Fog Signals: The Hardest Places on Earth to Reach, and Light for the Long Nights

The clocks fell back last night, and from tomorrow the sun sets before five here in Portland. The old Gaelic calendar called this the start of the dark half of the year. We happen to love it in here. This week: the hardest places on Earth to reach, a campground that takes your car away, America’s newest national park and a space station with no floor. Light a candle and settle in.

Daylight reaching the jungle inside Hang Son Doong. Photo: Andrew Svk / Unsplash

●  01  ·  TRAVEL

The Hardest Places on Earth to Reach

Some places you can’t just fly to. Our new guide gathers twelve of them, with exactly how to get to each one, every route checked against official sources this month. Tristan da Cunha sits six days by fishing boat from Cape Town, and on the island’s official passenger list, tourists come eighth of eight.

Then there’s Hang Son Doong in Vietnam, above. It is the largest cave on Earth, and so big it makes its own clouds. The man who found it in 1990 lost track of the entrance and didn’t find it again until 2008! A journey ladder shows how far each place really is, door to door.

Take the long way in  →

●  Lights down

Sixteen dark stories, and a flashlight

The dark is coming either way, so we decided to enjoy it. We turned off the lights on seventeen years of Moss & Fog and went looking for night skies, deep woods and deep water: a lake that turns birds to stone, trees that sleep at night, a sea angel. On the site, your cursor becomes a flashlight.

Turn the lights down  →

Dusk on the field sites. Photo courtesy of Snow Peak Campfield

●  02  ·  TRAVEL

Snow Peak Makes You Leave the Car

Snow Peak, the Japanese maker of tents and titanium mugs, has opened its first American campground on Washington’s Long Beach Peninsula, two and a half hours from our Portland desks. The first thing it does is take your car away. You load a cart at the Gatehouse and walk in on a boardwalk over restored wetland.

Fire pits face your neighbors’, so you smell their dinner and they smell yours. There are Kengo Kuma cabins tucked in the spruce, and a wash house with proper sinks for the dishes. Honestly, that’s the detail that sold us.

A Kengo Kuma cabin, out and in. Photos courtesy of Snow Peak Campfield

Walk in  →

A slow look across the pinnacles. NPS Photo

●  03  ·  NATURE

The Land of Standing-Up Rocks, America’s Newest National Park

On October 20, Chiricahua in southeast Arizona became America’s 64th national park, the first new one in six years. The Apache called it the land of the standing-up rocks: thousands of pinnacles, many balanced on bases far too small for the job.

A volcano did the stacking, about 27 million years ago, with an eruption more than a thousand times the size of Mount St. Helens. Only about 70,000 people visited last year, which for a place this strange is almost nobody.

See the standing-up rocks  →

The garden wall, which is also the floor.

●  04  ·  SPACE

Inside Thunderbird, the Space Station With No Floor

London studio Of My Imagination has designed the inside of Thunderbird, a station that packs into a single Falcon 9 and unfurls in orbit to about twenty times its folded size. With no gravity deciding which way is down, every wall is a floor.

The rooms circle a central core like spokes on a wheel, with handholds everywhere and a foot tether around the rim. On Earth the ceiling is wasted space. Up there, it’s prime real estate!

Float inside  →

●  This week, by the numbers

Illustration: Paweł Jońca

●  05  ·  ART

One Long Day, Drawn by Paweł Jońca

The Polish illustrator can draw a feeling in about four shapes, under a crayon grain that keeps anything from looking slick. We laid sixteen of his pictures out as one long day, from the first cup of tea to whatever keeps you up at 2am. Our favorite is the ironworker sharing his lunch with a robot. His posters are in his own shop, too.

Morning  →  2am

Spend the day  →

●  From the shop

For the long nights

A few things to keep the dark half bright.

Our best-selling candle light drops into a flicker mode that wanders like a real flame, low and amber. Gravitas is a two-player stacking game hand carved from Vermont stone, and no two sets match. The incense holder is a pebble of hand blown glass. All three make the longest night of the week feel short.

The candle light  ·  Gravitas

●  The gift season

Gifts, already figured out

Six sets we pack by hand in Portland, each with a little bag of Jacobsen sea salt caramels on us.

See every set  →

●  New this week

Two glass ornaments from kat + annie just landed: a glittering Yellow Submarine and Babar in his green suit. They’re real glass and properly fragile, so we wrap them like it.

Yellow Submarine  ·  Babar

●  Signals

Quick signals

The rest of the week, a few lines each.

01  ART Fredrik Raddum ties his sculptures in knots. His figures stand with a leg tied in a knot below the knee, chin up, as if it happens every Tuesday.

02  NATURE Drones are replanting Quebec’s burned forests. People in parkas picked the seeds by hand at 30 below, then the drones fired them into the ground in pods.

03  NATURE Meet the conifer that quits every fall. Larches turn gold and drop every needle, like a maple, and one in Washington has been doing it since before the printing press.

04  OUT AT NIGHT Concerts by candlelight. Fever’s Candlelight series puts live musicians in a sea of candles. Here in Portland that often means the Old Church Concert Hall, which is about as good as a long night gets! Switch to your city on the page. Booking through us sends a little our way.