I recently went backpacking in Aravaipa Canyon which, if you haven't been there, it's crazy beautiful and a requirement for southern Arizona residents, like a smaller accessible version of the Grand Canyon. My friend who came with me was pretty reactive to bee stings. She got stung once on a river trip and her ankle swelled into a cankle (calf + ankle, when it swells up so big you can't tell the difference) for over a month. I on the other hand have virtually no reaction to bee stings--no swelling at all, and not a lot of pain. In building my first aid kit, I would not have thought to put bee sting treatments in there; after all, I've never needed them. But it's a good thing I had the Adventure Medical Kits Ultralight .3 kit with us on the trip, because my friend got stung by two bees, and luckily the AMK folks threw in some antihistimines for me. She took them right away, we carefully pulled out the stinger with precision tweezers, and she swabbed the stings with After Bite, which is really mostly ammonia, a base, that neutralizes the acid in the poison. The pain went away immediately, and her hand only swelled a teeny bit. I was kind of impressed and happy to have the tools to avoid minor tragedy in my med kit. But I was missing one key first aid staple, and that was duct tape. I had moleskin for blisters, but when you're hiking through water for three days in sandals that rub just a smidge, nothing will stay on your feet and protect your skin better than duct tape.

An ounce of prevention worth a pound of cure in this tiny little package: Adventure Medical Kits' Ultralight / Watertight .3

It got me thinking about how functional first aid kits can really be. I once saw a simple band-aid and some antibacterial ointment heal over a feud on a trail when two dog owners had their pets off leash and one got a tooth puncture on her hand from her dog as she pulled it from a scuffle. She was furious at the other owner for having the bigger dog off leash, but being able to patch her up softened her fire a little. So often I've thrown my kit in my pack as that random accessory I'll never pull out, and so often I've brought it out for simple, helpful things. What if there were actually some useful things in there? So here's a little checklist of some of the things I've found to be practical additions to a stock first aid kit.

Nail clippers: It may seem a little prissy to bring nail clippers into the wilderness, but it's a handy cutting tool that can snip things off close to the skin, like hangnails and peeling callouses--those run of the mill annoyances that can become full-on sores in the backcountry. Plus, if you're a nail biter you won't want to be doing that with dirt under your nails; clip 'em off.

Precision tweezers/forceps: Most kits come with these, but if they don't, quality tweezers are a must and they're probably the most oft-used tool in the desert. They remove cactus spines, splinters, insect stingers (always be careful of the poison sac), and they can help you pull out ticks by the mouth parts, limiting your chance of infection.

Alcohol wipes: You get some in a standard med kit, but never enough. I stock mine with several extra, because any situation that requires a first aid kit will also require clean hands.

Super glue: It's not made of the nicest chemicals to put on your skin, but super glue was used for emergency sealing of wounds during the Vietnam war. In a pinch, it's useful for stemming bleeding and keeping bacteria and debris out of a clean cut when nobody's around to stitch you up. Its FDA-approved counterpart, Dermabond, is a lot more expensive but much better on skin; run-of-the-mill super glue can be irritating. Please note: I'm not medically trained in the least, and some medical professionals would definitely NOT recommend this advice. I'm speaking only from what has been handy in my experience.

Extra butterfly closures: Most med kits stock you with two of these, but these are especially handy for mountain bikers, who tend to get deep cuts from falling off bikes into sticks, getting pedal-chopped in the shins, or taking a chainring to the calf, all of which I've done. Sometimes you just need to close two flaps of skin together, and if you've got enough butterfly closures you can zip up a wound temporarily without having to glue yourself together (see above).

Classic Swiss Army knife: Though the other tools are handy, I keep this mostly for the scissors. Several times I've needed to bandage a deep cut with a smaller piece of cotton dressing than what they give you in the package, and scissors are really the best tool for that.

Chlorine tabs: In the book "Born to Run", author Christopher MacDougall describes going on a run with a group of people in Mexico; two of the runners got lost, ran out of water, and were found dazed and delirious drinking out of a putrid mud puddle under a rock. After I read that scene, I figured there was no reason not to keep emergency chlorine tabs in my med kit; I need a back up for my water filter anyway.

Emergency whistle: It's a small thing that I would forget to bring otherwise, so I keep one in my med kit. If you needed to drum up some help getting yourself or someone else out of the backcountry, it could be a way to signal for help without having to leave the injured person alone.

Extra ibuprofen and acetametaphine: Both these medications are handy because they perform in different ways. Ibuprofen relieves pain by reducing inflammation, so it's effective for injuries. Acetametaphine is not an anti-inflammatory, and instead blocks pain receptors, making it the better choice for headaches. Both will reduce fever.

Duct tape: The most universal fixer-upper known to man. It will stick to skin even through hours of sloshing through water, so it's a good blister-preventative and band-aid cover inside sweaty boots or for sandaled feet in Aravaipa. It also doubles as an emergency patch kit for for tents, rain jackets, packs, and sleeping pads. I used to make a little roll sticking it to itself, until a few hot days welded the layers together and it became useless. Now I take Lucky Duct, a little section of tape on a paper backing, available for 99 cents.

Standard contents are on the right; my useful additions and extras are on the left. Amazingly, it all still fits.

All these extra things fit in my Ultralight Watertight Medical Kit .3, a small enough kit that there's no good excuse not to carry it, which is important for me; I could build a kit that would be more inclusive, but then I might talk myself out of bringing it on small day trips. The best med kit is worthless if it's sitting in your bathroom cabinet while you're on the trail. This one I bring every time. 

Milagrosa Canyon was the first place I ever experienced the magic of monsoons: my brother and I hiked out there under a sky going indigo and saguaros shining electric on the ridge. The first wash crossing drenched us to our knees with warm summer rainwater. Looking at the first sunbathed red cliffs is a view that always comes to mind with the first summer storm: the crazy hypercolor desert, that static tension before the wind picks up. I don't recommend standing out in the open desert like a lightning rod before a storm; but it's a vivid memory that comes up every time I visit this canyon. Which I did recently, to show some friends the awesome pools at the top.

This time of year when I hike, all I want to see is water. We began walking down the road to the trailhead with temps in the mid-70s, which is plenty warm in the sun. The trail over the first hill was lined with wild purple dalea bushes in bloom, as if some suburban gardener had been out transplanting.  We turned off the main trail (which I've actually never been on) to head into the wash, which at this spot marks the confluence of Milagrosa and Agua Caliente canyons. A monolith of red rock juts up from the Sonoran desert to separate the two. From here we head up Milagrosa, taking a climber's spur up the right side of the canyon. Like most climber trails, it's narrow, rocky, and a bit steep, and after a little while lands you right at the base of an enormous cliff band looking over the rocky canyon bed below. This cliff band is a climbing boon: cool, sometimes even chilly in the shade, and home to a collection of fun, challenging sport climbs on its bright orange rock. The easiest of these is Valentine Arete, nicknamed the Hardest Eight in the State, and gathered around it are 5.10s, .11s, and a handful of .12s. Just up the stream the creek bed rises to meet the bench we've been hiking along, and soon we're at the first of three pools, like a king's daughters, each more beautiful than the last.

The first pool is shallow at its edge and very deep where the water flows in, so deep that its clear-green hue goes dark and black. The first time my brother and I took our parents to this spot, he stripped naked without warning and ran shrieking into the freezing cold water. Even in the dead heat of summer, when the hike up here is a test of true desert residency, the water temperature is on a scale from uncomfortably-to-deliciously cold. This pool seems prize enough, until a scramble up the rock reveals a second pool above, shallower but equally amenable to hanging out, and a full-on hands and feet scramble above that, a third pool, my personal favorite. This last sits in a grotto, with high smooth granite walls. The water is crazy cold from being in the shade. And while I love being in the west for the sweeping scenery, the big rugged mountains, the views that stretch for miles, it's small nooks like this that make me feel at home in this landscape.

Our party scrambled up above this pool and found a fourth, the smallest, which was in the sun. It didn't make the water any warmer, but after splashing quickly in the cold, the rocks helped warm us all back up. We sat next to the water and snacked, and looked for canyon tree frogs in their perfect camouflage on the granite. And then we headed back down.

You can make this jaunt into a loop adventure by scrambling up and over into Agua Caliente canyon. From the bottom pool in Milagrosa, you can look across the canyon and see the steep bench and a faint path that will lead you over the ridge. My brother and I followed this idea one time out here, and were surprised upon dropping into Agua Caliente that the canyon walls were steep and rocky at the bottom, making it nearly impossible to parallel the wash on dry land. We ended up slogging through knee-high water and reeds as the sun went down breaking back out into the shallower confluence and back on the trail roughly half a mile later. A little more non-technical canyoneering than hiking, it's a fun way to get wet. There's an actual trail that loops around both canyons on high sunny ground, but this version, which includes a little bushwhacking, a lot of scrambling, and some careful stepping over slippery wet rocks, keeps you tight in the canyon bottoms (and a warning here: monsoons could mean nasty flooding) and is a more intimate trek with some beautiful water, worthy of exploration.

As a kid growing up in the woods, I fantasized about being a warrior princess: a powerful girl trained in the arts of survival and war, who could stalk soundlessly through the brush and skillfully ambush prey. I wanted to live in a house made of earth, fish in the river with a spear, wear clothes of sewn buckskin. In real life I kept a diary of my fake exploits by writing on birch bark with a burned charcoal twig. But the truth is, I could be living this way; in fact, I know people who do: folks who hunt their own meat, grow their own vegetables, and make their own clothes, their knapsacks, their baskets, their houses. I've seen how long it takes to make a buckskin dress. It's a lot of work. And, it turns out, so is the simplest of components in my childhood daydream: walking barefoot. When barefoot folks walk soundlessly, I don't think it's because they're trying to be silent; they just have to place their feet very carefully. I went for a walk in the desert to discover just how gently we have to walk on this world when we take away all the stuff between us.

It all started with a minor hamstring injury. I'd been attempting to rest my tweaky leg for a few weeks until I couldn't stand it any longer. I had to do something physical to get my ya-yas out. I'd browsed through some of the new books we have at the shop on barefoot running, and balked a little at the advice of both authors, that minimal shoes are no substitute for being truly barefoot. I've been wearing and running in my KSOs for years now, and always felt like I got a lot of feedback from the ground; I love how thin they are, and when I read this criticism of them, I really didn't believe they could be that different. I decided to use the down time on my leg to go for a slow, gentle hike on the Yetman Trail to see if they were right.

The Yetman Trail, as it turns out, is not a great trail for a first-time barefoot hiking experience. I remembered it as being a flat, short jaunt to the Stone House on old soft dirt trail. In actuality, some of the trail is soft, with a dense layer of dust that's comfortable underfoot, but the majority of this trail is what should be expected from the Tucson Mountains: volcanic gravel. Barefoot folks who write books and blogs on the subject love to stress that your bare feet get a lot of "sensory awareness" that you just can't get through any shoe or sock. That's a really lovely way of saying that most things hurt. This stuff hurt. The trail also crosses the wash several times, which is a deep bed of pumice waiting to scratch all your calluses off. I walked barefoot for maybe a quarter mile before the soles of my feet started feeling raw and overwhelmed, and then I took my Fivefingers out of my pack and put them back on. For a moment, I thought: barefoot is bull crap.

But it was when I put my shoes back on that I realized Vibrams really do insulate your feet from the ground a lot. Suddenly my flimsy thin footwear felt like a couple of plush pillows. My feet were happy and cushy and protected, and Barefoot Ken Bob and Jason Robillard were right: being in shoes is an entirely different experience. I walked at a quick pace for half a mile before the trail smoothed out again, and I suddenly found myself itching to feel what the ground really feels like again. I took my shoes off, and lasted maybe another quarter mile before I had to put them back on again. So it goes. While walking at a (literally) painfully slow pace, I at least got let in on one of nature's little secrets: spring's first California poppies, hidden behind a rock a few yards off the trail. With my normal proclivity toward running or at least blazing forward to a destination, I probably wouldn't have noticed them. I found myself stopping a lot to take photos of all kinds of details on the trail. I was moving so slow anyway, what was a couple of seconds more to snap a picture?

I went for a much more successful walk at Catalina State Park, where the trails really are smooth and soft, and all the wash crossings make it fun to get your feet wet. I still walked slow, and it wasn't exactly comfortable; I stepped on cactus needles a couple of times. But I started to appreciate how we take our comfort for granted sometimes. The earth is not soft; there are rocks everywhere, and the dirt is gritty, and there's plenty of detritus that will give you a sharp poke. Maybe it's not such a useless endeavor to learn to tread lightly.

At 1:30 in the morning in early October I woke up to nearly freezing temperatures in the back of my car parked at Castro Park, in Douglas Arizona. I crawled out of my sleeping bag, desperately pulled on thicker socks and shoes, and stumbled out under the street light to meet a tiny crowd of cyclists getting ready for the longest event of the Cochise Classic, a 234-mile ride down the highways circling Bisbee, skirting along the Santa Ritas, up through the Dragoons, the Dos Cabezas, the Chiricahuas, and back to Bisbee. It's a gorgeous and classic southern Arizona tour. This little group of fifteen brave started from Castro Park and would take 11 hours or many more to ride the double-century route; it would take me roughly 4 hours just to drive the whole thing. So they were starting early, and we were freezing our butts off waiting for the national anthem at two in the morning. Or rather, the cyclists in their spandex were freezing their butts off.

I was cozy in my Arcteryx Atom Light jacket. The coldest you can be is just standing around outside, and I was pleasantly surprised to be pretty toasty at 30 degrees. Being October, the day of course warmed up to balmy tank-top weather, but after we placed our hands over our hearts for the anthem, and watched the fifteen riders pedal away down the street onto the black pre-dawn highways, I went back to my car and slept in my jacket until the start of the next event, after which I stripped it off and drove around the route to take photos of the cyclists for Tail Winds magazine.

I pulled the jacket out again to watch the dawn start of the 108-mile El Tour de Tucson ride. With hundreds of riders, the El Tour start is not nearly as intimate as our little crew huddling in the middle of the night in Castro Park, but nonetheless, it's amazing to be in the energy of hundreds of people about to pedal to every corner of our city. Loudspeakers blared music down the neighborhood to rouse the riders awake, and people stamped their feet in the first cold Tucson morning.

El Tour always seems to be accompanied by the first signs of fall, and now into December I'll find myself wearing the Atom Light every day. It's a perfect jacket for the transition of seasons, light enough and packable enough that it's not oppressive and can go everywhere--like in a tiny summit pack for cold belays out in Cochise Stronghold. I've always been afraid to bring my down jacket up on a climb, for fear of snagging the fabric on a rock and vomiting feathers everywhere. As sad as I would be to get a hole in my pretty lavender Atom Light, the synthetic fill will stay together until I can patch it back up. And the fabric itself is somehow nearly as light as the ultrasil shell on my down jacket, but much tougher and more abrasion resistant, so I'm less likely to tear it up in the first place. Stretch fleece panels on the sides give it a slimmer, cozy, and more breathable fit. Now that it's Cochise season, I can't wait to find some chilly rock ledge to hang out on.