They met in Alaska and became the ultimate adventure couple, biking and hiking and skiing their way to lifelong commitment. Then the kids and careers arrived, and the passion started leaking like oil from his bro truck. (Don't get her started on that.) Can a hardcore backpacking trip stand in for couples therapy? The author drags her husband into Colorado's roughest wilderness to find out.

Does God love camping? A new church movement foot-soldiered by wilderness-loving young people could transform the way conservative Christians perceive and protect the environment. We hit the trail with the new green evangelicals.

Tracy Ross's 2009 essay "The Source of All Things," first published in Backpacker magazine, told the unforgettable story of how Ross's stepfather, Donnie Lee, began molesting her at age eight during a family camping trip. Ross reported this and others instances of abuse, fled to the safety of foster care, and spent her teenage years in an on-again, off-again attempt to reconcile with her mother and stepfather, neither of whom were prepared to own up to what had happened. (While Lee was issued a restraining order at one point, he was never formally prosecuted.) As Ross recounted in her essay, which won the National Magazine Award in 2009, she eventually confronted Lee about this long-suppressed nightmare during a backcountry camping trip in 2008. In this excerpt, she describes how, at 22, after years of feeling so lost that she often considered suicide, she began to find her way back in the wilds of Alaska.