Editors Letter. Issue 8. Summer 2015.

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A narrow pool of dark turquoise green lay within brown and orange canyon walls. We contemplated it from the rocky outcrop above, it was a drop of perhaps thirty feet or so, with a narrow rib of compacted mud rock jutting out just below. There was the option to rappel in, which three members of our party chose to do. Or the more interesting version — jump. To land directly into the safety of the deep water, one had to leap far enough to clear this rib, yet not too far as to hit the chockstone blocking the narrowing walls in front, nor to the right, where a large boulder sat out of the dark water, nor too left where the walls rose up. Rob, the grizzled, middle-aged British expat who owned the operation leading the trip, counted himself down and launched himself into the air. Then it was my turn… with much hesitation, I jumped, the force of my eventual landing blowing a contact lens out of one eye. This was just the beginning of a six-hour canyoning trip in the right fork of Snake Canyon, one of Oman’s top must-do adventures. Our pictures later show me grinning like a kid through the whole six hours of rappelling, climbing, scrambling, crawling, and swimming. I hadn’t realized that I was smiling the entire time.

Buck was wildly glad. He knew he was at last answering the call, running by the side of his wood brother toward the place from where the call surely came…He had done this thing before, somewhere in that other and dimly remembered world, and he was doing it again, now, running free in the open, the unpacked earth underfoot, the wide sky overhead.

Jack London, The Call of the Wild.

We hope the content of our pages will make you remember the call, deep inside all our primitive memories. You may need to search for the silence of the forest, to finally be able to listen. When you hear its faint echoes, answer it.