked for over 30 years. During this time, he freelanced for scores of other outdoor publications. 

The December 1936 cover of Wyoming Wildlife, recently digitized and archived by the Wyoming State Library’s State Publications database.

He told me a story about a conversation that took place between his father — the late outdoor writing great John Madson — and a group of duck hunting buddies in a blind one morning. John asked the group of seasoned, serious waterfowlers what they looked for in good outdoor writing. 

“One of the guys said, ‘What bothers me is that these publications spend all this time trying to teach me how to do this stuff, a scary amount of time revealing where to do this stuff, and telling me what tools and products I need,’” Madson recalls his dad’s friend saying. 

“‘But what I really look forward to are articles that remind me why I hunt.’”

Madson took this tale to heart. He tried to lead Wyoming Wildlife with heavy doses of artfulness and gravitas through what he and many others considered a golden era in outdoor media. But, since Wyoming Wildlife is an agency publication, he didn’t have to worry about profit margins in the way that other legacy titles in the private sector did. This allowed for immense wiggle room in how he wrote, edited, and assigned stories. 

While Madson spent some part of the agency’s communications budget on making a quality print publication, he watched the triangulated relationship between outdoor writers, independent outdoor publishers, and outdoor gear manufacturers strengthen, which seemed to degrade the opportunities for the kind of writing that appealed to his dad’s buddies. 

“That feedback loop, around and around and around, maybe it’s necessary. But it leaves very little room for the answer to the questions of why I hunt, and why the outdoors are important to me,” Madson says. “While I was busy taking advantage of the fact that I didn’t have to demonstrate a profit, I absolutely recognized some of those realities.”

One freelancer that Madson worked with on occasion was lifelong outdoor writer Eileen Clarke. She wrote an article in the August 1994 Wyoming Wildlife issue contrasting a Rocky Mountain bighorn hunt with a red deer hunt in the Czech Republic. Shortly after Clarke met her husband — seasoned outdoor writer and editor John Barsness — in the MFA creative writing program at the University of Montana, Barsness took Clarke to meet his friends at a Thanksgiving gathering.

“Well, his friends were Norm Strung, a longtime editor at Field & Stream, and David Petzal, managing editor at Field & Stream,” Clarke says. “I was dumped into an area where people are making a good living writing about the outdoors. They were making like, a thousand bucks an article in the eighties. That’s the bad thing — you’re still making a thousand bucks an article today, if you’re lucky.” 

Clarke pivoted from her creative writing pursuits and started writing hunting and wild game cooking articles instead. But she quickly ran into one of the most glaring downsides of the outdoor media’s “golden” era. 

“For a lot of women during that period, thirty years ago, the only way they could get their writing into hunting magazines was through the food column,” Clarke says. “Occasionally, female biologists would get articles. But essentially, it was all men, and women met a lot of sexism.”

Eileen Clarke shoulders Eleanor O’Connor’s rifle at the Jack O’Connor Hunting Heritage & Education Center in Lewiston, Idaho.

Clarke recalls a time when she sat in an editorial meeting for a magazine she wouldn’t name. The head editor asked the staff for any ideas on ways to improve their content strategy. 

“I knew women were starting to hunt way more, so I asked if we could please not publish anymore sexist hunting cartoons. You know, like the guy who sneaks the gun into the house to keep the old battleaxe from seeing it,” Clarke says. “One of the other guys at the table asked if I also wanted them to advertise Tampax.” 

Clarke managed to navigate these roadblocks and has since amassed an immensely respectable byline for herself, including titles like Gray’s Sporting Journal and Field & Stream in addition to Wyoming Wildlife and her numerous wild game cookbooks. She has two entries in Heart Shorts: Women Write About Hunting, an anthology edited by Mary Zeiss Stange. Today, she and Barsness publish a quarterly paid e-newsletter called Rifle Loony News and sell their combined library of titles on their personal website. 

They have made their living, in part, by building a reliable following that compensates them for their work. In this sense, they’ve built more than just a readership. They’ve created a wide-reaching, sustainable community. This is something that social media and other digital platforms (maybe with the exception of Substack) have massively over-promised and under-delivered on. For Madson, Clarke, and Barsness, any digital component of their business has long been the means, not the end. It’s always been about writing the stories that dig below the surface of the “how” and the “where”  and answer the immortal question of the “why.” For them, a community of engaged readers has followed.  

Rising from the Ashes

A few weeks ago, a large-format trade magazine from a Vermont printing press showed up in my mailbox, addressed to a past tenant of my apartment. The cover feature, by Dartmouth Alumni editor Sean Plottner, had more of a call-to-arms than a headline: “FOR THE LOVE OF PRINT.” I brought the issue back to my apartment and read it cover to cover, wondering all the while if I’d get arrested for tampering with someone else’s mail.

In the feature article, Plottner addressed all the usual suspects for a story about the print media industry; the same golden age from the 1960s to the 1990s that Madson detailed, the subsequent downfall caused by who knows what (although Plottner wonders whether the answer might be “a guy named Jobs”), and the recent signs of life in print media that we all cling to with inky fingers. That last part was my favorite.

“Readers want paper and crave curation,” Plottner writes. “Print allows for curation that a website simply can’t provide. Print begins and ends in your hands. No doom scrolling. No diverting pop-ups or links. No lithium batteries required. No wormholes.” 

“Print isn’t dead” has become something of a rallying cry. Much like how some hunters mourn the days before onX Maps and skiers mourn pre-climate change snowpack, everywhere I look journalists are vomiting nostalgia for a chapter of the media industry that many of us never actually worked in. I know I am, which is why I wanted to ask Madson and Clarke what the last 30 years of outdoor media could teach us about the next 30. When I read that paragraph of Plottner’s, I realized that repeating the early 90s sounded pretty incredible. What seems so problematic is everything else that’s happened in the meantime.

My suspicion was confirmed when, after two extremely pleasant but sometimes-pessimistic conversations with Madson and Clarke, another industry veteran and mentor of mine declined an interview on the subject entirely, saying that she didn’t have any helpful insight to offer. Knowing her and her passion for troubleshooting all the woes of the modern media, I realized that maybe I was barking up a pointless tree. Maybe the only thing the last 30 years of outdoor media can teach us about the next 30 is what not to do. If the early 90s were the last really “good” years, then maybe the years since best serve as a cautionary tale, or at the very least a harsh look at a tumble from grace. 

Maybe we need to try the last 30 years over again.

The author practices the ancient art of plucking sticky hairs from a bloody deer heart.

It’s not just writers who feel this way. As Plottner pointed out, consumers are tired of having their eyeballs assaulted on digital platforms, especially social media. One survey from tech research firm Gartner estimated that half of social media users would either abandon or significantly limit their social media use by 2025, due to an overall decay of experience and “toxic user bases.” For all our trying, we largely fail to maintain healthy relationships with digital content. We download one app to tell us when we’re spending too much time on another app. We’re sold headlines the way smokers are sold cigarettes at a gas station checkout counter; in extreme abundance and blinding color, all at once.

This fatigue doesn’t end with the content. It extends to the very digital platforms themselves. No one wants another hack at creating a unique set of login credentials, nor another chance to use the same old ones. We’re not thirsty for another reason to bookend our precious hours of sleep with cozy scrolling. (Substack, if you’re reading this, please tread lightly with that Notes section.)

Sure, technology paved the proverbial gravel road, easing the journey for anyone who wants more readily accessible content. It’s been quite effective at convincing us the only reasonable trajectory for the modern media is a vector; perfectly linear and extending in one direction forever. But does that not feel far from the truth? Everywhere, smart consumers, real humans with flesh and blood and thinning wallets and hungry stomachs and anger and love and hope, still beg for a different kind of innovation, one that goes in the opposite direction of the innovation they’ve been subject to since that man named Jobs turned the media industry upside down.

There is no gun held to our heads, demanding we follow the vector. The only thing that seems to be stopping us from rebuilding a media landscape that actually works, other than the overwhelming need to feed, clothe, and shelter ourselves, is the notion that industry evolution can’t happen backwards. 

Who better to look backwards than those of us writing for audiences that participate in ancient forms of engagement with the natural world?

What the Future Holds

Even through all this catharsis, it’s impossible to ignore the good qualities of digital media. From where I stand, this encompasses the things we learn, the important information we disseminate to the masses, and the online-turned-real-life friends we’ve made. In this sense, the “outdoorsy community” is probably more interconnected than it’s ever been. 

But the community element only feels fully realized when those interactions leave the internet and enter the tangible realm. Otherwise, we’d all be content to stare at digital photos of mountains and alpine lakes all day, no participation required. 

That’s likely why high-quality outdoor magazines remain so popular. We love feeling like we’re holding a heavy, thoughtful piece of art in our hands, something that a series of humans curated for us. Consider Modern Huntsman, Project Upland, Adventure Journal, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Trails Magazine, Strung Sporting Journal, and the recent Field & Stream reboot, just to name a few. Even the New York Times took notice of this phenomenon earlier this year when they covered the surge of print magazines — outdoors-focused and otherwise — stocking shelves.

“High-end magazines are not new, and their re-emergence is not exclusive to outdoor pursuits,” NYT correspondent John Branch writes. “A visit to an independent bookstore or a sprawling newsstand like Casa Magazines in New York or The Kosher News in Los Angeles unveils a universe of artful niche publications, from The Bitter Southerner to Catnip, Mildew to Whalebone.”

On the other hand, an ephemeral downfall of print media is what we’ll call the “stack” factor. Much of it is too good to throw away but too bulky to keep in perpetuity. We end up with growing piles of dense paper sporting full-page photographs, meticulous design, and quality writing. Throwing these magazines away feels akin to throwing away a book; it seems offensive to the people who created it. Soon, we sell whole collections to antique stores, where they’ll collect dust then (hopefully) enrapture some woeful young journalist once again. Or we recycle them, and all that insanely expensive paper, color ink, writing, photography, and overall production value goes down the tubes anyway.

So, the question remains; is there such a thing as truly sustainable print outdoor media? Sustainable for the consumer, the producer, the larger outdoors community, and maybe even the environment, all at once? 

A starry night at deer camp.

Well, we’re here. Welcome. If you read this piece when we first published it online on Jan. 1, you might not recognize this ending. That’s because we made good on our original promise, that we would work toward experimental answers to this existential question. 

Since publishing this piece the first time, Outside laid off 20 of their editorial employees. Another 34 of their past and current contributors requested that their names be stricken from the masthead in protest of the title’s direction. The federal government lopped the legs off various environmental and public lands agencies and blocked the Associated Press —the standard-bearer for journalism ethics and style — from the Oval Office for refusing to comply with the “Gulf of America” in their ubiquitous stylebook. Of course, little of this behavior seems likely to hold up in a court of law. But things have changed for outdoor writers and outdoorspeople alike in the last three months. If you didn’t feel a gripping uncertainty before Jan. 1, maybe you do now.

This changes nothing about how my future as an outdoor writer makes me feel. Doomed? Sure, sometimes. But I’m also inspired and fiercely committed to carving a path forward. I don’t want to wake up in 2055 and feel the way my interviewees felt when asked about their last 30 years. I want to have three decades of resilience, industry revival, and innovation under my belt. I want to be brimming with good anecdotes informed by good decisions and good relationships, and I certainly want to have useful ideas for young journalists staring down their next few decades. 

When we first published this piece, we had just over 1,000 subscribers. In the three months since then, we doubled that number (and then some), and now we’ve shipped a 32-page newspaper full of paid writing to 27 states, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Starting a new publication sometimes feels improbable, but with the right readers it’s well within the realm of possibility. We made our New Year’s resolution — to build the backcountry of outdoor media from scratch — come true.

The Westrn has officially left an ink stain on history. Now, you get to help us shape the future. Thanks for reading.

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Katie Hill is a freelance outdoor journalist and managing editor of The Westrn. Her writing has appeared in Outdoor Life, MeatEater, Modern Huntsman, High Country News, and other publications. For more of her work, check out her website.